I Know Why Online Dating Isn’t Working for You

There’s no end to the complaints people have about online dating and how it didn’t work for them.

The gripes usually go something like this:

• Guys only send creepy emails looking for hookups.
• Girls only want free dinners or simply won’t respond.
• The dating site sends me matches that aren’t a match at all.
• I know a friend of a friend who met a guy and got married, but it hasn’t worked for me.

I know online dating can and does work for many people. I met my husband online and know for a fact there are people online genuinely looking for real connection.

On the flip side, there are also people trolling dating sites looking to scam you, only hook up or who are merely bored and looking for attention.

I promise you there is hope! I have a few ideas for you to consider before you delete your profile.

Some people think the best way to mend a broken heart is to find another relationship as quickly as possible.

For your own sake and for those you may date during a broken-hearted rebound, take a breather before diving back into the dating pool.

You know all the stuff that didn’t work in your last relationship? Well, you ignoring it and finding a replacement isn’t going to solve that problem.

Give yourself some time to pause, reflect and come up with an improved game plan before launching head first into dating. If you keep doing what you’ve done, you’ll just get more of the same.

Or are you just throwing darts?

Answer the following question: Have you spent more time researching what you want in a new car than really figuring out what you want in a relationship? If you answered yes, you have some work to do.

A bottle of wine on a lonely Friday night has produced many a bad dating profile. Those are the same people who are shocked to find an inbox stuffed with emails from jerks clearly playing the odds via cut and paste emails.

Before putting up a profile, give some thought to the kind of person and relationship you want in your life. Yes, it will take a bit more work to stop and reflect, but if what you really want is a good, lasting relationship, that’s what you need to do.

You can’t get what you want if you don’t really know what you’re looking for. “I’ll know it when I see it” won’t cut it.

“Online dating is a powerful tool

for connection. The rest is up to you.”

Expecting computer calculations to find love would be neat, but it’s pretty unlikely without some effort on your part.

A dating site is a tool to help you locate potential matches. What dating sites aren’t is magic.

Many dating sites claim they can find your soul mate for you, but that’s where their abilities end.

Once you locate each other, it’s up to you to make it work and math isn’t going to help you.

With dating sites, you need to be your own advocate, have a good idea of what you’re looking for and use common sense. They may offer up some good profiles to look at, but don’t rely entirely on them to make connections for you.

I recommend sites that offer generous space for you to describe who you are and what you’re looking for and that allow you to do independent searches within the site.

Stay away from the sites that give you 400-question surveys before telling you you’re unmatchable and force feed you your matches.

As much as I would like to say there is a way to avoid this, there just isn’t. It’s pretty hard to go anywhere these days and not run into someone with bad manners and questionable intentions.

Early on in the dating journey, I recommend that you accept their existence (much like we do junk mail) and that unfortunately they come with the territory, and then proceed to ignore/delete/block them and report them to the dating website if necessary.

For the more subtle jerks, the ones that seem OK to begin with and then eventually get a one-track mind involving  rushing into anything like sex, expensive dinners or moving in together, trust your gut.

If you start feeling uncomfortable about anything in your exchange with someone, call them on it. If you don’t get a satisfactory answer, end it. Life is too short for jerks.

Don’t give money to anyone you meet online no matter how great their tale of woe is.

Seriously, anyone with an ounce of integrity is not going to go asking complete strangers for money, particularly those they claim to be madly in love with.

Online dating can and does work for many people. There are some people who magically find that special someone because of who was delivered into their inbox.

For the rest of us who found love online, it works because we went into it ready to date, knew the kind of person and relationship we wanted, didn’t let the jerks get us down and enjoyed the journey of meeting people and fine-tuning what we wanted.

Online dating is a powerful tool for connection. The rest is up to you.