Online Dating Guide & Blog

This post will be a guide to eHarmony. It is the second post in a three-part series where I’m going to discuss in detail using Match.com, eHarmony, and finally I will compare these services to determine which is the “better” of the two. In this article, I’ll be describing eHarmony from the ground up.

Thoughts on the eHarmony Profile

eHarmony is known for its long sign-up time but that’s part of the service. The long sign-up process is based on determining your [...]

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In this three-part series, I’m going to discuss in detail Match.com, eHarmony, and finally I will compare these services to determine which is the “better” of the two. In this article, I’ll be describing Match.com from the ground up.

Creating Your Profile at Match.com

When you visit Match.com, you’ll be presented with a form to search for singles where you can enter simple details, such as if you are a man looking for a woman, etc. This is actually part of the [...]

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Online dating most often requires a great deal of patience. My wife met me on her first date using Match.com but she is absolutely the exception, not the rule. That normally doesn’t happen. What normally happens is we sign up for online dating and assume that because we are surrounded by singles that meeting someone will only take a day or two.

Unfortunately, that’s normally just not the case. Sometimes finding a date at all is frustrating and other times finding [...]

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I’ve looked at my fair share of online dating profiles and I wanted to talk about one of the bad habits I see in many profiles: the plea for contact. There are many examples of this; some good examples but honestly most of the time when I see someone trying to encourage communication it isn’t done in a good way. Here are some of the more common ways people will attempt this:

If you decide to contact me, I’m very flattered.
Please [...]

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There are some online dating sites that will automatically assign you a user name but most of the popular dating service (including Match and eHarmony) will require that you create your own user name. I recently had some traffic coming to my site where the people were obviously looking for the answer to that question so I wanted to briefly speak to this.

First, you need to keep in mind that your user name is not going to be very important [...]

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In my last post I covered questions on winks at Match.com. This time I wanted to cover other types of questions that have sent people here.

How Do I Hide My Profile on Match.com?
What Happens When I Hide My Profile?
Can I Hide My Match.com Profile but Still Quality for Guarantee?
How Do i Contact Non-Paying Members on Match.com?
What Does a Green Highlighted Profile on Match.com Mean?
How Can I Tell Who the Paying Members Are?
How Much will the Match.com Six Month Guarantee [...]

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Recently I’ve received quite a few questions from women on winks so I wanted to take the time to answer a few of those questions here. I’ve discussed my thoughts on winks in great detail but I wanted to cover these specific questions as well. I would recommend you read that article first as I cover the dynamics of winking in detail there. On to the questions:

Should I Wink at a Guy I Find Attractive?

My opinion on this one is [...]

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A few months ago I reviewed The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman and as I mentioned in that post, I thought the book was great. I know that my relationship with my wife has been improved because of it.

Recently, I was contacted the publisher of this book and they wanted to let me know about their online test. This will allow anyone to quickly discover which love language is their most dominant. Discovering your love language is interesting but [...]

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I’m really learning to love OKCupid more every day. As I’ve written here in the past, it is my recommended free dating service. Aside from offering a great free dating option, they’re the only service that offers substantial statistics on the dating habits of their members.

In some ways I believe these statistics aren’t going to tell the whole story as I believe the type of clientele will differ from service to service. As an example, this article I’m about [...]

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As of today, Chemistry offers a 14 day trial to try out their service for free. Recently I received the question: Is the Chemistry.com free trial worth it? At first, I thought this was an odd question. If it’s free, how could it not be worth it? However, the more I thought about it the more I realized the real answer is “it depends”.

Can I Have Success with Chemisty.com in the 14-Day Trial?
This is the question that was actually being [...]

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Writing your online dating profile can be a tricky thing. Many of us feel fine discussing ourselves in conversation but put us in front of a computer screen with a few text boxes to fill and we freeze up. I believe that writing a profile from the heart is the best option as it [...]

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YourTango has a good article on Twitter Top 10: Who To Follow For Dating Advice. I thought this was a pretty good list and I guess more and more people will be looking to collect advice, dating or otherwise, using Twitter. Of course, you can always follow me too! Honestly, though, I’m not the best tweeter and generally only tweet my new posts so the list above would probably be more useful.

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As I lay out in my online dating guide, I think one approach that should be taken with online dating is to date as many people as as you can simultaneously. There are many reasons for this such as gaining confidence and just improving your odds by the number of people you are meeting. However, I don’t want to go over all of that again here.

Instead, I wanted to direct my readers to an article at Dating Advice From A [...]

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This is the second part of my discussion regarding online dating advice. You can find more of my thoughts behind this in the first post, on why some dating advice can be more harmful than helpful.

1. Easy Answers
In many cases there is no easy answer. The people who are selling easy answers often believe the answers are easy…even though they’re not. Their personal experience of having an easy time with a problem gives them a very wrong impression of how [...]

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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 [...]

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Something that’s been around for a while (especially in Japan) but that I’ve only heard about recently is something called group dating. This works exactly like it sounds it would: a group of single men go out on a date with an equal number of single women.

In many ways, this is something that happens naturally at times but in this case it will be planned. As an example, there are plenty of times where a group of guys and [...]

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As I remember all too well, spending Valentine’s Day alone can be a painful process. Spending it alone for a few years in a row only makes things worse. I wanted to share some thoughts since the date is quickly approaching and I know that there were more than a few years I hated that the holiday even existed.

It’s as Much About Money as Love
It’s a man-made holiday and is really no different than the 13th or the 15th. [...]

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As I discuss in my online dating guide, I think it’s best to be prepared for the worst when going on a first date. By no means did all of my online first dates go bad (many went great) but there were more than a few that I expected to go well that went horribly. As I’ve suggested, I think the best approach is to tell the person you’ll be meeting that you will only be available for a short [...]

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I found myself reading an article recently about professional profile writing and it discussed how Kate Houston, the owner of TrySweetTalk.com, is helping singles find success with well written dating profiles. I’ve worked with Kate some in the past and I think the examples on her site show exactly how good she is at what she does. Plus, at $80 (last I heard anyway – her prices may change) it’s a pretty good deal.

However, the article got me thinking about [...]

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Is there any recovering from a bad first date? If you know you made a bad first impression or if the date went badly but you are hoping for a second chance, my honest opinion is that the odds aren’t in your favor. This is especially true if your first date was set up through an online dating service or was a blind date. This should obvious considering how important a first impression is and with online dating the first [...]

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