Amidst all the buzz surrounding Governor Panlilio's desire to run for President and PGMA's supposedly (and hopefully) last SONA, there was a different, fairly interesting and all together intriguing article in the newspaper today about a certain person in the US named Kelly Hildebrand who was engaged to be married to another person who had the same first name and surname as her.
The news article's very interesting lead certainly piqued my interest so I continued reading. Apparently, the two Kelly Hildebrands (Kelly Katrina and Kelly Carl) met through Facebook, arguably the current most popular social networking site to hit the Internet's shores. As much as some people may not want to admit, some Internet users have tried to look up themselves up on search engines just to see what hits show up. Kelly Katrina did the same thing herself on Facebook search. She wanted to check if she shared a name with anyone on the social networking site so she went ahead, ran a search and voila! She found another person who shared exactly the same name as hers! Kelly Katrina emailed Kelly Carl and what started initially with curiosity ended with a wedding proposal.
In the sleazy world of mail-order brides and Internet prostitution, online match-ups such as this certainly feel like a breath of fresh air. It is unfortunate that a lot of people perceive social networking sites, Internet chatrooms and the like to be practically crawling with all kinds of shady characters. This is a natural fear of course, since an innocent sounding handle can certainly serve as the perfect mask for an alias-holder who is far from altruistic. One cannot really know for sure what persona hides behind any given online nickname.
However, despite all this, the Web can also provide the perfect growth medium for friendships and, yes, even those relationships which end with a change in civil status. Endless stories have been told about couples meeting in chatrooms and eventually getting married and I have my personal stock to share. A good friend of mine met her Finnish husband in a Yahoo! chatroom about four years ago. The rest of us were against her meeting up with him ("He might be the biggest sleazebag you'll ever meet" was the general consensus) but we were certainly in for the biggest surprise when he turned out to be a perfectly normal, no-nonsense architect with a non-existent criminal background. For my part, I visited Seoul for the first time four years ago and I saw the city's backroads and main thoroughfares not through a professional tour guide but thanks to the expertise of a certified local - a South Korean from Gangnam-gu who I got to know through forum posting.
Certainly, "the ties that bind" can no longer be solely defined as something invisible. At this point in time, these "ties" have certainly acquired a "virtual" aspect to them. Apparently in this day and age, in terms of the romantic angle, Cupid has certainly found himself a worthy, online opponent.
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