Online dating carries a ‘tipping point’ for meeting

One of the biggest challenges when dating online is knowing when to take the blooming relationship away from a computer screen or smartphone app and into the real world for that first face-to-face meeting. 

It's a big moment for people who have met online, and understandably many will be nervous at first about doing so, but according to one researcher, it's important to get that first meeting out of the way sooner rather than later to avoid potential disappointment. 

For anyone who has tried online dating, there will have been a time when you met someone and they turned out to be not as you expected, leaving you feeling let down and disappointed somewhat. According to Artemio Ramirez, Jr., Ph.D., an associate professor at the University of South Florida, there's a tipping point at which you are less likely to be impressed when you meet your date. 

He said it all boils down to the fact that we idealise people when talking to them online. It's hard to get a true impression of what that person is like through a computer screen, so we visualise them in a perfect way, and this can, of course, only lead to disappointment if they don't live up to expectations face to face.

Ramirez and his colleagues discovered during their research that when talking to someone online, daters will automatically fill in the blanks and elaborate on the limited information they are actually given.

"For instance, if you say you have a great sense of humour, I start thinking: Not only do you have a great sense of humour, you have a great sense of humour the way that I think of sense of humour," he explained to the Huffington Post.

The study of some 433 people who have used online dating found that the longer you wait to meet someone, the higher the chances are that you will be disappointing. So what is the magical tipping point? According to the research, it's somewhere between 17 and 23 days at most. 

"We're saying, 'Yes, getting to know them is good, but you're going to reach a point where you really should go meet them face to face, otherwise you're running the risk of thinking that this person is perfect, that they are The One," Ramirez concluded.