Once you’ve chosen an online dating service, you’ll want to make the most of your investment. Even if the service you’ve chosen is free of charge, online dating represents an investment of your time and energy. It’s not like perfect dates will automatically arrive in your inbox! The success you have with online dating will be directly proportional to the effort you invest in finding good matches.
In fact, if you just let your account languish without attention, you’ll undoubtedly be the victim of spam – people who send “form emails” without any personalization (and without even reading your profile). Needless to say, those are not likely to be the best matches for you.
So the first thing you’ll want to do is find (or take) some really nice digital photos of yourself, and spend some time carefully filling out your profile. Rule #1 with your profile: be honest! It is amazing to me the number of people who lie about their height or weight or some other fundamental personal characteristic, as if once I fall in love with them online, I won’t mind that they lied when I meet them in person. It’s ridiculous. Just remember, you don’t have to be Adonis or Aphrodite to have success with dating online (or anywhere else for that matter). You want partners who love and accept you for who you really are, inside and out, so you don’t have to try to keep up an act or pretend for the duration of the relationship!
Once your profile is up, and before you start browsing other people’s profiles, think a little bit on your own about the kind of person are looking for in a dating partner or partners. This pre-browsing thought will help you not only look at photos, but really read the profiles too, to see if these people are compatible for you. The photos are important, of course, but remember that everyone has chosen the most flattering photos of themselves they can find. The real person will probably look similar, but perhaps not quite as dazzling. So, if there are compatible aspects to your profiles, in addition to nice photos, you have a better chance of making a good match.
So, how do you handle it when you find someone interesting, and they find you interesting too? I suggest exchanging some emails and then moving on to chat. If the person is located close by and you want to go ahead and meet for coffee, that’s fine too. I personally like to get to know the person a little better before meeting them, because often in the first few emails or chats you can learn a whole lot about them and decide if it’s worth meeting. It’s sort of like learning a new language: at first you learn a lot really fast, and then as you get to know them better it takes longer to learn the nuances and details. What I don’t recommend is spending a very long time getting to know them online, because it’s too easy to hide certain aspects of yourself. You might be falling in love with an idea more than with a real person. The other problem with “falling in love online” is that there is that essential component of interpersonal chemistry, based on pheromones and other physiological aspects. You simply have to see a person, in person, feel their vibe and even smell them, before you’ll know if a “real” relationship is possible.
Of course, there are anecdotes of people meeting and dating only online, falling in love and getting married and living happily ever after. But I promise you, most relationships don’t work that way. Meeting in person is the only way you will be sure that you feel as good about this person as you thought you did.
One of the downsides of online dating is that, not surprisingly, you’ll be initiating and ending relationships fairly quickly. All those little breakups, even if the relationship wasn’t that long or deep, are hard to live with. It’s not easy to look into the eyes of your hopeful and enamored companion and say, “No thank you.” It takes a certain kind of courage, which is important to have, so you don’t get sucked into longer and longer relationships that you don’t really want, out of fear of hurting someone’s feelings.
Get used to the idea now: you will hurt some people’s feelings when you decide you don’t want to see them anymore, and they still want to see you. But it is far, far better to let them go early, to find someone who really enjoys them and wants to be with them, than to string them along and keep them dating someone (you) who would really rather be with someone else. Think about it in reverse: would you want someone to continue dating you, even if they didn’t really want to, out of fear of hurting your feelings?
So, online dating does take a bit of a thick skin. You will dump and be dumped, probably many times, before you find “the one” or even a relationship that lasts. If you can handle that dynamic, however, it will help you learn to be more honest and upfront in your relationships, which is always a good thing.
The other thing to keep in mind as you date online is that almost everyone you meet will be a reasonably nice, interesting person who is worth spending an evening with. If you can focus on enjoying meeting interesting people, without focusing exclusively on completing some elaborate checklist you have for your future marriage partner, the (much) more you and your dates will enjoy the experience.
