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"Coworker: It&amp;#039;s easier to be killed by a terrorist than get married over the age of 40. Annie: That is not true. That statistic is not true. Becky: That&amp;#039;s right. It&amp;#039;s not true. But it feels true. ~ From &amp;quot;Sleepless in Seattle&amp;quot; Last week, I was doing some research for a post about online dating, and I found this gem, taken from an article in the NAMAC newsletter: &amp;quot;Surveys show that in the online dating world, women are afraid of meeting a serial killer. Men are afraid of meeting someone fat.&amp;quot; That quote is from When Strangers Click: Five Stories from The Internet, a non-fiction film that premiered on HBO back in February. As soon as I read that, I let out a loud bark of laughter at the absurdity of it, but then I realized that I also kind of believed it. While I doubt it&amp;#039;s true for every man out there (oh please, don&amp;#039;t let it be true for every man out there), I&amp;#039;ve known enough friends of both sexes who&amp;#039;ve tried online dating and I hear a lot of the same things out of their mouths. The women give all their date&amp;#039;s information to a trusted friend before they meet him. They meet him somewhere public on the first date. I even know friends who take a picture of the guy&amp;#039;s license plate and text it to a friend. I know women who deliberately won&amp;#039;t shave their legs for a first date so they won&amp;#039;t be tempted to go home with a smooth-talking stranger. All this because there is a chance, however slim, that we may be physically harmed by a man we don&amp;#039;t know that well yet. Many of the guys I&amp;#039;ve talked to (or read the blogs of) have a different worry. They want to be sure the woman&amp;#039;s picture truly represents her, physically. They worry that the picture was just taken at a good angle, or it was taken five years and forty pound ago. They don&amp;#039;t worry for their lives. They worry that they&amp;#039;ll have to spend an hour talking to someone who doesn&amp;#039;t look like the image they have in their mind. When I started doing some Googling to try to find the elusive survey that gave us that quote above, I found lots of references to it - and I mean lots - but I can&amp;#039;t seem to find the actual survey anywhere. So maybe it&amp;#039;s bogus. Maybe it&amp;#039;s made up. It&amp;#039;s what we call a &amp;quot;factoid&amp;quot; - not necessarily rooted in truth, but widely repeated. And there&amp;#039;s a reason it&amp;#039;s so widely repeated: because unfortunately, it feels like the truth to a lot of people. What do you think? Does that factoid feel true to you? Or do you think it&amp;#039;s oversimplifying things too much? [Follow Ellie on Facebook and Twitter ] "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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