Have you been thinking about using a dating site, but are nervous that you’ll meet only weirdos and freaks, or get your feelings hurt, or that no one will be interested in you? I’m a walking advertisement for online dating, because I met my wonderful husband well over a decade ago on a large dating site.We have a fabulous daughter and are still happy together.
In my mid 30s and never married, I had decided to give online dating a concerted try, because I had just moved to a new city and wanted to meet new people. I wasn’t desperate to get married, but was definitely starting to think about settling down. You know how investors talk about “deal flow”? I was looking for good “guy flow” so that I had plenty of choice. During a three-month period, I met 25-30 men from a single site, many of whom were great dating material. Sure, there were a few who were boring (and some who probably thought I was boring), but my husband was not the only gem in that group.
How did I do it? I followed a few simple steps that worked well, kept my life simple and the “guy flow” high. Online dating has become orders of magnitude more popular since then, but these rules will still make the difference between a dynamic or dud experience. If anything happens to my marriage, I will definitely use this method again.
- I wrote a breezy, entertaining profile that told enough about me but left a few things to the imagination. (I utilized my seventh-grade social studies teacher’s advice on writing a paper: “Make it as long as a lady’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to be interesting.”) I also said what I was looking for in a guy, without making it a laundry list. And I included a good casual snapshot that really looked like me but was still a little flattering.
- I didn’t just sit around and wait for guys to write to me. (This seems to be a common mistake made by women on dating sites.) Instead, I gave the search function a real workout. I made a list of what I felt were a few important criteria—I didn’t want to date anyone who was already married, who didn’t want children, or who lived more than 10 miles from me—and narrowed the field to a few whose profiles I liked. I wrote to each one individually, mentioned something I liked about their profiles, and pointed them to mine. Most of them responded. I repeated this step about once a week.
- I didn’t get too picky too fast. I wanted to have a lot of “first dates” to check out the field, so I wasn’t overly choosy about looks, career, etc.–I looked harder at whether they seemed literate, funny, interesting to talk to. On the other hand, I used my best instinct about their truthfulness, and if there seemed to be anything “off” about their e-mail messages, I would simply write and say I thought I had met someone (not a lie, as I was meeting people all the time) or that I had gotten too busy at work to meet them.I have a pretty good "creep detector," apparently, because only one of the guys I met turned out to be overly pushy.
- I didn’t want to waste a lot of time on e-mail/messaging/phone, so when interesting men wrote to me, either by their own initiative or in response to my messages to them, I took the conversation offline as quickly as possible—I suggested meeting for coffee. Not lunch or dinner, because I didn’t want to spend a lot of money or time with someone I might not be interested in, and not a bar, because I wanted to be clear-headed. Besides, Starbucks is a pretty safe and neutral place to meet, and I drink a lot of coffee anyway!
- Most of all, I thought of it as a fun adventure, a way to meet new people, not some kind of race to meet Mr. Right. That doesn’t guarantee you won’t get your feelings hurt, but neither does meeting people at church.
