Now, about technology dating...

FACEBOOK. Email. MySpace. SMS. Love them all and love to use them to flirt.

I’ve had complete relationships based on ''technology dating''.

You can line up a date by text without speaking to each other. You can meet people on MySpace and chat by email for months, getting to know each other, and don’t get me started on the Facebook poke.

But can you translate this type of flirting into a real life relationship?

Personally, I’m undecided on this one. It’s just so much easier to flirt and be confident with your witty

responses and ''pokes'' when there’s a computer in front of you instead of the man/woman of your dreams.

So does cyber dating cut out the hard and awkward ''getting to know you'' phase or does it actually create an awkwardness of its own?

When you finally have a face-toface date, will you be embarrassed by what you’ve said on email? Do you

discuss your email flirting or ignore it and start afresh?

When intimacy online reaches a level that’s much higher than face-toface intimacy it can create all sorts of issues. I met this guy on MySpace and we really hit it off, but when we met face to face he seemed incredibly shy and didn’t seem to know what had hit him. He could totally handle himself online,

but as soon as we started talking he completely freaked out. Was it a case of real life being too far

behind our technology dating?

Face to face, this guy seemed awkward, nervous and stressed . . . or was it just that he didn’t really like me? Did he never really like me? Had he just kept up the technology dating for the fun of it?

That is the problem. It’s impossible to know how someone really feels about you by communicating with them using these means.

The tone of a text can be misread, you can read too much into a simple comment on email . . . hey, you can even chat to a 60-year-old who’s pretending to be 30. There’s no real way of knowing.

But those are the worst parts of technology dating. Mostly it’s a great avenue for getting to know someone and lining up the next date. Texting someone is so much easier and less confronting than calling them, and I’m sure a lot of the time it helps

relationships get off the ground.

Still, let’s not forget to have some actual conversations and personal contact.

As Justin Timberlake puts it: ''I’m tired of using technology . . . I need you right in front of me.''

-JD