Online Dating Guide & Blog

I recently had a reader contact me to let me know that he was giving up on trying to use online dating. He listed several things that bothered him but a big part of his argument was this:

Online dating should come naturally and if it doesn’t come naturally for me, then I guess I shouldn’t be using it. Online dating is hard and that’s a problem…right?

I think the idea that online dating should come easy is a common misperception. It’s easy to see why people would think online dating would be easy: log into a website with thousands of singles looking to date – how hard could it be? The thing is, there’s a lot that isn’t natural to us about online dating.

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Some time ago, a friend of mine shared with me an approach to have success using the Match.com Instant Messenger. He didn’t come up with the approach himself but stated that the guy he knew who was doing this had a lot of success with it.

I have never used this approach but it sounded interesting to me and I wanted to share it here. If you find yourself tiring of the traditional email a woman, wait,
email a woman, wait approach then this might be something worth giving a try.

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It has been a year of romance for our much-loved celebrities. However much we enjoy reading about scandals and dramatic break-ups in the tabloids, it’s always great to see a functioning celebrity couple standing loved-up on the red carpet. It’s an inspiration to every one of us, whether we’re looking for love on free dating sites or are happily married. Here are a few famous duos who have shined through this year’s headlines…
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Chemistry.com is having another free communication weekend. This free event begins on Friday January 13th and runs until the end of the day on Sunday, January 15th 2012 (so all of Friday, Saturday and Sunday are free with this event).

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A marriage can seem like a lifetime, and it is certainly supposed to be. But we all know life doesn’t work out like that, and things change. Divorce can be an incredibly stressful and exhausting process but once you’ve got through the other side, when is the right time to start dating again?

The answer is…there is no answer. Sorry, but only you know when you’re ready to dip your toe in the dating pool. The important thing to remember is, don’t rush into anything. It’s unlikely that you’ll be searching for another marriage so soon, so now is the time to relax and have a good time! But there are a few things to think about when searching for the perfect date online:
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In my last article I talked about taking your resolution seriously if you are resolving to date online. If you’ve not read that article already, I’d encourage you do do so.

I have a free online dating guide that you can download but I realize not everyone wants a full book on dating to read. Because of that, I wanted to list of a few of my articles that I think are most helpful to someone new to online dating:

Online Dating Checklist
If you’re looking to read as little as possible, this is the article for you. I take a lot of the advice I give here and try to trim it down to as small a list as I can.

Creating Your Online Dating Profile
This is my step-by-step guide to creating your online dating profile. I try to go through the process I used to create a solid dating profile. I know it’s easy to find yourself staring at your computer screen not knowing what to write and I hope this post helps in that area.

Writing a Better First Email
In this article, I walk through what should (and should not) be in the first email you send to someone. While quite often men do most of the contacting, I think this can be helpful for women. Even if it’s just to recognize that for some guys (some great guys) it can be difficult to write that first email and being a bit understanding can be quite helpful!

Being Normal Online
In this post, I discuss how just being normal can go a long way. This is not to say you should not be unique in your profile but getting carried away can be a killer when trying to meet someone new. When we go out of our way to try and be clever or unique, we can sometimes do more harm than good.

Online Dating and Unnecessary Rules
A discussion on how hyper-specific some people can be in what they are looking for and why it can lead to so much frustration. Hopefully this isn’t you!

Going on a First Date
So, you’ve made it to your first “first date”. Now what? In this article I discuss the approach that worked well for me and how I would prepare for my first dates.

My Online Dating Success Story
This is the story of how I came to meet my wife using online dating. I don’t suppose this article is very helpful in itself but I do hope that it serves as a reminder that you can have success online if you feel like you want to give up.

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I hope these articles are helpful land I hope that you find everything you are looking for in the new year!

eHarmony will be having a free communication weekend to ring in the New Year. This free event starts on Friday December 30th, 2011 and will run until January 2nd, 2012.

Sign up eHarmony to Try the Free Weekend

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We’re about to head into what is considered the busiest time for online dating. It turns out that more than a people will be resolving to stop being single and the population of the online dating services is about to spike.

If you’re considering making such dating resolution this year and plan to use online dating as a part of that resolution, I’d like to encourage you to do the following:

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In my free online dating guide, I talk about using a service called tineye to identify fake dating profiles. In this article, I want to talk about using Google Images to do the same thing.

In many ways I’m writing this for men as I believe scams with beautiful women are aimed more at them (for obvious reasons). That said, this should be helpful to anyone as there are multiple reasons people put up fake photos, not just for scams.

Fake Dating Profiles and Google Images

Here I’m going to walk you through the process of using Google Images to find out if the person might be using a fake photo. Fake photos often point to fake profiles (or at least someone who’s lying about what they look like!) I’ll be using Match.com for this example.

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When I talk about what I think makes for a good first email, one thing I’ve argued in the past is that you shouldn’t be talking about yourself in one of these emails. As I’ve said, your profile is the place to talk about yourself, not your first email.

In this article I want to use an example to show why I think talking about yourself is a mistake. Also, I’ve been contacted by some men recently who complain that they get very few responses to their emails, but when I have them send me some example first emails they almost exclusively talk about themselves. I think this is the reason why they get few responses.

I’ll be writing this mainly for guys for a few reasons:

1. Guys still do more contacting than women
2. I’ve never been contacted by a woman who had this problem

That being said, I hope this is helpful to anyone curious about talking about yourself in a first email.
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From time to time I help readers by reviewing their profiles. Much of the advice I give is covered in my online dating guide but every now and again I think it’s good to go over a real example with all my readers.

To be honest, many people who contact me about their profile already have what I would consider to be a good start to a profile. Not always great, but generally if people care enough to contact me then they care enough to try to create a good profile from the get-go. Often it’s just a matter of helping them improve on a solid foundation.

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Once again Chemistry.com is having a free communication weekend. This free weekend event starts this Friday December 2nd and runs until Sunday, December 4th 2011. This event will start at 12:01AM on the 2nd and will end at 11:59PM on the 4th (in other words, you get all of Friday, Saturday and Sunday with this free event).

The last Chemistry free weekend was in October and through-out this year Chemistry has proven to be more reliable than other dating services for these free events. That said, even Chemistry.com is having these free event far less often than they did in 2010…so I’m not sure if the free weekends are falling out of favor or if something else is going on.

Regardless, this weekend will be a good opportunity to try it out. If you’d like to see a full list of free events that I’ve talked about for Chemistry.com, checkout this article.