For many years, I’ve been on and off several dating sites,
each with their own impressive claims with regard to how many users
successfully use the site to meet the ideal mate. Most of the options require users to enter a
good deal of personal information and other content to facilitate matching very
specific and possibly quirky interests.
Ideally, the system should be able to help anyone find quality dates,
and the capability most definitely exists.
A fair amount of my personal friends met through online dating; some
even married and started families. So
what’s the problem? For a growing number
of us, either the system itself does not work or even with a good system, we approach
online dating with very different assumptions and attitudes which tend to limit
the number or quality of dates. In the
next few entries, I’ll explain the particulars of how we can change the way we
think about the system and the way we use the system to yield a greater
percentage of quality dates.
Based on my most recent browsing, people want to meet
everyone from their next regrettable one night stand to their soul mate. And though many sites offer the choice to
select which types of relationships you’d like, the self-marketing doesn’t seem
to change. Even across sites (with the
exception of very specific niche sites), the guided profile sections provided
by the site and the type of information users typically enter look almost the
same. For the average user who is
reasonably interested (using a free site, passively dating) in meeting quality
people who meet the requisite standards of long-term potential, I think we can
all agree on a few basic assumptions which can help us continue our searches.
What type of dating
are you into?
Can we agree to generally ignore the “Interested In” blocks
or at least to fill them out the same (long-term, short-term)? Ideally, we’d all like our next date to be
our last date. Even for the most cynical
of us, meeting someone we instantly know we’d like to see on the regular causes
us to pause and to not expend as much effort looking for plan B or C. And whether we like to admit it, many of us
are willing to settle for short-term (possibly non-exclusive) companionship,
romance, or purely physical intimacy if a person we meet is great but not quite
on the level for one reason or another.
Given that we all eventually want the same thing and are forced to
compromise on occasion, can we please not get too hung up on the “Interested
In” options?
What do I expect to
accomplish with a profile?
For the sake of managing expectations and minimizing stress,
let’s agree that a good profile and solid e-mail exchanges should only land you
a date: a one-time block on that person’s calendar to exchange pleasantries, to
share some pleasant conversation, and, if the two of you agree, to negotiate
the location and activity of a second date.
In other words, writing an award-winning profile does not get you to
your soul mate any faster than a very basic one, and in fact, you will probably
be far less frustrated if you simply write a clear and concise profile that
gives a potential date a good idea of what to expect on a first date with
you. In my next installment, I’ll
discuss what I believe are some of the competing interests in profile creation
(privacy vs. clarity). In the meantime,
keep it simple and don’t give up forever if you haven’t found what you’re
looking for yet.
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