Online Dating in A New Decade

Modern Online Dating Survey Results:

The following summary from a study of 100 urbanites details some insights gained as to how people seek out dates and potential life partners. Dating Online may not result in you getting the person of your dreams, but it may be a welcome distraction from all those hard to believe eHarmony.com and Match.com TV commercials that try to convince you about how unfulfilled your personal life is during late night TV.

Some Dating Insights Gained:

1)     In conventional dating, it is frowned upon when people have more than one person on the string at any one time.  With online dating, it is expected that people will go out with more than one person to test the waters to see if the pseudo-chemistry that they feel for the person when interacting online will actually translate to physical chemistry when they meet in person. Most people in the online dating community understand that you may interact with 10 people in real life before you feel any spark at all, and they may in fact not end up being the love of your life anyway.  Maybe more technologically oriented people are more fickle, or perhaps they are just more pragmatic but they do get the fact that if you only deal with one person at a time, and it takes you a week or two before you get comfortable enough to meet them in real life. So if you have to meet 10 or 20 people to find someone that you might want to get more serious with, then it would take years if you do not actually do some multi-tasking in the dating department. Playing the field is a defence mechanism in the online arena. Because of the anonymity of the sites, you cannot tap into you normal social networks to find out about the people you are talking to online, or dating in real life. There is a much higher chance of being taken in by a smooth talker. It is also easy to give your heart away to a loser. Keeping several people “in process” at the same time helps you from “settling” on any one of them prematurely. In conventional dating situations, other than blind dates, you have some concept of how a person interacts with others because you usually have a chance to observe them in action from afar. It is one of the reasons why blind dates get such a bad rap, because you do not know what to expect, nor can you prepare yourself. Online dating does allow some interaction, but meeting in person for the first time has more of the hallmarks of a blind date than it does in conventional dating.

2)     Online Dating is much more superficial – pictures and videos are everything – without them you get almost no action, or attention.  Ladies about having less than average looks. If you do a good job of portraying yourself in both words and pictures of someone who loves to have fun, you will get positive results.  For both men and women, this is a marketing exercise – the key here is not to take a crappy looking big-nosed picture of yourself staring into your web-cam’s fish eye lens – everyone already knows that you stare at your computer a lot because you are on an online dating site in the first place.  There is no need to supply a picture of you in such an unflattering pose. The key is to portray an image of you as a person who has fun interacting with other people, animals, children, sports events, etc. If you are a woman, just remember that men see and assume – most do not read much, they look and evaluate visually for the most part, so keep the words to a minimum. If you are a man – pay attention to the words as best you can – look for the “must not be” things that many women pre-qualify their profiles with, and do not annoy them if you are a “must not be” person.  Women are generally strong communicators; hopefully having to read “likes long walks on the beach” for the umpteenth time will not make you lose your cookies.  In any event, for both sexes, keep the brief and factual (within limits of course – this is marketing after all). If you are lucky, you will find another with a complementary sense of fun and similar interests. Be prepared to use the email and chatting facilities of the online site to get to know people better. Do not over write or over work your profile.  Your profile is a 15 second ad spot, not an biography of your life.

3)     Men without strong advancement prospects, or God forbid, no jog at all will find it difficult making much headway on some specialty dating sites where people are focused on success. In their heads, women are looking for winners, not losers. On the other hand, if you can connect with a woman physically, they will often overlook the fact that you are do itinerate day labor, as long as you can show yourself to be someone with future prospects.  Keep your personal financial status out of the conversation if at all possible. If the person keeps insisting on focusing on that particular statistic, they just might be a gold digger

4)     BBW women are as disadvantaged as they think they are. If a women is slightly overweight, or is of a set of proportions that the weight that they carry is evenly distributed, most men are okay with it. As long as you keep yourself in decent physical shape, you have an excellent chance of establishing a lasting relationship with a man. In any event, most women will post a profile of themselves at a younger and lighter age, and then proceed to lighten the age load a few years on top of that in their profile.  Men, although quite likely to lie about their income, are, almost to a man, truthful about their age. You will find however, that men almost never tell the full truth about their body weight. Almost all men show themselves as athletic, or average, almost never as overweight in any manner.

5)     Love does not actually happen online – love can only happen after you meet.  You either totally connect and love someone, or you do not. It is the daily interactions and small interpersonal body language signals that are at the root of love. If you meet someone online, they will likely want to meet in person within two to four weeks. If you take longer than that to get up the courage, you will likely miss the boat anyway. So if you are too cautious in online dating, you will most certainly fail.

6)     There is still a social stigma associated with online dating. The reputation is that people who use such sites don't have a real life. They are social outcasts, ugly people, and deviants. Nothing is further from the truth. Even so, people using such services are reluctant to be associated with “losers”, or, they may be careless with their safety.  The reality is that many millions of people have successfully used online dating sites. You are likely at more risk of being stalked on facebook as you are on a modern dating site. Most people who meet and fall in love online do not broadcast how they met to the world at large, so all you hear about is the people who were not successful on dating sites. This leaves a bad negative impression of the online dating industry in the public eye. People will admit that they met in line getting an unemployment check, but they will not admit to meeting online for some reason.

7)    The real power of dating sites is their ability to match people up who are in completely different social circles, and therefore would never have met through any conventional means. Since everyone is there for the same reason, and since it is possible to simultaneously be interacting with several people at once, you really do have a much better chance of finding someone that you are truly compatible with for the long term. These social dating sites are the ideal place for busy professionals or single parents. Who has the time to hang out in bars with a bunch of underage teens with forged identity? There is not enough hours in the day, so if you want to meet someone, then you should take your search online to make more productive use of your limited time. If you want to find successful and interesting people, then online dating is truly the wave of the present, and the future. The road to future happyness will still have a few nails, so you will likely still get your share of flat tires. No matter though, just keep on trucking.


If you are interested in online dating sites, then you might want to check out this resource page:

Online Dating