If you find anyone interesting online, you\’ll have to consider whether you want to move the friendship offline and meet in person. So, what is the right moment to meet in person for the first time? As soon as possible? Or after you\’ve given the bond time to deepen and strengthen?
Since every case and partnership is different, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, my general response to this issue is: As soon as realistically feasible.
That was three months in my situation. It may be three weeks or a year in yours. Don\’t rush things—no there\’s a need to board a plane to visit someone you knew in a chat room last weekend. However, assuming you can afford it and are no longer in school, there is no need to go more than six months without meeting in person at least once.
So, why is it so important to meet in person as soon as possible? Here are three of them:
1. It Would Ensure That You are not Getting Catfished
The majority of individuals would turn out to be more or less as they claim to be. Most citizens have positive ideas in general. However, much does not equal everybody.
Long-distance dating scams are on the increase, which is a sad fact. You may believe you will never fall for a scammer, but don\’t underestimate how skilled these individuals are at eliciting strong emotions and forging strong ties. If you haven\’t met in person yet, you can read this article about 5 could long-distance scams and how to avoid them.
2. It Will Assist You With Removing The Rose-colored Lenses You are Sporting as You Interact for the First Time.
Everyone is vulnerable to viewing the object of their burgeoning affections through rose-coloured lenses in the early stages of a partnership. This is known as the \”halo effect\” by psychologists. In practice, this suggests that within the first few months (or even years) of getting to know somebody we find desirable, we prefer to think they are often wonderful in a variety of other respects.
In other terms, when we are attracted to someone\’s vibrant face, shining hair, or clever text messages, we prefer to believe that he or she is also intelligent, kind, and fascinating.
This kind of rose-coloured idealization occurs when we begin dating someone who lives just down the street. However, idealizing others is much better because they live far away and we just have emails, messages, and phone calls to help us get to know them.
When someone lives far away and we just have emails, messages, and phone calls to get to know them, it\’s convenient to idealize them.
McKay, Lisa
In long-distance relationships, our idealized view of somebody is normally much farther from the truth. It may often take a long time to notice inconsistencies in the individual we expect them to be and the person they are in real life.
Taking off these rose-coloured lenses entirely during the early phases of a partnership is almost difficult, but meeting in person always helps.
When you encounter someone in person, you hear a lot about them, like how they look, walk, act, smell, and so on. Both of these contribute to the mental image of who they are. Before you meet in person, the mind can fill in the blanks by dreaming of all kinds of wonderful things. The meeting can help get the thoughts regarding this individual closer to life, which is often a positive thing.
It\’s a nice idea if you meet in person and know you want to get serious. And if you meet in person and either or both of you say you don\’t want to pursue it anymore, it\’s always a positive idea in the long run. For instance, the second option is traumatic, but if that is going to happen, wouldn\’t you rather realize earlier rather than later?
3. When You Meet in Person, You\’ll Find out Whether You Have \”Chemistry.\”
A friend of mine forwarded me an article she had come across and loved many years before I met my husband, Mike. The essay was written by Ryan, who lived in Afghanistan at the time.
Ryan\’s essay started, \”I turned thirty in Afghanistan.\” “I was celebrating my second birthday here. Last year, I got the strange flu three days before my twenties ended, and the fever slowly broke when I reached the final year of my twenties. To my feeble groans, my friend Halim entered my space and cheerfully gave me a bowl of rice and beans. He assured me once more that I had malaria without a doubt. ‘Today, search blood?\’ he inquired, as he did any other day. All are infected with malaria here. They expect malaria if you get a toothache.”
It was a simple article, barely a thousand words long, but it piqued my attention in a way I hadn\’t felt in a long time. After I finished reading the article, I forwarded it to my parents with the terse, \”Read this. It\’s incredible. I\’m trying to find him and let him fall madly in love with me.”
It took me months, but I finally found Ryan.
After I persuaded Ryan to become my pal, he gave me the rest of the essays he\’d written while in Afghanistan. I admired his wry yet insightful writing style, as well as his outlook on life. Ryan then quit Afghanistan and returned to Canada. He and I started exchanging light, joking emails more often, and I was smitten.
I figured there was a fair possibility I\’d have met my soul mate.
There were just a few issues in this case. At this stage, I was still in a long-distance relationship (another story I won\’t go through here). I\’d never really seen a picture of Ryan. And Ryan had no idea how much I was interested.
What do I do?
The solution to that question was to purchase a plane ticket to Vancouver, claim to Ryan (and my boyfriend) that I was there on business, and travel up to Canada to meet Ryan. Obviously.
That\’s just what I did.
It now appears absurd, not to mention morally questionable. So guess what? Going up to Canada to meet Ryan was one of the greatest choices I ever made at that insane time in my life. It abruptly placed an end to my feverish fantasies of Ryan and I being soul mates, as well as my daydreams about our wedding.
Since there was no chemistry when they met in person. There are none.
You might not be willing to connect online one weekend and in-person the next, so even though you are far apart, you can try to meet in person as soon as possible.
McKay, Lisa
I couldn\’t place my finger on it, but there was a distinct lack of synergy between us. Ryan turned out to be attractive—he was tall and blond, with blue eyes. I guess it was more than Ryan seemed to be very different in person than I had expected. Ryan was optimistic and saucy in his messages, pithy and funny, smart and insightful. Ryan was calm, relaxed, guarded and diffident in person.
The weekend in Vancouver, I had a nice time hanging out with Ryan, but just as colleagues. There was no indication that any of us would desire anything more in the long run.
I got back on the plane to LA with all of my Ryan-related questions addressed. My dreams had not corresponded to reality. The fact had not piqued my interest. He, too, had become uninterested in me. If we\’d met in person sooner, before I\’d spent hundreds of hours obsessing about my visions and fantasies, I may have discovered all of this sooner and spared myself some heartache as well as a lot of time and energy.
According to Paul Carrick Brunson, a trained matchmaker and author of the book It\’s Complicated (But It Doesn\’t Have To Be), “When the contact chance is low—an e-mail here, an instant messaging exchange there—easier it\’s to talk to others. The best way to figure out whether you\’re compatible or whether you have the enigmatic thing known as \”chemistry\” is to meet in person… And you can do that now because the stress and demands are light.”
Brunson mostly blogs for online dating. When you find someone online that you believe has promise, he suggests meeting him or her for coffee as soon as possible after making the initial touch. Brunson contends that a coffee date is public, time-limited, and low-pressure. It encourages you to choose if you want to take the next move and see the individual again.
That is excellent guidance. You might not be able to say whether you want to date someone after only one coffee date, but you can always tell if you don\’t want to date someone. Meeting somebody shortly after connecting and in a low-key environment reduces the anxiety, hopes, and stakes.
What\’s the issue?
If you\’re reading this document, you\’re already aware of the problem. When you\’re worried about a long-distance friendship, things are a lot more complicated logistically. It\’s hard to meet for coffee while you work in New York and they live in Los Angeles unless either or all of you have a lot of money and time to waste.
But Here\’s The Bottom Line of Where you can Meet for the First Time
You might not be willing to connect online one weekend and in-person the next, so even though you are far apart, you can try to meet in person as soon as possible.
Don\’t be too eager to meet anyone, but don\’t put things off for too long either. Chat in person if at all practicable until any of you has spent too much time or emotional resources in your new partnership.
