Online Dating Chat Rooms

Once you're signed up with one of the quality online dating services, the chances are you will spend a good deal of your time online in the chat rooms getting to know new and interesting guys or girls. The main problem with online dating chat rooms is that they tends to be quite emotional, meaning that jokes, flirting and competition are all commonplace. You're likely to be surprised at how much information about a person's mood you subconsciously take in just from people's faces and body language in real life. But we're not going to get into psychology here, there's no need for that!

Fact is, most people aren't yet comfortable with chatting over the net and often end up giving people a misleading impression of what they're truly like. I don't know about you, but I still know loads of people that aren't comfortable even sending email! The net is still young, after all.

The most likely thing to go wrong when using online chat is misinterpreting what sort of mood someone is in. For example a comment such as, "I hope your face isn't as ugly as your spelling!" could cause a certain amount of offence, as you could imagine. The problem is the lack of visual signals that would be picked up in real life, such as a smile for instance. For this reason, it's a good idea to clarify that a comment such as the above should be taken as a joke by using what's called an "emoticon". To you and I that just means a face on its side made out of textual characters. For example, we could revise the comment to look something like the following, " I hope your face isn't as ugly as your spelling!! :-) "

There are a huge number of different emoticons using all sorts of characters to convey a whole plethora of different moods. Here are some of the more common emoticons that you may come across (tilt your head on one side):

Happy: :-)        8-)        8-D        ;-)

Angry: >:-/        >8-/        >:-|

Concerned: :-/

Sad: :-(        >:-(..

Shocked >:-o        >8-O

A lot of online chat providers, and particularly chat provided by dating services, will now have a set of graphical emoticons available for people to use. These just look like pictures of cartoon like faces in different moods.

Sarcasm is often another problem and can completely confuse the reader. A comment such as: "Yeah, because I ALWAYS clean my teeth with hair conditioner!" would be better written as "Yeah, because I ALWAYS clean my teeth with hair conditioner (!)". The exclamation mark in brackets shows sarcasm well.

It's also important to learn to read people. I don't just mean read the text - I mean actually appreciate what it is they're truly trying to say.

Because many people are still not used to the above, as a rule of thumb, it's a good idea not to take everything too literally! As a final note, always remember it's ok to ask, "What do you mean?" if you're not sure. Enjoy your online chats!


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