Chapter 19: Shifting Perceptions
After you’ve made a new circle of friends online, your life may brighten with anticipation. One day soon, from among them, someone may emerge as the leading contender for your heart. As this person become dearer to you, the tone of their letters may suggest the feeling is mutual; and now you’ve found yourselves quietly musing on the possibility of more.
As your relationship becomes serious, it’s time to gently back away from the others in your internet circle; but it’s also true that your hopeful, new relationship must evolve into another form to remain viable, for it will soon reach the limits of what the internet alone can bear.
Think of this opportunity as a piece of fruit that is ripening. An optimum time will come when it must be taken if that is ever to be. But if you wait too long, the fruit will decay. In a similar way, your romantic hopes will grow and ripen toward a moment of truth, and then you must take things further—or by consequence of inaction, you will let them go. It’s a very natural test of your sincerity, and depending on how quickly things have progressed, you could easily reach this point by the second or third week.
The next most likely step is for your form of communication to expand. It’s time to speak in a lively, more spontaneous manner, though perhaps too soon to meet in person. The telephone most naturally suggests itself. It’s time for the gentleman to be bold, pleasantly float the suggestion her way and see about getting the lady’s number. But just when you thought you were ready for this, you might be caught off guard by it.
Through email or chat rooms, you’ve established a good rapport, but your first telephone conversations may bring disorientation. The relationship may seem familiar and distant at the same time. This is a phenomenon I call ‘shifting perceptions.’
Basically, here’s what happened. As you wrote to your special new friend, you did build a hopeful rapport; but without realizing it, you probably blended in some private assumptions along the way. Your friend’s voice was still unknown, so a subtle ‘poetic license’ emerged: you probably made up a voice in your mind, to represent them. For example, we do this when reading a novel to privately envision what the main characters look and sound like. Having established your new friend's voice in a similar way, you have ‘narrated’ their letters in your mind by that voice—all without realizing that you were doing so. And of course, your friend was probably doing the same while reading your letters.
When you finally speak over the phone, your perceptions will be challenged and they will probably need to change. Part of the familiarity you thought you had achieved must shift into the reality of your true voices. If this becomes so, your first conversations may not go as smoothly as you’d hoped.
The best way to handle this phenomenon is to anticipate it. There’s no need for panic; just generously allow for it and make a thoughtful adjustment in your mind. But you should also be prepared to comfort your friend by explaining the phenomenon to them, in case they’re not acquainted with it.
To help bridge this gap, you might open your first telephone discussions with familiar subjects—things you’ve previously discussed at length through email or chat rooms. This will allow your voices to become warm to each other’s ear by way of familiar themes, so the overall impression will be that things have started to seem familiar after all.
“Shifting Perceptions” can play a role in your appearance as well. Earlier in this book, I strongly recommended including an honest photograph in your profile (and if possible, more than one). Well, here’s the hour when that advice pays off. It will minimize the turbulence of ‘shifting perceptions’ and make your first meeting go much smoother; and let’s face it: your entire romantic future may depend on this meeting! So let’s take a moment to review your photographic options:
Your first option was to not include a photograph at all. If that’s what you chose, then you could be heading for some real heartache in this meeting. You see, in your new friend’s mind, a picture has probably formed anyway, based on the description from your profile. In fact, after they read your description, this is probably what they did:
First, they gathered all the information you supplied about your height, weight, age, hair color, etc., and used it to ask themselves, “Now, what would a person of this description look like?” and then they had a brilliant idea. They asked the website computer to perform a search and find all the other members who matched that criterion!
When the computer answered their inquiry, they clicked on the profiles with photos, and presto! They now had some ‘proxy’ photographs of you! To their mind, you probably looked like one of them, since the numbers and categories matched. And as poetic license found expression over the weeks that followed, their thoughts probably drifted toward the best-looking person in that bunch.
If that’s so, then you could be facing a strong perception gap when you actually do meet your friend in person, and your acceptance could easily turn into an open question again. They may be disappointed and reject you after all. And by then it could hurt a lot!
So wouldn’t it have been better to include an honest photo right from the start? Even if you received less attention that way, the attention you did receive would be genuine and it would give you something certain to build on.
“Open rebuke is better than love carefully concealed.”
If your profile didn’t include a photograph for whatever reason, I strongly urge you to at least do this: once your friendship has begun to show promise, but before you’ve started making phone calls, at least send a recent photo of yourself through an email attachment. If they maintain the same level of correspondence, it means they’ve made the adjustment and there’s a real chance for you. If their level of interest increases, even better! But if it decreases or stops altogether—well, at least it’s better to find out sooner than later, and you can still try again with someone else.
On another score, you may have used an old photograph or some other photo that doesn't really resemble you anymore. If that’s what you did, now’s the time when it all catches up with you. You may actually have been better off not including a photo at all.
I once met a girl who so barely resembled her photograph that I literally could not recognize her. It took me several minutes of polite wondering to mark the resemblance. Some of my other friends had similar experiences and it’s always been their biggest complaint. It brings such a strong protest that if it’s happened to them even once, they’ll automatically disqualify anyone else who does it again. And they won’t consider profiles without photographs at all!
Bear in mind that your photo has helped to establish an ideal about you and the other person has already invested a part of their life toward that ideal, so their hopes are naturally high. Also, they may have traveled a long distance to make this meeting. ‘Shifting perceptions’ will already be playing a role, so you should always try to minimize this effect as much as possible. And the only way to do that is to be honest and open from the beginning.
Your third and best option was to include a realistic photograph with your profile. But if you only included one, you may still face a perception gap in this meeting. That’s because a single photograph is only a ‘static’ picture. It can’t convey a sense of movement or a fluid sense of life, so your date must still shift their perception toward your living, breathing, moving presence. And that can still throw them for a bump or two.
But if you include more than one photograph, it will help minimize the effect of shifting perceptions. A variety of photographs, taken from different angles and with different poses, will convey a sense of ‘movement’ that will add additional facets to the diamond. It will give your image a ‘sparkle’ that makes it more lifelike in their mind.
Once this phenomenon receives wider recognition, we believe it will be easily remedied. The next generation of matchmaking sites will probably contract with YouTube or some similar service, to create clips which can only be viewed through their website. These clips could help both the ‘speech’ and the ‘appearance’ problems immensely. But if you use them, try to show more of yourself than the shoulders up, even if it’s just in sitting down at the chair before the video message begins. In a similar way, when you make your first telephone meeting, I would suggest using face time, Skype, or Zoom.
Finally, you’ll be facing another form of ‘shifting perceptions’ after your first in-person meeting is over. This shift will occur as your initial impressions are reviewed in hindsight. The best way to prepare for hindsight is through a little foresight, so we’ll talk some more about that in our next chapter.
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