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. [...]

Filed under: personal experience

Have you found success with online dating but now you or your significant other is struggling to admit to others how you met? Believe it or not, my wife and I have actually been there as well.

At a company Christmas party several years ago we were in a group of at least 6 people (perhaps more, my memory fails me) and everyone was talking about how they met. When it came to my wife and I, we weren’t embarrassed: we [...]

Filed under: personal experience

Recently I wrote an article discussing the topic of a man re-contacting a woman after his first email was unsuccessful (that is, she may have looked at his profile but didn’t respond).

In that article, I discussed how the reader had a theory that contacting later could be beneficial because she may be more able to respond at that time. This wasn’t something that I had considered in my original article on contacting a second time (but an idea I [...]

Filed under: personal experience

When I first started this site, one of the things that bothered me most about the online dating advice I had been finding was that everything had the same answer: be more confident.

I found this advice very hard to take and I actually gave up on acting confident. I think occasionally I might have been successful at appearing confident but I was consistently successful as not portraying who I really was…the gains weren’t worth the sacrifice.

At any rate, I discussed [...]

Filed under: personal experience

From time to time I see online dating safety advice offering this as a suggestion: bring a friend with you on a first date.

I understand the need to be safe but I really dislike this suggestion. Mostly because I had a woman bring a friend on a first date with me and it really hurt the odds of having another date (there wasn’t one). Admittedly, I found her approach as annoying as her actions…so I guess a full story is [...]

Filed under: personal experience

In a post a few weeks ago, I gave some additional details behind my online dating experience. After writing that post, I decided I wanted to talk specifically about some of my dates in detail.
Photo by Peter Clark
For my first topic on the subject, I wanted to talk about the time I was stood up and offer my thoughts topic.

Filed under: personal experience

Sometimes I reference my experience in my other posts and while I discuss my dating history in my guide, I wanted to have an article I could make references to that anyone could see. I’m not going to go into extreme detail but this should give a nice overview of my online dating experience for those interested.

Filed under: personal experience

There is a lot of dating advice out there and much of it tries to make your dating problems sound as if they are the easiest thing to solve in the world. Recently I was shown a video of a very handsome man giving dating advice on how everyone should just “get over” rejection. By looking at him it became clear that he had done most of the rejecting in his dating life (he made comments that further strengthened this [...]

Filed under: dating advice, personal experience

Some years ago a friend of mine had been discussing the idea of loneliness with me and while she didn’t come out and say she was looking to date, I felt the signs were there. I mentioned this blog and then discussed some ideas on why I think she might want to try it.

She did try it and for a time, things didn’t go very well. She met quite a few jerks and sometimes it seemed to me she was [...]

Filed under: dating advice, personal experience

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

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

In August of 2006, I had my first experience with a fraudulent charge on a credit card. The charge was for service at AmericanSingles.com and was labeled “VISA CHECK CARD PURCHASE SPR*AMERICANSINGLES.COM 888-8543803 CA”. While I had visited AmericanSingles and had used the free services they provide for a short time, I never provided them with a credit card.

I contacted American Singles and they were very easy to work with. They said that the account opened with my credit card [...]

Filed under: dating advice, personal experience