A couple of years ago I recall the looks of pity my friend Jennifer would get when she mentioned she’d been trying online dating. Admittedly, at the time, I thought she must be desperate; couldn’t she meet anyone in ‘real’ life? Didn’t she ever talk to people at work or at parties?

I judged her actions and concluded that she must be either a bit weird or socially inept. Of course, you know I wouldn’t be telling you all this if she had never met anyone! Sure enough, she met a guy online and fell in love. He didn’t live in Bahrain either, he lived in her town!

Just one experience such as this in your own circle of friends is enough to make you reconsider your hasty judgments. So, could online dating really be the answer? Or, is best to just stick with the traditional method of meeting people, even though it hasn’t worked out for you yet?

Well, let’s say you’re occupied with work all day (nobody eligible there), you go out twice a week with your usual group of friends, and the rest of the time you’re washing dishes, doing laundry, cleaning your home (or more likely a combination of Facebook, TV and surfing the net); realistically, how many new people are you going to come across?

Even if you met one new person a week, how many of those are likely to be a good match? One in a hundred? At that rate, it would take you two years to meet someone you could fall for. Not bad, but, in the meantime, you’ve spent two years alone!

So, what if you want to speed up the process? You do the logical thing and search a database of millions of people on a dating site. Isn’t it still a bit like shopping for a laptop on Amazon?! Isn’t it less ‘real’ than bumping into someone at a party?

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You can find online dating reviews at http://www.bestonlinedating.co.uk, where the best dating sites UK are briefly reviewed and rated on a single page.