My Date With Charles Manson

Years ago when I was single, people would say "who are you going to meet in a BAR?" Like it was a terrible idea to meet someone in a bar. These people are nuts. Bars are great. Nowadays these iPhone geeks want to do EVERYTHING in the virtual world, including meeting and talking to people. The idea of talking to someone in a bar is bad because...well, look at the class of people you meet there. Plus, they're drinking! Every self respecting person is busy staring at the phone in their hands. Who has time to drink? How would you HANDLE the drink, while texting?

So now you meet people ONLINE. Which is so much safer. You really get to know the person online and then you agree to meet them someplace. Doesn't that make more sense than sniffing someone out in the real world? When they are drunk? Oh no. Do it online. The Internet creates a whole happy bubble between you and the universe. The whackos haven't even HEARD of the Internet. They're afraid of it.

Ultimately this is progress because now a whole industry will spring from this arrangement. People who check out the people you meet online. It will be like "Romeo and Juliet," where you pre-screen Romeo to make sure he hasn't been arrested for killing anyone. This could be a great science fiction movie, where a prospective suitor has to put on a helmet, and if he has done anything wrong, or if he EVER will do ANYTHING wrong, the helmet will shoot arrows into his head and kill him. Like a damsel in distress story before the damsel is actually IN distress. Do you know what I mean?

I'm tearing up already, thinking of all these lucky kids who get to live this way. So much better than the way things were...

Never mind whether your date is smart or good-looking. How do you know you aren’t flirting with a felon?

For a small fee, a nascent crop of companies wants to help you find out by running background checks on the potential flames you encounter on Match.com, eHarmony or any of the nation’s nearly 1,500 dating Web sites.

At the same time, at least two states, New York and New Jersey, have begun regulating Internet dating sites, and legal experts say they believe changes to the liability laws that protect such sites are on the horizon.

No one has put a number on how much violence stems from dating sites, according to groups that keep track of rape and other violent crimes, like the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for Victims of Crime.

Yet plenty of crime stories begin with two people skimming each other’s online dating profiles. Consider the widely reported case of Jeffrey Marsalis, a serial rapist in Philadelphia who met his victims on Match.com.

“If I really knew that there was great ability for us to not let anyone on the site that shouldn’t be on the site, I would do it,” said Mandy Ginsberg, the general manager and executive vice president of Match.com. Background checks, she said, might lead daters to think everyone they encounter on the sites is safe. (Ms. Pheffer said she originally wanted background checks but decided against them for the same reason.)

[The New York Times]