Internet Relationships

Until a decade ago, when internet was just a new technology, anyone would have laughed at the possibility of it playing a dominant role in people’s life, forget relationships. However, in the present times, the matter is not at all laughable, as internet or virtual relationships have become a fact of life. With strangers becoming friends and people whom you would never meet sharing theirs and your darkest secrets, the internet has become a forum for making and breaking relationships. The success of the internet to creep into people’s life can be attributed to the fact that with effective technologies more and more people have started getting connected. As such, their natural curiosity to know what other people in other places are doing or even to escape from boredom hooks them onto the net. Soon they get immersed in a virtual life, which appears to be a better place than the real world. The freedom that internet effectively provides is much more addictive than drugs. The interaction however, today is not constrained by time and space. More and more people today find best of friends and even soul mates through internet, thereby giving rise of internet relationship. As in real life, internet relationships too have the possibility of becoming what you treat them to be. However, the path should be treaded on a cautious mode, because, say it or not, the relationship which is now strong and healthy still cannot deny of having a blind base. Read below to know the different types of internet relationships.  

Of all the types of relationships formed in the internet, it is the friendship that is the healthiest. Internet friendships more or less work on the same basis as pen friends. In such a relationship, geographical barriers are dissolved and interaction occurs generally between people who cannot meet physically. People bond with each other on the internet by sharing common interests, passion and hobbies. Internet friendships gradually evolve to become a creative platform, wherein the two people involved are supporting and inspiring and also challenging each other.

Dating through the internet came as a blessing for those with an introvert and socially isolated personality trait. The internet proved to be a very important tool for such people to bond and find partners, which they would have been unable to do in real life. This led to a proliferation of dating services providing such facilities. However, there are a couple of disadvantages to this system. Since partners meet online, they develop certain expectations, which when they meet in real life is, in most cases, shattered. This creates frustration and emotional problems. Also, gullible people may be taken undue advantage of, by their online partners, in a variety of ways.

Many people who are emotionally needy find internet as the best place to find emotional support. At the beginning, though it fills the emotional vacuum of the person, it cannot be sustained over a longer period of time. This is because unlike in the real world, there is no way in which one can feel if the other partner is becoming more and more demanding and how one can keep up with the emotional requirement of each other. This becomes trickier when the partners are involved in a real life relationship along with their online one. Accusations of betrayal, affairs and jealousy can arise leading to unwanted turmoil in one’s life.

Often people in unhappy and dysfunctional relationship use the internet to seek solace from their marriage. So, in the anonymity of the internet, they start having affairs with other men and women. Sometimes, even when the marriage is a happy one, people get into online affairs just to look chic and modern, only to end up becoming fonder of the unknown person than the real partner.  Matters may sometimes get so serious that it can lead to divorce, as when the virtual partners start meeting in real life for romantic and sexual affairs.

Though internet has surely come as a boon and is singularly responsible for converting the entire world into a global village, you cannot keep a blind eye to perils that it has created, one of them being sexual and emotional abuse. Abuse, either online or in real life, is the most painful and unhealthy of all relationships. Because one’s identity can be hidden in the internet, some people conceal their identity and present themselves as someone else or someone different than what they are to get into a relationship. The innocent party in the relationship is left traumatized or has a breakdown when the reality is found out.