Come on!! Sooner or later, most intelligent lavalife members must be able to wake up and realize how destructive lavalife really is. My experience with lavalife, although full of hope and naive notions of finding "the one" at first, soon became a nightmare. And like me, soon enough, most intelligent people figure out the types of behaviours that lavalife promotes. First of all, lavalife promotes a kind of pseudo intimacy enabling people to hide their feelings, insecurities and fear of commitment. Secondly, most lie about themselves in their profiles, this includes age, height, education and more -- and everybody is a "social drinker" on Lavalife, plus they all participates in every sport and outdoor activity imaginable.
The site opens doors for opportunities to give up on potential relationships quickly, because after all, all one has to do is "log on" again. NEXT! should be the lavalife word of the day, each day. Other behaviours include spying on ex dates -- quite a painful experience most difficult to give up especially if you are the one who got "dumped". Lavalife is also a place that promotes rejection, mysterious disappearances, rudeness, infidelity (two of my friends marriages have broken up because of Lavalife), stalking, and of course, online dating addiction. Sooner or later, most people leave, get discoured with "real life" meetings and go back to the site. Each time, another disappointment.
So little criticism has been written about the site and this amazes me. People's feelings are hurt every day, marriages break up, and more important, the paranoia and suspicion that sets in once people meet and break up on lavalife is never talked about.
In my experience this is the only way lavalife has the potential to work: set up a profile, be naive, be hopeful and know little about the site. By chance, meet some other people who have been there for the same lenth of time and with the same intentions (limiting enough for you?). Of those few, you might connect with one. Congratulations you found potentially "lasting" love. Now delete your profiles together, forget you were there and give your relationship a real try. If you happen to miss this brief and wonderful window of opportunity (a possibility to about 5% of members in my opinion), then you will stick around and get to interact with the players, the elusve, the commitment phobics, the serial daters, and worse, the married members. Lots of them have been there for years! Most of them have no intention of finding a real relationship. Now, we all know that no one can play a game with you unless you play back -- so if you stick around to play the game, the only possiblity left is improving your strategy, reinventing yourself, figuring out how to "get even", and changing your pics and bio often. Then you get to speculate, speculate and speculate some more as to why lavalie is not working.
Keep on clicking while time is ticking!! Guess what...it's three years later, you went on 30 dates and you're still single. You tell me how this place brings people together?. 5% doesn't count as a reliable statistic. True there is immediate gratification when you keep trying (although brief)... promotes bouts of happiness followed by let downs. Intimacy that lasts at least five minutes at a time is better than nothing right? If you add up all the five minutes you might end up with a few hours over the years. And it's just perfect, you don't have to be accountable to anyone, even to yourself. Dump'em and move on right? Five years go by and you have the perfect excuse. "I just haven't found the one!"
I say get real! If you haven't found the one within the first month you're there, get out and find your other half in the real world. And when you find him/her, have an honest conversation and be absolutely clear he/she is not playing the game behind the scenes on lavalife.
