Book Review – Santa Monica Daily Press

Book Review
The Perils of Cyber-Dating
Julie Spira – Morgan James

by Dane Robert Swanson

More people are doing it now;  going online to find mates. It can be a dangerous area to surf in. You don’t know what you are getting nor how truthful those profiles are.

“This book is not intended to scare or discourage anyone from online dating. It is a real-life guide to embrace and navigate the World Wide Web with fun and entertaining stories,” author Julie Spira writes in the introduction.

She states that there are over 40 million singles now online seeking love. It is not always what you see is what you get. “When choosing to go online in search of love, the most critical challenge is creating your online profile.” It seems that most people will fudge on their details. “I used to be honest about my age,” she admits, “I sometimes found myself cutting off a few years to fit into a search. It seems that is the unspoken rule for most women online and men now expect it to be the norm.

Spira provides us with her list of dates she had through cyber dating. With over 250 dates in almost 15 years, a few marriage proposals and a divorce from a person she met online, she has experience to choose from. Some are humorous and some are fairly sad. She is still single but wiser. She started in her 30s and into her 50s, on and off.

She admits she was one of those early adapters to the scene. She started in the mid-1990s using the online dating possibilities offered on the Internet.

She sums up her reason for writing this book. “I have learned a lot throughout the course of my nearly 15 years of on-again, off-again cyber-dating experiences. While some of these memories have faded, before sending the others up to Internet Heaven, which is my version of the trash icon on my computer where I send my bad cyber-dates to with a one way ticket, I’ve decided to share them with you.”

In her accounting she lets us share in her dates with The Architect, the Neurologist, and the Plastic Surgeon. In between there was the Art Dealer, the Boy Next Door, The Investment Banker, the Drummer Boy. That is just to name a few.

She also gives us some rules of ‘Netiquette’ we should follow if we are inclined to use the Internet for our dating pool. “We are living in the information at your fingertips mode as the Internet has become part of our daily lives, and we can find out more than we probably want to know.”

She therefore advises you don’t ‘Google’ your date before the first date. One of her dates did and it was a disaster. She found out more about herself than she knew was out there. Also don’t discuss body parts on the first encounter. She had one person she dated who gave her the details of his colonoscopy between the entree and the dessert. When it comes to your profile there should be a cut off rule of five to 10 years on your age and five to 10 pounds on your weight.

Not all cyber-dates were disasters.

This book is a must for this generation of singles, both male and female, who are into cyber-dating. It is possible to find someone if you know the rules.