1 in 4 say little white lies okay in online dating

Silicon Valley: Singles surfing the internet for relationships may need to be a little wary with a new poll showing that a quarter of them believe it is acceptable to tell a little white lie while dating online.

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We have always been strong in our belief that to make online dating work, that is to make it provide happiness to the humans who look for love on it, that it has to accept open mindedness, honesty, respect, and fun.

Sadly the acceptance of little white lies shows how far from this the industry is moving. Pushed by the new d0t coms the businesses are only concerned about volume, and lots of failed relationships is more money than not a lot.

But the consumers seem to have adopted a rather sad perspective. In the old days, when you meet a human being first and then a date grew out of a human relationship, the natural moral rules that have evolved to govern human to human contact aided in opening many of our minds. Perhaps if asked we would say we didn't want to fall in love with some poor, or Jewish, or fat, or short, or without money; but then we would meet someone who was against everything we imagined we wanted only to find they were everything we ever wanted.

My wife is certainly not the person I imagined I would marry just 6 months before.

But on online dating it is pathetic has materialists and inflexible people become. Frankly the number of women who say essentially "no thin haired men need apply" is disturbing.

People new to the service imagine the vast quantity of members provides them the ability to be selective. But I would point out that today we have much greater options to buy things in stores than our grandparents, but our grandparents had many things much better than us, like furniture. Volume does not equal quality.

The acceptance of little white lies is understandable in a dating seen where most players will not even have coffee with someone because they are bald or fat or have a grown child or any other set of check lists people create for dating.

Truthfulness may be the ideal, but many online daters seem to feel it is both necessary and acceptable to express little white lies," said Joelle Kaufman, Vice President of The Experience at Engage.com.

And there is the problem, people feel they need to lie about income, height, weight and relationship goal because too many users reduce online dating to a search engine composed of and statements. Because they can find respondents who are the right income, the right size, the right height, the right desire they will only look at them; even when most likely the person is the wrong person.

A little heads up to people out there, we don't understand why we fall in love. That is why we have psychologists. That is why people fall in abusive relationships. That is why soon a majority will live outside of relationships, because we don't understand what makes love.

Online dating needs to evolve beyond forms based input on logical search to help aid the user in the discovery of people, not the search of perfect matches. Even the names "match" present everything wrong. People need to find others who fulfil them in a way they didn't understand. You can't map out the right other and just have them made as a robot. True love is finding someone who shows you the you you didn't know you were before you meet them.

Little white lies, forms based search and indexing, and purely text and graphic web sites will only become sites for easy sex or endless neurotic relationships. That is why we are very interested in efforts to expand the collaboration between people. Second Life and MySpace, web2.0 system that build social networks have more promise than the current dating sites, which are based on library search theory and not a sound understanding of how people find each other.

Robert Hooker