I am looking for a compatible partner from anywhere on this globe. But even if I would want to restrict my search by distance, frontiers in the mind would be an obstacle.
When I draw a circle with a radius of 450 km around my home, it includes areas of 4 languages spoken, English, French, Dutch and German, and 4 capitals, London, Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. But the capital of Germany, Berlin, is not inside the circle.
When I draw a circle with a radius of 90 km, it still includes areas, where people speak German, French and Dutch.
Lately I had some annoyance in fending off romance scammers mainly from the Ivory Coast, while I never had such trouble with the ones from Nigeria and English speaking African countries. I will write another post about that. But I got aware of some differences in the paradigms of how dating sites are working, and those differences are making the romance scammers from French speaking African countries much more of a nuisance.
When dating-sites started, computers and Internet connections were slow, and there was not much else to do but have profiles and make contact by messages. But when the technical possibilities advanced to allow instant messaging, and there were more choices, there were different developments. The English speaking world, copied by the German and Dutch, developed chat rooms, the French speaking world developed dialogue systems and they are also using the possibilities differently.
As two typical examples, I am using the English site Ukchatterbox, and the French site Tchatche.
Both systems show a list of who is connected, with gender and age directly visible, the Tchatche also gives the location. And in both sites, people can click on a name and start a dialogue or private chat. Tchatche allows to make a selection, who is shown in the list, the chatterbox is divided into chat rooms.
Those chatrooms are the fundamental difference. Tchatche only enables one to one dialogues, while the chatterbox has chatrooms, where at least a dozen, probably many more people write statements, that appear all mixed up. People reply to statements, that have already disappeared at the top of the window, and every time, someone joins, everybody greets that person. What they do blur out to the room or to a target person in it, is usually banal. Such chat rooms are like mental diarrhea.
Chatrooms may work fine, as long as up to 5 persons talk about one common topic. But what goes on in a chatroom with 20 persons blurring out nonsense, to me is so preposterous, that I just cannot see myself take part in it. To the 50+ room of the Ukchatterbox, there are usually about 100 persons of both genders connected. While the mass-gibberish is running at high speed, only about every few hours, somebody contacts me for a private chat, and then many times it is someone so much too young, that I wonder, what he even does in a 50+ room.
In contrast, Tchatche is a very active site. Sometimes, there are nearly 25.000 persons connected at the same time. Of these, about 300 to 400 are men in the age group, that I am looking for. Since Tchatche only serves the one purpose to have one to one dialogues, it is very active. I have no clue, why guys half my age from Africa contacting me even expect to get a reply, but blocking them is just one simple click. So in the Tchatche, I am contacted frequently.
But here is again one difference. The chatterbox allows to enter a full profile, that can be looked at before contacting. But most men there do not fill in any information, and they contact me as a haphazard person, without even looking at my profile first. I prefer to be chosen by my profile.
Tchatche limits the information to a few sentences in the presentation. Therefore I perceive a dialogue on Tchatche as a first step of superficially getting to know some basic facts about someone and if there is basic affinity start a correspondence.
I do not really like instant messaging. It leads to superficiality. When I write an email, I can think carefully, how to structure my thoughts, I can look up words in the dictionary, I can take my time to do this. In an instant message system, I have to answer fast, as the other is waiting. Also of course I too am waiting for a reply. I could stare at the screen and wait, when I know, that the other is only talking to me, but many times, someone may be chatting with several persons or be busy with other things too. So instead of staring at the screen, I switch the window, start to read something and then just forget the chatting, and then the other is waiting.
Therefore I prefer emails, but to get in contact, I wished there were sites in all languages, that would combine the activity and the one to one dialogue of Tchatche with an extensive profile, where I could check first, if I want to start chatting with someone or not, and where the other would first read my profile, and then initiate contact.
But in spite of the economical globalization, people still continue to have language frontiers in their minds. They stick to their own language and those, who decide on the paradigm of dating sites are ignorant of how things are different in the sites of another language. Only cosmopolitans like me sit on the fence and look upon both sides.
