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In a time before the web had been invented I met a man and fell in love.Ìý The year was 1989 and it was a textbook romance. Our eyes met across a crowded room (a lecture theatre inside Brighton Polytechnic) and - following a five-year courtship - we got married. It’s what people did in those pre-web days.

Sadly, the marriage did not last, and in the late 90s I found myself back on the dating scene, in world that had been revolutionised by the invention of the web. Being to some extent shy around people I don’t know – and a bit of a geek – I perhaps naturally turned to the web with hopes for a new relationship.

While I would never dream of registering with a dating agency ‘in the real world’ (again, too shy) a number of commercial dating sites had sprung up online that seemed to offer a more attractive alternative – the ability to browse profiles of potential love matches from the privacy and comfort of home without the pressure of making contact until I felt ready.

Meeting new people online is easy. When it comes to dating however, maybe the web makes it a bit too easy to make connections that run fast but not deep. Online relationships that are characterised by frequent, frantic email exchanges may burn brightly to begin with, but can quickly burn out.

You can learn too much about a person too soon when you have email and texts and web cams at your disposal. I may be an old romantic, but I still believe true love is a slow burner whereas the web is all about speed (think about it, when did you ever hear anyone praise the web for enabling them to do anything more slowly?!).

Online dating is a lot of fun at first, but before long you may find your initial optimism tempered by cynicism. I registered my profile with a number of dating sites and learnt one thing pretty quickly; everyone looking for love online registers with the same sites so you will inevitably run into the same love matches time and again. Like a school of brightly coloured goldfish swimming round and round in the same murky water, some of the people you will encounter will have distressingly short memories. You may feel you’ve made a connection with someone special on Tuesday, only to discover that they’ve completely forgotten who you are and what you discussed by Thursday.

I never found love through a dating website. But I did make a number of very good friends through such sites and if you approach online dating with friendship in mind I suspect you will be less likely to meet with disappointment. However, I did find love elsewhere online, when I wasn't particularly looking for it. Such is the nature of love. It finds you.

I met a guy in a chat room that had nothing at all to do with dating. We made eyes at each other through our webcams, messaged each other furiously for a couple of days, met up, fell in love and moved in together. Without the pressure of being on a mission to find love the relationship flourished. Or so it seemed.

Unfortunately, I must add a sad epitaph to the story. I soon discovered that my new love was an online infidel, simultaneously involved with a number of women - each believing they were the only woman in his life. Although I was fairly convinced that I was the only one with whom he'd 'taken things offline', the seeds of suspicion had been sown and once the extent of the deception had been uncovered it was goodbye to him and goodbye to online romancing as far as I was concerned.

For some, online dating clearly has worked. A number of my close friends met their husbands and wives through dating websites and are very happily loved up with mortgages and children. But I don’t think it will ever be for me. There is just something about that first lingering look from across a crowded room that online dating cannot, as yet, replace. But the huge commercial success of online dating tells me that that this is an area of life where technology will continue to evolve rapidly.

Perhaps one day the web will be able to deliver the same frisson as that moment when a handsome stranger catches your eye. If it does for you, don’t forget to take it slow.