Tell your buddy you met your girlfriend at a Royals game, and he’ll congratulate you.
    Tell your buddy you met your girlfriend at a bar in Aggieville, and he’ll say you’ve got game.
    Tell your buddy you met your girlfriend on the Internet, and he’ll just make fun of you.
    It’s 2008, yet it is still taboo to meet one’s better half online. The Internet is an amazing networking tool; however for the most part, it is still not acceptable in today’s world to meet a companion online.
    Why is the Internet such a looked-down upon networking tool? I met an ex-girlfriend at a basketball game, and it ended in disaster. I met another at a place where we worked together, and she ended up leaving me for one of my friends.
    Now, it wasn’t all bad, but let’s face it, even the broken clock gets to be right twice a day. So why is it OK to meet someone face to face and start a relationship, but not on the Internet?
        According to Facebook.com, 100 million users have an account on the networking site. That could be the the perfect place to meet that special someone.
    There are actually sites that are 100 percent dedicated to matching people up. Match.com and eHarmony.com have been matching random people up for years. One might say that this is just lazy — cowardly even. However, how many marriages fail each year because the people just weren’t meant for each other? It could be nice to see who you should be matched up with and be automatically introduced to one another.
        This does, of course, take away the thrill of the “hunt,” which I do always enjoy. However, one could eliminate all of those crash-and-burn first-date failures that I’m sure many go through by meeting someone online.
    One would just have to weigh the pros and cons of each. Would you rather be matched up with someone you’re likely to be happy with, or go at it with the old guess-and-check method?
    There are so many different ways with today’s technology to network with people. The Internet can reach all the way around the world to people who otherwise would be unreachable. I’ve developed so many good relationships with people I would not have known if it wasn’t for Facebook.
    I’m not one to believe in fate or the old saying “if it’s supposed to be, it will happen.” God has no say in who we match up with; everyone is in control of his or her own destiny.
    So if your one and only lives somewhere like Ann Arbor, Mich., there is virtually no way for you to even meet that person if it wasn’t for the Internet. The odds obviously are still against an individual, even with the Internet, but one would have much better chances using the Internet as a tool to find that special someone.
    Relationships nowadays come and go faster than the water shooting out of your faucet. People go through companions like tissues during flu season. If a person is looking to meet new people, and by some strange chain of events, has access to the Internet, he or she should give it a try.
    You won’t find me on it, though. Tonight I’m going out with a friend to celebrate her 21st birthday. Maybe the bars will have more luck than that basketball game did a few years back.