11: Am I Attracted To Beager and Calabrese?

This blog post brought back a funny memory of mine from high school, in which I “took one for the team.” My best friend met this girl at a party and they exchanged screen names and a few days later conversed over AIM. After talking for a week or so, they decided to setup a date. The only catch was that it had to be a double date, which is where I come in. She wanted her friend to come along on the date, so I was my buddy’s wing man. I agreed to take the girl out as long as we got to talk beforehand. He got me her screen name, and we started talking a couple of days before the date was suppose to occur.

Talking to this total stranger was a little weird at first because we didn’t know anything about each other and we were really dragged into the situation by our friends. The first 20 minutes or so was awkward because we weren’t paying that much attention to each other since the interest level was not there. After we got past the introduction phase, we both suddenly became interested in each other and began our CMC relationship. It’s interesting because I was attracted to her without even seeing what she looked like. We exchanged physical characteristics of each other, but decided to make it interesting by revealing what we looked like on the date. Other then characteristics that we possessed we talked about anything and everything for the next couple of day’s non-stop, almost as if we had known whom the other person was.

The gentlemen that we were, we picked them up at my friend’s date’s house and took them out to eat. Seeing my date for the first time was actually shocking because she was not the type of girl I normally would go after, however, I was attracted to her in a different way. Throughout the night we joked around and had a lot of fun in our conversation over dinner, and I could feel that the attraction was there for her as well. After that date, we actually went on a few more dates before we got into a relationship. Unfortunately for my friend it didn’t work out as well, but they decided just to be friends.

My first face-to-face meeting was the date in which the communication was no longer through an AOL chat. Beager and Calabrese's Uncertainty Reduction Theory states that the reduction of uncertainty leads to attraction. When someone has a lot of information about the other person online it will then lead to an increased liking in a relationship. When we left the online world and met face-to-face we had a very positive effect. After our date, we continued to converse online and eventually found more things that we had in common. Our impressions of one another did not change, and our conversations online continued to be the same as before we had gone on the date. McKenna's attraction theory played a role as well in my situation. I believe that some of our attractions were due to common interests. Another small factor was the SIDE theory; SIDE predicts that when moving from individuality into a group that the interaction will be more positive than being in a one on one situation. This held true for our date since our first interaction of face-to-face was on a double date with people we were comfortable with.