7 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Tried Online Dating
The first thing I wish I knew was that your friends know best. If you have friends who have already dabbled with online dating then take all the advice that’s offered before you launch yourself feet first into online dating. Your friends know you and they know online dating; these two bits of inside knowledge means you are in for some apt advice. That is, if you choose to take it. In the heady excitement that was signing up I nodded along to the advice given, only to promptly ignore it and discover for myself that dating is a numbers game, so date with speed and gusto, to avoid surprises check heights on profiles before you meet, avoid number swaps and texting before you meet and keep clear of free dating sites.
This leads me on quite nicely to the next one…
Number two of the lessons learned is “You get what you pay for.” This pithy observation holds just as true when spend 100 dollars on a second hand card as it does when you put all of your hopes and dreams into the romantic possibilities of a free dating site. Joining a paid dating site is not quite the romantic equivalent of scaling mountains but it is certainly a modern day inconvenience to locate your wallet, tap in your bank details and part with your hard earned dollars. The free dater can whip up a dating profile with all the commitment required in trial tasting a new cheese in Walmart. His paying counterpart, however, has shown commitment to the cause. Note too that you are unlikely to see signs of healthy turnover on free dating sites. You might spot the same characters advertising their romantic wears on free online dating sites for months, years even. It’s the proof in the pudding that free love just doesn’t work, or surely the frugal dater would have met their dream boat and closed their account by now?
The third piece of advice I would give myself would be that digital wallflowers don’t get asked to dance, so get out there and message people. Despite the technological revolution of the modern world many dating rules are still stuck in pre-dial up times. Yet one tradition that can be happily ignored is that a woman should wait for a man to make the first move.
Regardless of the time and effort you put into your profile and photo upload, digital dating will be all hopes and no glory if you are not proactive in your dating search. You may only have a collection of winks, hellos and random messages if you don’t reach out to others yourself.
Be a bit gutsy – send out personalized messages to people that take your fancy and respond directly to people’s profiles. Take comfort in the fact that being ignored online is less embarrassing than being ignored in 3D. Plus no one can see your blushes. If you are sending numerous messages to prospective dates with wild abandon, it won’t smart so much if every 3rd person gives you the digital cold shoulder.
The fourth piece of advice is, if you are sending out messages and being gutsy, you need to also have a thick epidermis. Unless you have the luck of my colleague Ben who met, fell in love and then moved in with the first girl he met through a dating site, you will meet people that you are not sure about and people who are not sure about you. This makes for plenty of opportunity for upset. If you are feeling particularly fragile then note that this bit of online dating is neither fun nor avoidable. Being medium skinned, I ducked out of online dating a little earlier than my dating comrades. My friends who have had relationship success all continued to date despite momentary loss of well being and are currently paired up quite happily.
Advice piece number five is that time has a different currency in online dating. Just like it’s right o clock in the US when it’s funny am in the UK, there is a different time zone in online dating too. The clock seems to tick more slowly in the offline world. If you meet someone under the fluorescent strip light of work, for example, it might take weeks to establish the very same details you can uncover about your prospective date with just one sweeping glance of their dating profile. The first date itself would be a major triumph that would take more than a few cute messages to engineer. Online it is a little bit easy peasy in the sense that all the hard work has already been done for you. You already know that the person is single, looking for a partner, have a cat etc without surreptitiously straining your ears to decode every conversation you can listen in on. Online dating has the effect of speeding up the dating process in an artificial time machine and relationships can develop as quickly as a cold on a plane. Delicate, prickly and subject to sudden nose dives, remember the time zone difference and don’t get too comfy with a new beau until you pass the 3 month mark for good measure.
Number six would be to tell my pre-rating self that texting is just digit flexing. Imagine that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette were teleported into the 21st Century and met on an online dating site. Would Romeo ditch the serenades and use only the medium of text to communicate with Juliette to win her affections? I imagine texting would be just one facet in Romeo’s huge dating arsenal that he would use in his efforts to woo our Jules.
If you rely heavily on texting as a form of communication, you miss an opportunity to get to know each other better – texting is not unlike trying to keep a digital pet alive on your phone. Just as signing up for a free dating site is cost and commitment free, so too is texting. Try not to get into the texting bat and ball before you’ve met and if you do meet and get on, strive for a healthy balance of connection with plenty of real phone calls and 3D meet ups.
And lastly, number seven would be to have realistic expectations – I compared most encounters to Romeo and Juliette. My friends tell me this was not helpful…
Happy dating and good luck!
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