Online Dating Guide & Blog

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.

Several months ago, I had posted the first two videos from Dentyne called The Single Life. I thought the videos were great and captured a lot of the real humor that happens behind-the-screens with online dating.

Well, somehow I lost track of these but a reader contacted me and let me know that the final two videos are up. Well, once again, I love the videos. There’s a lot of humor…and a lot of truth in them. Hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
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I recently had a conversation with a reader where he reveals frustration with getting new eHarmony matches. He said that he had been receiving a dozen matches a day for over a month and then suddenly he didn’t get a match for 5 days. Understandably, he wanted to know where all his matches went!

How the eHarmony Matching Process Appears to Work

A lot about eHarmony is “hidden” from people like you and me but I have been either using their service or talking about it for many years now and I think I have an idea of where they are coming from when they give you matches. To me, it comes down to this:

eHarmony wants to give you GOOD matches, not ANY matches.

They take this so far as to not accept people to their service that they feel they can’t match well. I know this is a sore spot for some people but I actually appreciate this approach: eHarmony could make money off of the people they feel they can’t match well and then just dump all those people into one bucket where they’re matched against each other. In a sense, they could make a lot more money if they did this sort of thing. Instead, they stay honest and don’t accept those people at all.
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How should someone with a visible disability approach revealing this information when dating online? A few times in the past year I’ve been contacted by readers who have had this question.

I’ve always tried to handle answering this question carefully because I can’t fully appreciate the situation. I think I can empathize well but when it comes right down to it, I’ve never walked in their shoes. I’ve warned readers who have contacted me of my limited experience…but they still seem to be thankful for my advice. With that in mind, I wanted to share my take on this situation with everyone.
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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 simply stated that we met on Match.com.

Based on how the group reacted, you would have thought we said we enjoy sacrificing kittens on the weekends! Dead silence was all we got. After that point we jokingly talked about creating a fake story behind how we met, although we never went through with it.

My story highlights why some people are embarrassed to admit they met online and a reader wrote to me discussing exactly that:

My boyfriend and I met on an online dating site but he lies to his friends and family about how we met. I asked him why and he responded with its embarrassing and its none of their business that he was on an online dating site to meet people. We have been dating for 3 months and things seem to be going really well but I don’t know how to take this and I don’t understand why he doesn’t just tell the truth. I refused to lie about it and I told him I don’t want him lying about it but he doesn’t think it is a big deal. I feel like if he is going to lie about that, what else would he lie about? Am I thinking too much into this and overreacting?

Is it Okay if They Want to Lie?

So, my reader is basically saying: I don’t want to lie and I feel like him lying about this might mean he will lie about other things. I can see why she might feel this way but, at the same time, lots of people lie about this. There’s still a good deal of embarrassment about dating online for some people (her boyfriend being the current example).

That being said, I think it’s a pretty small issue to have compared to a lot of the emails I get. I’m not saying it’s a good issue to have, but things could definitely be worse! If you find yourself in this situation with the person you’re dating, in the short-term I would encourage you to be willing to work through the issue.

I definitely feel that at some point honesty should be achieved and you should be able to talk about how you really met. However, some people really, really care about what other people think and I wouldn’t encourage minimizing someone else’s emotions. I also don’t see this issue as some type of measure for how honest a person is. When people are embarrassed by something, they tend to be very quick to lie about it…even extremely honest people. With that in mind, I would use their response to something they see as embarrassing as an overall measure of their honesty.

So early on, I wouldn’t say you should try to force them to admit how you met. Apply some pressure? Sure, that’s fine. But if you go around telling everyone you met online just to prove to him/her that doing so is fine, you may just create resentment or damage the relationship.

That said, once things become more serious and it turns into a long-term relationship, I then feel that people have to come to terms with being honest to people on how you met! At this point, who cares what other people think? You’ve found someone great! Be willing to be honest about it! And not just for yourself: if you admit you found success online you can encourage others to do the same.

Really, in the long-term there are only two solutions:

1. Both people agree to lie about how they met for the rest of their lives

2. Honesty

My wife and I are honest about how we met and, yes, sometimes it still seems to make some people feel awkward. But over the years, that has been happening less and less often and now most often people are simply interested in how it works (especially singles!). Plus, we have each other: when someone is awkward about it we can just look at each other and laugh!

Office romances are nearly always a bad idea. As the rather crude phrase puts it, ‘Never dip your nib in the office ink.’ It’s best to keep personal and professional lives as separate as possible, as they tend not to mix well. But with the influx of many celebrations over the next few months – Halloween, Bonfire Night and Christmas – there are many opportunities to get close to your colleagues. If you’ve got your eye on someone at work, this is the time of year that things might start to happen…
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