Dating Online Survey Results:
The following summary from a study of 100 urbanites details some insights gained as to how people seek out dates and potential life partners. Online Dating Services may not result in you getting the person of your dreams, but it may be a welcome distraction from all those poorly directed eHarmony.com and Match.com Television ads that try to convince you about how lonely you are during the late winter/early spring/ mid summer blahs.
Resulting Insights about Dating:
1) In conventional dating, it is frowned upon when people have more than one person on the string at any one time. With online dating, it is expected that people will go out with more than one person to test the waters to see if the pseudo-chemistry that they feel for the person when interacting online will actually translate to physical chemistry when they meet in person. Most people in the online dating community understand that you may interact with 10 people in real life before you feel any spark at all, and they may in fact not end up being the love of your life anyway. Maybe more technologically oriented people are more fickle, or perhaps they are just more pragmatic but they do get the fact that if you only deal with one person at a time, and it takes you a week or two before you get comfortable enough to meet them in real life. So if you have to meet 10 or 20 people to find someone that you might want to get more serious with, then it would take years if you do not actually do some multi-tasking in the dating department. In any event, you would want to play the field until you find someone that you really bond with. After all, in real life, you are probably meeting a friend of a friend, or at least have had some opportunity to watch them interact with other people at your favorite watering hole. That tends to prescreen the people that you would actually go out with before you make any sort of commitment to one-on-one dating. In actual fact, in most conventional dating scenes, you are actually doing some multi-tasking on the pre-screening front before you ever interact in the first place. Because of the anonymous nature of online dating sites, you cannot prescreen people through friends before meeting them. One way dating sites try to mitigate that is via chat and anonymous email, but even so, once you meet in real life for the first time, it has more of the hallmarks of a blind date that any other dating situation that you have found yourself in. With this high tendency not to hit it off on the first actual date, the online dating community tends to interact with more people at the same time, and as a consequence, they are more tollerant of people playing the field during the initial relationship phases.
2) Online Dating is a visual media at best. If you do not post pictures or videos of yourself, especially in situations where you are having fun with others, you can expect little or no action. And you ladies need not worry, as long as you have a reasonably flattering shot of yourself having fun someplace, you will likely get responses from lots of men. For both men and women, this is a marketing exercise – the key here is not to take a crappy looking big-nosed picture of yourself staring into your web-cam’s fish eye lens – everyone already knows that you stare at your computer a lot because you are on an online dating site in the first place. There is no need to supply a picture of you in such an unflattering pose. The key is to portray an image of you as a person who has fun interacting with other people, animals, children, sports events, etc. For women, since men do not read much, you have to be reasonably brief in what you say, but it also needs to be fun and engaging if you hope to have him read. Watch the movie “Must Love Dogs” for ideas in how to market yourself on an internet dating site. If you are a man – pay attention to the words as best you can – look for the “must not be” things that many women pre-qualify their profiles with, and do not annoy them if you are a “must not be” person. Women are generally strong communicators; hopefully having to read “likes long walks on the beach” for the umpteenth time will not make you lose your cookies. In any event, for both genders, keep the brief and factual (within limits of course – this is marketing after all). If you are lucky, you will find other people with similar interests and a complimentary sense of silliness. The anonymous chat and email services are there for your benefit and safety. Use them extensively before agreeing to meet in person for the first time. Do not try to give your life story in the profile. Your online profile is a 30 second teaser commercial, not an in depth user manual.
3) Men without jobs have little or no traction on dating sites that are focused on long-term relationships. Women do not want to hang their hats on perceived losers. On the other hand, if you can connect with a woman physically, they will often overlook the fact that you are flip burgers at McDonalds, as long as you are able to show her that you have solid future prospects. Keep your personal financial status out of the conversation if at all possible. If the person keeps insisting on focussing on that particular statistic, they just might be a gold digger
4) BBW women are as disadvantaged as they think they are. As long as you have it reasonably under control, many eligible guys are okay with a little padding around the middle. As long as you keep yourself in decent physical shape, you have an excellent chance of establishing a lasting relationship with a man. Since most women will often post a younger, or more flattering photo of themselves, they will often attract men online. Coupled with shaving a few years off of their ages is also done with great regularity. Men are generally more honest about their ages, but may actually be more inclined to lie about their income. You will find however, that men almost never tell the full truth about their body weight. Almost all men show themselves as athletic, or average, almost never as overweight in any manner.
5) There cannot be love in the online world, only attraction. To have love, you must have contact with the person. You either totally connect and love someone, or you do not. It is the many little interactions between two people that add up to someone falling in love. If you meet someone online, they will likely want to meet in person within two to four weeks. If you take longer than that to get up the courage, you will likely miss the boat anyway. So if you are too cautious in online dating, you will most certainly fail.
6) There is still a social stigma associated with online dating. The reputation is that people who use such sites don't have a real life. They are social outcasts, ugly people, and deviants. Nothing is further from the truth. With this in the back of their minds, people sometimes avoid using dating sites so they will not be branded a loser, or looked at as a potential sexual preditor or something equally disgusting. The fact is that one in five relationships at the current time are people who met online.. You are likely at more risk of being stalked on facebook as you are on a modern dating site. Most people who meet and fall in love online do not broadcast how they met to the world at large, so all you hear about is the people who were not successful on dating sites. This leaves a bad negative impression of the online dating industry in the public eye. People will admit that they met in line getting an unemployment check, but they will not admit to meeting online for some reason.
7) Online dating is amazing in it’s ability to connect people who would likely never have met in real life. Since everyone is there for the same reason, and since it is possible to simultaneously be interacting with several people at once, you really do have a much better chance of finding someone that you are truly compatible with for the long term. These social dating sites are the ideal place for busy professionals or single parents. Who has the time to hang out in bars with a bunch of underage teens with forged identity? There is not enough hours in the day, so if you want to meet someone, then you should take your search online to make more productive use of your limited time. Online dating is the wave of the present and future if you want to find successful and interesting people. No matter if the forum is online dating or bar hopping, when it comes to finding the person of your dreams, you will likely have to kiss a few frogs along the way. So just get out into that real world or Internet marshland and get on with it.
If you are interested in online dating sites, then you might want to check out this resource page:
Online Dating
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