Online Dating Survey Results:
Here is a summary of the results of a study about the online dating practices of urban dwellers. This was the culmination for interviewing just under 100 men and women about how they date online and what they look for in potential dates and partners. Online dating may not result in you finding the love of your life, but it may be an interesting diversion from all those hard to believe eHarmony.com and Match.com TV commercials that try to convince you about how lonely you are during late night movies.
Resulting Insights about Dating:
1) People who date online attempt to put the odds in their favor when trying to find their soul mate. As such, it is not uncommon for someone to join 5 or more different dating sites at the same time. On the same note, they are also more likely to date several people concurrently, trying to keep all of them on the string until they can make a final choice. Kind of like the online world's version of “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette”. 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. Online dating sites cannot give you that same intuitive comfort before your first real interaction that you get in more conventional dating scenes, therefore, with online dating, the meet in person step tends to be more often a miss than a hit.
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. Ladies about having less than average looks. If you do a good job of portraying yourself in both words and pictures of someone who loves to have fun, you will get positive results. 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. If you are a woman, just remember that men see and assume – most do not read much, they look and evaluate visually for the most part, so keep the words to a minimum. 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 men and women, keep the brief and factual (within limits of course – this is marketing after all). If you are lucky, you will find a person with a really funny and offbeat sense of humor that meshes with your own 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 profile is a 15 second ad spot, not an biography of your life.
3) Men without strong advancement prospects, or God forbid, no jog at all will find it difficult making much headway on some specialty dating sites where people are focussed on success. In their heads, women are looking for winners, not losers. On the other hand, if you connect to a woman's soul, they will often overlook the fact that you are a bicycle courier, as long as you are able to show her that you have solid future prospects. By the way, keep information about your personal finances close. There are a lot of gold diggers out there!
4) Full figured women are actually not at the disadvantage that they often 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. In any event, most women will post a profile of themselves at a younger and lighter age, and then proceed to lighten the age load a few years on top of that in their profile. Men will often lie about their income, but are usually quite truthful about their ages. Men are almost always athletic or average, and almost none admit to being overweight or obese.
5) There cannot be love in the online world, only attraction. To have love, you must have contact with the person. You either click, or you do not. It is the daily interactions and small interpersonal body language signals that are at the root of love. The average time between meeting on a dating site and meeting in person is about two to four weeks. You must be cautious on a dating site, but you cannot be overly cautious or you will fail. If you are attracted to someone, so are other people, and you have to compete for their attention. Putting off a face to face meet for too long will doom you to failure.
6) There is a bit of stigma associated with dating sites. The real problem with online personals sites is that they have had a reputation in the past for being the hangouts of losers and predators. 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 over 60 million people in North America have used online dating sites in the last few years, and there are just not that many losers and predators in North America. You are likely more at risk in conventional dating as you are with online dating. People are strangely closed mouthed about telling people that they met online, which leads many people who have never used a dating service to assume it is useless, or worse yet, just a scam. This tendency to be closed-mouthed is kind of silly because everyone knows that people who date to have met at some time, so why try to hide it.
7) Online dating sites are an extremely powerful social tool that brings people together who would never normally have ever met each other. The fact that everyone on the site is looking to meet someone for the purpose of dating, or establishing a long term relationship, it is incredibly easy to start up a conversation with someone that you have never met. You already have at least one subject in common – dating. Online dating is actually the best forum for people to meet when they are just too busy, too tied up, or just not inclined to be wandering around bar hopping or social clubs trying to meet people. Online dating is one of the most modern types of tools for people to use on the internet. It is where the cool guys hang out these days. People like you who are not afraid to try something fairly new, or not quite in the mainstream. The road to future happyness will still have a few nails, so you will likely still get your share of flat tires. No matter though, just keep on trucking.
If you are interested in online dating sites, then you might want to check out this resource page:
Online Dating
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