From my latest post at Bed, Bitch and Beyond blog at Bitch Magazine:
A relationship question for our modern times: Do you Google the people you date? Before a blind date? After a first date? Just quick background check? It’s undoubtedly the greatest invention in history if you want to check up on your exes, but what about Googling the people you’re meeting right now? It was the topic of much discussion in a Jezebel thread last week, and a recent article in the Washington Post.
Now we tackle the issue head-on: Does hitting the search engines ahead of time spoil the thrill of discovery? Does it ruin the romance? Or is checking people out on-line just common sense?
Golly gee whiz Becky whatever gave you the idea for this article?
I just don’t understand women who don’t do research on men before they go out with them. And I really didn’t get the animosity towards “Karen” for encouraging the douche she was considering to check her out. We’re busy – why not save time and hassle (and possible injury added to insult if he’s a disgusting pig) by doing your due diligence?
I really hate the idea of over-researching things you’d like someone to be able to tell you themselves over crab ragoons, but ever since the one time I realized a blind date set up was a sex offender by googling his name, I have never felt guilty about it. There is a difference between finding out enough to know you aren’t in an unsafe situation and completely ruining your prospective sweetie’s stories about backpacking through Malaysia. That said, I try to draw the line with personal blogs and things of that nature.
@ML. Mmm…crab rangoon.
My feeling about personal blogs is that if you put something on the internet under your own name, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Hence, why we all blog pseudonymously here. If a prospective date googled my real name, he’d come up with a lot of hits about my professional life, but nothing that connects me to this blog. I want to be able to tell someone about that in my own time, once I know it’s safe, since I’ve had some rather unpleasant dudes try to stalk me via the internet by using this site.
It would be foolish to not take advantage of of this resource, especially in this day in age. Am happily married so out of the dating loop. As for the rest of you single folks, Please be careful.
I agree it’s common sense to Google someone before or in the early stages of dating. I once got stood up by someone I met in an online dating site. I only knew his first name and his profession, which were both relatively uncommon, but something was not quite checking out in his story and I was annoyed . A quick Google check revealed that he was 10 years older than he claimed, as well as a picture of him wearing a wedding ring. Whew! I should’ve done this before I agreed to meet him.
One of my friends has been asked out in the past week by a convicted flasher AND a convicted girlfriend beater. Thanks, google, for keeping those guys away from her.
I don’t really date, but when I like a guy I definitely google him. Maybe not the best thing to do, ’cause it gives me a false sense of knowing him, but on the other hand it’s also a way to see if he is worth the trouble.
I am looking for a new place to live, and around here we have a system that you get invited by people living in a house with a vacant room for an ‘interview’. When I have a name of one of the people in the house beforehand, I always look them up on internet. It’s really practical, because on sites like facebook it’s quite easy to judge whether you’d fit in. It saves a lot of time
If there’s a tool that helps with issues of personal safety, I have no problem using it and have done.
I’ve also learnt that google works best for people that have an interwebs presence.
The current person I’m seeing doesn’t (by choice strangely enough), but I still tried the “f2f google” method of asking mutual friends etc before embarking.
@Mackey: When it’s a blind date where you don’t have the f2f google available (great term, btw!), the safety issue is key. Internet dating sites are a prime example. I think everyone should Google away in those cases.
I think it makes all the sense in the world.
I’m currently apartment hunting in a new city, and I’ve been checking out all the people who offer me a room on Google, and decided *not* to visit certain flats on that basis, let’s just leave it there…