Mommy The Journalist: February 2011

At the beginning of this week, we ran a two-part series about people looking for love in non-traditional ways, i.e. the internet.

It seems that the days of traditional boy-meets-girl, boy-takes-girl-on-date, boy-and-girl-fall-in-love relationships are quickly becoming obsolete. And why not? With technology not-so-slowly taking over every other aspect of our lives, why not our relationships as well?

Match.com claims every one-in-five relationships starts on the internet. eHarmony, meanwhile, boasts 20 million users and credits its site with 5% of all new marriages. And there's definitely some truth to that. According Jupiter Research, online dating sites are projected to have made just under $2 billion in profits by 2012.

That's a lot of people shelling out cash or entering their credit card information to find love.

And here's the thing. I get it. I totally do.

As cool as it would be for all of us to be able to tell our kids we met our significant others in a chance encounter somewhere romantic, a lot of us just aren't putting ourselves out there for those kinds of opportunities. It may be because we're super involved in our careers or just because we choose not to.

I, for one, didn't want to meet the love of my life in a bar. Yes, I know it happens, but I wanted to connect with someone over more than just a beer and cocktail. Crazy, I know.

So I became one of those millions of people who turned to the internet to meet people, and I got lucky. I found my soulmate with just a few clicks.

And let's be perfectly honest. Technology is slowly robbing us as a society of our face-to-face communication skills.

More often than not, we choose to hide behind the anonymity of our computer monitors rather than actually talk to a person. That holds true for dating.

The sting of rejection doesn't feel as bad when it's coming from a person you haven't met in person but only talked to via a dating site. Telling someone you don't want to be with them is less likely to cause a scene in an email than it would in the real world.

But for those of us who legitimately don't get out there and need some help, the internet is doing wonders.

It provides a venue for you to unabashedly get to know each other, so that by the time you get to the point where you want to brave a face-to-face encounter like a date you already know each other and there's less awkwardness. You've already established that you click and share interests without running into any of those awkward pauses that so often come up when you're first starting out.

But if it doesn't work out, promise me one thing. Don't be one of those pathetic people who turns to an internet dumping site like idump4u.com to do your dirty work.

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I was talking with a friend a few days ago. She graduated a semester ahead of me because I decided to add onto my degree, yet I found a job in our shared career field within a few months while she landed her first job after I did and has since had 4 different job titles.

I'm pretty confident, however, that if you asked my friend if she regrets any of the decisions that's led her down this seemingly inconclusive path, she would answer you with an emphatic no. She doesn't need anyone to tell her that she's destined for great things and just hasn't found her niche yet, although many people including myself have done just that.

In our conversation, she said she wants to do something that's never been done.

That got me to thinking, aren't we all that way? Sure, many of us end up in jobs that have been done many times over, but should we let that stop us from striving to reach new horizons?

Should it matter to us how many great people came before us? Or should we learn to focus on our talents and what we can do from within a seemingly tried-and-true profession to add a new spark of life to it?

Why should doing something that's never been done always mean creating a new career? Why can't we do something that's never been done within an existing career?

Why should we try to fit into our careers instead of fitting our careers to ourselves?

Finding your niche doesn't mean fitting yourself into a ready-made mold. Finding your niche is about discovering who you are as a person and how you can apply that knowledge to your chosen field to make it better... something that my friend is striving to do.

The world is changing all around us. Technology is constantly being upgraded, especially in the field of journalism, and people expect the media to shift and flow with the changes. We're constantly on the threshold of new horizons. We find ourselves caught in the ebb and flow of change...

The future is ours for the taking. We just have to know how to grab on with both hands and shape it into the molds we want to fill instead of going back to the same old thing time and time again.