Summary: How do you connect with someone in the sea of students? We talk about the role social media plays in student dating, how relatively small campus social circles can sometimes lead to unwanted dating overlap and our own experiences with dating in school. We have a few emails on the topic as well as a response to our discussion of match making and eHarmony on our last episode. - Direct MP3 Download - iTunes Subscription - RSS Feed Tweet Show Notes for episode 4 below... DDP Ep. 004 Show Notes: On DDP episode numero cuatro we talk about... Lara hung out in Toronto last weekend, where the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has been going on, and she has been busy the last couple of weeks volunteering with the Atlantic Film Festival (AFF) here in Halifax. Joel has been super busy with his work, and noticing that the whole city is crawling with students now that the new academic year is beginning! So what’s it like to be in a city with a new influx of students? There might be some people you’d like to avoid after a bad date or two in previous years, and others you’d like to run into on a regular basis! The fall is a great time to feel optimistic about doing some dating as new people move into your city, or if you move to a new place as well. Lara talks about her very first experience with online dating on Match.com as an undergrad in Boston, when she enlisted a roommate to trail her for the evening as a safety mechanism. It is really exciting to be a student in a big city with new people everywhere. You can make connections at other universities and use online dating as a way to meet people you wouldn’t normally encounter in your daily routine. If you feel weird about asking a friend to tail you to a date, these days it’s even easier to make sure you feel safe in a situation, by asking a friend to call or text you during the date, of course. Joel didn’t do any online dating as an undergrad, but was at a smaller university where it would have been more awkward because of the small size of the community. In a place like that, chances are pretty high you might run into a bad date at a party the next weekend. Uncomfortable! Facebook has changed everything. Lara and Joel didn’t have FB as undergrads, but did have access to ICQ and then MSN Messenger for chatting online. Things have changed so much! We get slightly sidetracked talking about when FB launched (2004) and reviews of the brand new The Social Network Movie, opening October 1. Will you see it? These days you can probably connect within someone you encounter briefly, especially on campus, because you may find them through mutual networks online. We talk about the ease of finding someone online and following up with them if you don't get a phone number the first time. Joel and Lara have slightly different gender-based perspectives on how much information you might want to have available on FB, for example, that is visible to people outside your network. Listener email: Laura L. wrote about our topic from last week, and her experience in trying eHarmony.com after trying a couple of free sites. She found that the same people were on the paid site, and didn’t have more luck there, which is really interesting. With respect to today’s topic, Laura also comments that September is a good time to start online dating. New things are starting up, everyone’s full of energy, it can be a great time to meet people! So Laura encourages everyone to give it a shot this fall - you might have someone new to cuddle with come colder weather! Venessa M. commented on online dating and writes about the danger of running into someone on campus that you don’t want to - or in being set up with someone you already know! She had a friend who got set up on her first ever online date and then realized that she had previously been set up on a blind date with the same person - and rejected him! So it was really awkward.
