Online Dating Guide & Blog

Several times I’ve been asked if a girl should email first in online dating. First things first: yes, it’s absolutely fine for a woman start the email conversations in online dating. However, I think when this question is asked what these women really want to know: “Will writing first be worth my time? Are men open to this?” This is where the questions get a little more difficult to answer.

Before I get into the advice, it’s probably worth mentioning [...]

Filed under: dating advice

If you never give online dating a chance, you’re never going to have success with it! This comic makes that point quite well. I probably shouldn’t admit this but that was me for a long time. Then, as I’ve said before, my loneliness finally outweighed my pride and I gave online dating a try. Things got much, much better at that point.

Update: Here’s another good one.

Filed under: dating advice

Have you been rejected by eHarmony? You’re not alone if so: eHarmony claims that as many as 20% of the applicants are rejected. There are several issues which eHarmony explained to the Washington Post as reasons a person can be rejected. As you’ll see, many of these reasons won’t apply to you. Regardless of the reason for your personal experience don’t look at it as a failure of your own. As I’ll discuss, eHarmony is inadequate in some cases for [...]

Filed under: dating advice, online dating services

Nielsen released numbers in June of this year showing which online dating sites were receiving the most traffic. During that month, there were close to 30 million unique visitors across the sites they were tracking…obviously online dating is becoming more popular all the time. The following are a list of the top ten sites based on the data they collected.

10. AOL Personals (Unique visitors in June 2009: 957,000)
Personally, I don’t think this one should count as a dating site at [...]

Filed under: online dating services

When I was single, I always felt like meeting women was very difficult. And for me, for quite a long time, it was. But then, almost over night things seemed to come together and I was meeting lots of women and I was even getting plenty of dates. Some weeks I would have multiple first dates and there were even a few weeks where I had more nights with dates than without. There were several things I changed over the [...]

Filed under: dating advice, personal experience

A reader wrote in asking if it is worth his time to send a second email when a woman didn’t respond to his first.

First things first, not getting a response after the first email is normally a sign to move on. If the woman is using the site actively, reads your email and then doesn’t respond there’s normally a reason. In “real” life, it is not uncommon for a man to pursue a woman who turned him down the first [...]

Filed under: dating advice

Yesterday I discussed why the free online dating services have such problems: men who send massive amounts of spam searching for a woman willing to have sex. The services could cancel these men’s accounts but that really accomplishes nothing – they’ll just open another. It would appear that these free services will simply have to accept being plagued with the spammers…right?

I think not. I believe that these free services could implement a system that would remove all of these problems [...]

Filed under: online dating services

With completely free online dating services out there, you might wonder how it is that sites that require you to pay have stayed in business. It’s not because there is some hidden price with the free services (they really are totally free). It’s not because the free sites don’t offer similar services (they do, if not always as polished as the pay sites). I believe that pay services continue to thrive along-side free services because of how poorly members of [...]

Filed under: online dating services

Following quickly on the heels of the eHarmony free weekend, Chemistry.com is offering a free communication weekend beginning this Friday the 18th through Sunday the 20th. As my readers know, I used eHarmony when I was dating online and Chemistry is a similar service.

Because I had already met my to-be-wife by the time Chemistry came onto the scene in 2006, I’d never used this service. So I decided to try out their personality test over the weekend and it was [...]

Filed under: promotions

One strange woman and I never gave out my phone number again. I had been dating online for about three months at this point. I was still in that phase where I didn’t know what I was doing and I wasn’t having any success. I was so excited when a woman asked for my number I didn’t think twice about it. I should have hesitated as we had barely exchanged any emails at all but, like I said, I was [...]

Filed under: dating advice

This week I was contacted by folks over at Cougared.com who were looking to get some attention to statistics they have collected. They had recently finished surveying older women who prefer to date younger men (referred to as “cougars”) and some of the information they found is interesting:

The most common age group for cougar women between 40 and 43
A very large percentage of these women are looking for a serious relationship (rather surprising I guess when considering some of [...]

Filed under: dating articles, online dating news

This month eHarmony is offering a 20% discount for anyone who signs up for their 6-month subscription. This offer is only open to U.S. and Canadian citizens and it will be ending on September 30th.

United States:
Save 20% on a 6-month eHarmony subscription! (coupon code: CJPROMOAAA, Exp. 12/31/09)

Canada:
Save 20% on a 6-month eHarmony subscription! (coupon code: CJPROMOAAA, Exp. 9/30/09)

I have used eHarmony and I did like this service. The price of a subscription does tend to run higher for this [...]

Filed under: promotions

After repeated encouragement from my doctor, my wife and I decided to try a vegan diet he was recommending. Going on this diet wasn’t about losing weight, it was about living healthier. The rules were extensive: no meat, no dairy, very little or no processed sugars, no white flour, no caffeine, no alcohol, nothing that has been overly processed, and we could only cook 15% of anything we ate. As you can see, it’s pretty strict! The only up-side was [...]

Filed under: personal experience

When I started dating online, I would drag my feet before meeting a woman. I wanted to make sure she was exactly what I was looking for before we met. Whenever I did finally meet someone I would almost always find out within the first few minutes of talking that she wasn’t the match I believed her to be. My first dates were stressful, disappointing, few and far-between. In the second phase of my online dating life (the [...]

Filed under: dating articles

Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.
- William W. Watt

OkCupid.com has some interesting statistics on online dating emails, specifically some numbers on who gets responses to their first email. Creating good first emails is something I’ve discussed in my online dating guide and also in some posts. My advice has always been keep your first contact brief and OkCupid agrees with this…but for some very different reasons.

My [...]

Filed under: dating advice, dating articles