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When my long-time marriage ended two years ago, my then-therapist told me to check out online dating. Since then, I’ve gone on meet and greet type dates with more than a few people I met online and learned that while there is still some stigma attached to online dating, it’s one of the basic dating tools for the over-40 crowd—and very common with people in their 20s and 30s as well.
A year or so into my dating life, I ended up going to work at Yahoo Personals -partly because I’d formed strong opinions about what dating sites did and didn’t do well—and now that my day job is helping people find meaningful connections, love and romance-I’ve learned even more about how online dating works.
So, with this mix of personal and professional experience, let me share the following tips, based on my own experience, on successfully dating online:
1. When you create a profile on an online dating service, say exactly what kind of person you’re looking for and precisely specify their attributes—because the matching engine is working with a database, the system serves you exactly what you asked for from a huge pool of prospects—that means that if your search criteria are too broad, they can push down the best candidates and you won’t see them soon enough. In plain English this means that if you want someone who is 35-42, athletic, college-educated, makes over $100,000 a year and doesn’t smoke—specify exactly that—in a big dating service, you’ll still get a lot of matches and you’ll be able to focus on the best fit prospects.
2. Photos really matter, but lots of people (men and women) don’t want to put them up. If your hesitation in adding photos has to do with privacy, consider only using services that require all searches to have their own profiles (this cuts down on gawkers). If your issue is that you don’t want people to look at you and send you emails based on your appearance, consider creating your profile, adding pictures, but then making it unsearchable--this would allow you to share your profile and photos with people who you contact and who respond to you, while limiting the amount of contacts you’ll receive. And if your issue is that you don’t have any good pictures, fix that—find a friend or get a photographer who can take some decent shots.
3. Anyone with only one picture posted probably doesn’t look like that anymore. More likely, they are fatter, older, grayer—or look significantly different from every other angle.
4. Online daters have three ages—the one they post on their photo, the age of the person they want to date, and the age they really are, which is harder to discover than the size of their mortgage.
5. People don’t always want exactly what they say they want—or, appearance really does matter for some guys. For many men, their date’s appearance reflects how they want to be perceived—the more a man describes his income and his status as reasons to date him, the more likely he is to want a traditionally *pretty* partner as evidence he’s arrived.
6. As you go down the socio-economic ladder, men’s appearance preferences seem to broaden to include heavier women—I have no idea whether this is a this is who I can get or a this is what I want scenario-or whether tastes just broaden when people have less status (or are less status conscious.)
7. Not everyone is honest. If someone who contacts you has a profile that says he is interested in women ages 18-99, with many of their other desired characteristics set to Any, any, any—they could be a scammer or a spammer and you should stay clear or proceed with great caution. And if they’re eager to get your personal email address right away and get off the dating site, be cautious-that's iffy-I don't share email addresses till I have a better sense of someone.
8. Consider how much you want to give people who contact you the benefit of the doubt—or not. When I started online dating, I was eager to scrutinize each profile and find people who seemed possible. Now, a year or so later, I only look for people who seem probable—there are just too many people out there to wonder if someone who’s on the edge of what I’m seeking is a possible fit-I save those corner cases for the guys I meet
