Are you going to the bar tonight…? If so, you might be missing out on 100’s of new people you never would have met before.

For years people knew little about meeting a partner outside of the bar scene. Unless you were lucky to meet in school, work, or church… the bar was the one place where it wasn’t seen as weird or creepy to approach someone you were interested in. And online dating? Even 3 years ago when dating apps first came on the scene, there was still a stigma around using online dating. People were still shy about telling their friends about logging on to Match, OKC… or POF. Well a lot has changed since then… and now “playing” on Tinder or Hinge has become as acceptable as having a profile on Facebook.

But is this a good thing? Are we trading real life face to face conversations for cute messages via text? We don’t think so… but let’s take a look.

When we go to a bar to meet people, we are immersed in a sea of faces, just as we are in the virtual world of online dating. In this environment though, many limiting factors for interpersonal connection exist, that aren’t as prevalent in the virtual environment. Fear of judgment from others, financial class separation, race discrimination, clique isolation, approach anxiety, and many other barriers along these lines, often influence who we meet and who we don’t. We may even just stay with the people we know at the bar, and never venture outside of our little social circle. (Similar to Hinge…?)

Often when we do decide to push past these limiting social environment barriers, it is because we’ve consumed enough liquid courage to feel uninhibited by them. Unfortunately by this point though, our interactions with people beyond these barriers, have changed. They’ve wilted into conversations we won’t remember the next day. We’ve become chemically induced, false or exaggerated representations of our personalities that can never be depended on for a repeat performance.

So having established the barriers that inhibit our connecting with others in the bar scene, it’s time we take a look at the alternative to this environment. We think of Online Dating as the more potent, more effective, even more evolved version of the liquid courage mentioned before. And now with the recent development of mobile dating experience, people have become embolden to chat with just about anyone anywhere… saying just about anything (dare we say) at any time!?!. (More on that in a different post.) Online dating cuts through the aforementioned social and mental barriers that exist in the bar scene, like a hot knife through butter. Online dating is what we affectionately refer to is “Technological Courage.”

With “Techno Courage” so many factors that prevent us from connecting with one another at the bar, disintegrate with the mere click of a “log in” button. When we enter our favorite dating site, we are in our own private cockpit, free to navigate through the sea of faces, without fear of judgment from onlookers and by standers. We are able to contact and connect with people from different financial classes, races, and friend cliques, that before appeared to be separated from us by unspoken barriers. The approach anxiety that we felt in the bar scene, quickly becomes a non-issue, as email and IM chats relieve us of its torment. Even people of different body types and styles become fair game for contact, where before we may have looked the other way.

In online dating, we are also able to get a glimpse into the other person’s personality, through examining what they say in their profile. We could have never had such a depth of perspective, simply gazing at them form across a crowded bar. In fact, we can get a glimpse into a much larger number of people’s personalities, than we ever could have, stumbling from person to person, in the frenzy at the bar. Suddenly the inner worlds of other people are visible for us to explore, where before we could barely remember their name if we talked to them. Opportunity is abound for meeting people you would have never met before! Your “Dating Matrix” is being unveiled.

This is just the tip of the iceberg though, in the argument for Online Dating as a superior alternative to the bar scene. The benefits and advantages Online Dating brings to the dating scene, are many and growing with each new advancement and innovation that emerges in the online dating universe. With every passing day, we too, are learn new ways to improve the dating scene in this virtual arena. And that’s our goal.

At Hone, our mission is to help our users learn, grow, and meet people that they never would have met before. We look forward to the future of what technology and creativity bring to this new space. And we hope you join us on this exciting journey… where we create a space where 100’s of people are there waiting… eager to meet you too!