Online Dating Guide & Blog

Don’t do this! I was talking about online dating experiences the other day and woman was describing her most recent date. She was explaining why she had no intention of having another date with the man she had met the night before. There were several issues she had taken with the date itself but as we talked I get the feeling this man had ruined his chances in the first few moments of the date. Simply said, he was dressed [...]

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A post at Slate.com discusses eight ways to tell whether you’re being boring. While the article wasn’t written for online dating specifically, I think the article is very applicable. Some of the tips might even be a little surprising to some, such as why interruption is actually a sign of healthy conversation

I think the article provides very good tips on recognizing if you’re being boring. And the truth is, many times we can’t see that we’re not being very interesting. [...]

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Before discussing some good questions to ask on a first date, I wanted to offer several tips on first date conversations in general.

First, you should ask your questions with a purpose. Specifically, you should be trying to determine if this is someone you would like to continue to spend time with. Don’t just find a bunch of questions on the internet to ask just so you can “fill the silence”. While I will provide examples it’s best if you [...]

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I approach “self-help” books with a great deal of skepticism. Half the time, these books seem do little more than point out the obvious. Other times they seem to reveal so much but when the advice is applied to the real-world, we have a rude awakening realizing that the “great” advice isn’t easy to apply or simply doesn’t work. The Five Love Languageshowever, is an exception to these norms and the advice it provides was life changing for me [...]

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A few weeks ago I had mentioned that a study had shown that your appearance in a photo reveals a lot about you. Later I discussed why picking the right photo for your dating profile, even without this study to prove it, is very important.

Newsweek covers this same study in far greater detail in an article called Making a Digital First Impression and a part of the article covered a real-world example of this with online dating. One of the [...]

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Some Dating Email Dos And Don’ts
Quick tips on CNN provided by the site TheFrisky.com for sending emails and overall I found the advice good. In some ways I was surprised as I find myself shaking my head more often than not when the main stream media dives into the dating advice business. Maybe it made sense since someone else wrote it (although I’m not actually familiar with TheFrisky.com). I will say that number 5, which says you should wait at [...]

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More Warnings on Dating Site Scams
This article discusses some real-world examples of online dating scams occurring in the United Kingdom (well, they’re occurring everywhere really). I covered this topic recently in my series of articles on identifying and protecting yourself against online dating scams. While the scams don’t appear to be going away any time soon, there are steps you can take to avoid them and enjoy your online dating.

How To Avoid The 5 Most Common Dating Mistakes (for [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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I’ve recently been discussing the difficulties of dating with a friend of mine. In her case, the struggle has been that while she wants to date someone looking for a serious relationship, many of the guys she meets make it clear they are not ready for that. At the same time, she hasn’t been interested in any of the guys that have expressed an interest in exactly the kind of relationship she is looking for. It might sound like she’s [...]

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When I started writing my online dating guide, I had hoped it would be helpful to people that were either brand new to online dating or who were considering using a dating service. However, based on my traffic, it appears that most of my readers are already taking advantage of an online dating service. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I suspect my guide is much less useful to people who have experience with online dating. For example, advice [...]

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A friend of mine tried out the Match.com 6 Month Guaranteeprogram where if you don’t meet that “special someone”, you will get 6 months free. Unfortunately, when he came to the end of his six months they said he didn’t qualify even though, as far as he could tell, he did. I checked online for anyone else having this problem and found this post on RipoffReport.com. I decided to look into this program and the rules are (basically) as [...]

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If you live in the United States, you’ll probably know that today is Super Tuesday. For anyone not familiar with U.S. politics, this is the day where the largest number of states will hold their primaries in the process to select a party’s presidential candidate. I still have some time before I’ll be voting (I live in Pennsylvania) but some recent discussions with my wife have gotten me thinking about dating and politics. In particular, when I was dating I [...]

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In a recent post, as well as in my guide, I argue that it is a good thing to date as many people as possible. A very interesting article at 40s Singleness takes exception with this advice. The author, one Lisa Q, challenges this idea with some questions that point out that simply dating for quantity can be, at best, just a waste of time or, at worst, simply dishonest. If you have a few minutes I’d recommend you read [...]

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Here are two articles that are helpful for finding dates outside of online dating:

For the guys: 6 Ways to Ask Her Out
For the ladies: Help Him Ask You Out!

While I separated those articles based on who they were written for, I found the article for women more interesting. The advice for the guys is good but its not horribly different from other advice I’ve seen on the same topic. I am admittedly thick when it comes to picking up [...]

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When I started online dating, I hadn’t been on a date for several years. Getting started was very difficult and to be honest I wasn’t sure where to begin. So, with that in mind, here are some tips to getting started:

Take Advantage of Online Dating
I’ve made the case for online dating time and again on this site. If you’re unwilling to give it a try, it is my opinion that you are only hurting your chances.

If you are just starting [...]

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Have you ever been on a first date where from the very beginning your date was rude or angry? I’ve experienced this type of date once when using internet dating sites and have heard several horror stories from friends who have also run into this. From what I have seen, it seems to happen most on blind dates or online dates. So what is exactly going on when someone counts you out before you’ve even said “hello”?

What Creates this Situation?
Part [...]

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I’ve been receiving a healthy amount of traffic to my blog posts lately. Surprisingly, very little of that traffic ends up viewing my online dating guide. I had anticipated that people would find my site through the individual posts but end up reading the dating guide. I looked into the statistics to try to understand where most of my traffic is coming from and, using that, discover what readers are actually interested in. I categorized as many of the searches [...]

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I was on a date once and for the first fifteen minutes things were going fine. Mid-date, though, something changed and I could actually feel the woman across from me withdrawing from our conversations. Soon, every question I asked was met with a single word answer and she was making no attempts to start any conversations. After several failed attempts at light conversation I saw things were going bad fast so I came right out and asked her what happened [...]

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