Online Dating

I’VE STARTED ONLINE DATING

            After months of encouragement and endless “I know someone who met their husband on one of those websites”, I finally decided to make my match.com profile.

(1)   Making the profile

Let me tell you, making an online profile was not an easy task for me.  Describing myself and my ideal match was not something that quickly rolled off my tongue.  More importantly, it made me really take time to evaluate what it is I wanted from my future mate and what I had to offer this mate of mine.  It has made me quite self-aware, constantly asking myself, what would make me happy? Am I happy now? Do I like nights out at the bar? Do I like live music?  What do I like to do and is that the person I want to be.

My strategy has been to keep my profile brief.  Using the old adage from graduate school, “show don’t tell”.  Instead of being outgoing, I am someone who can engage in conversations with anyone.  Instead of being fun, I am someone who believes in laughter every day.  I’ve tried to be very honest and highlight the importance of my friends and puppy!

(2)   Realistic Expectations

I am constantly setting quantifiable goals.  When I first entered the website, I had this idea that my inbox would be flooded with messages from prospective candidates.  After all, my married friends had told me constantly, “Your young, your beautiful, your successful, any guy would be lucky to have you.”  WRONG!  I’ve been on the site for about a month and have received very few messages from men.  And of those messages received, none have been interesting to me.  But rather than let this activity crush my ego, I have decided that my goal in this online dating is to find me, reward me, and discover what I want in the future.  At first, I committed to sending 5 e-mails a day but that was nuts!  Now, my goal is to send 5 e-mails per week and trust that I will get responses from some interested guys.

More to follow as the dates start to occur (hopefully)….one things for sure, online dating and online shopping sure do have a lot in common.