Online Dating Guide & Blog

When dating online you may find yourself asking: Why did he stop responding? Did I scare her off? Did I say something wrong?

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These are some of the most popular questions I receive from readers, both men and women. They will often send me their email communications to try to help identify where things went wrong…or if they went wrong at all. I want to offer some advice to any readers out there who might have these same [...]

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Online dating is designed to be a safe environment for meeting that “potential” person you are looking for. Yet oftentimes when dating online people forget to look for the “Red Flags”. There are always red flags that we should be looking for in the first or second email.

Too many people do not listen to the warning signs or their intuition. This often leads to hardship, hurt feelings, financial loss, or worse. There are many obvious red flags [...]

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A reader recently wrote in with the following question after she had received a large number of emails after signing up for online dating:

The challenge that I have is that when I go online, I get so many views, flirts, im and email requests that it is impossible to finish my profile, search or anything else.

I did hide my profile for now so that I can work on my profile. Thanks. Is there a strategy for handling all [...]

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Writing online dating messages can be frustrating. Spending the time to write the “perfect” email only to receive no response can cause many of us to ask if we’re doing something wrong.

Below are some online dating message tips, most of which I also cover in my online dating guide. Hopefully these will help you with communicating on online dating services and might even help you realize that a problem you think you have isn’t a [...]

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I recently read an article AskMen.com that covered five mistakes men make early on that scare women away. I think this article is well worth reading regardless of how you are meeting women. I also wanted to offer my take in this area, but specifically for online dating.

Most of my thoughts revolve around one idea: not coming off as strange or the stalker-type. Appearing strange or appearing like someone who might stalk the woman is [...]

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A reader recently wrote in to ask about dating conversations where the person you are talking with responds but with little or no apparent interest:

If you are conversing with someone via email (regardless of who initiates the conversation) and you respond with a short paragraph and question and they always responds with one or two sentences, does this mean that they are really not interested. If asked a question I answer the question plus give some background and ask another [...]

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In my article on writing first emails using online dating, I discuss what should and should not be in your emails. I wanted to expand on that topic to include a pattern I’ve seen recently: apologizing or making excuses when contacting other singles.

Apologizing in First Emails

For whatever reason, some people see apologizing as the preferred way to start an email. It will often begin something like “Sorry to bother you…” or “I’m sure you get lots of emails [...]

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When I first started providing dating advice, I had assumed that I would have more visitors to my site on the weekends. My thinking was that people would be reminded of being single the most on the weekends and therefore would be looking to solve that problem then. Well, that theory turned out to be incorrect – at least as far as my site statistics are concerned. For as long as I’ve been tracking the traffic to my site I [...]

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What is a VIP email message? It stands for “Very Interested Person” and this is a new type of message that Match.com is testing at the time of this writing (right now only some users are currently able to use). You should see a “Use Your VIP Email” button when you’re writing an email if you’re in the group of users who have this feature enabled.

A VIP email has a few rules and features that make it significantly different than [...]

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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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Is it better to ignore unwanted contact or come right out and tell someone that you’re not interested? I’ve had this question asked a few times…always by women but I assume some men find themselves asking this question as well. On one hand, simply ignoring people is generally considered rude but on the other explicitly rejecting someone isn’t something most people like to do. For many of us, especially early on in our online dating, this creates something of a [...]

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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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