The Dao of Dabbling in Digital Dating

DO!

Honesty, honesty, honesty. You turned to online dating so you could avoid flying to every city to sift through eligible singles. Why would you sabotage your odds of finding your ideal match by misrepresenting what needs to be matched?

All in the details. A rockin’ photo alone can get you dates, but as far as a committed relationship, put time and effort into the information you dispense about yourself. It’s a reflection of you – don’t cloud your mirror!

The picture is worth all your words. If your profile is a wheel, your photo is the hub and the information represents its spokes. The homerun photo should show you smiling directly into the camera.

Practice safe dates. When meeting someone in person for the first time, always tell a friend about the meeting and make sure to choose a public place.


DON’T!

It’s not personal. Who knows the real reason why flyfishin75 didn’t return your wink? It’s probably not an intentional blow to your ego. Move on – there are countless fish in the online ocean.

Unicorns don’t exist. While you try to keep things honest, some people may still be telling the same lies that didn’t work for them offline. Examine profiles with a skeptical eye and keep a watch out for the unicorns – profiles that sound too good to be true.

Here’s my card. There’s never a need to hand out protected, privileged information to an online interest…Unless you’re an officer of cyber justice trying to trap online scammers.

There is no such thing as a free lunch

We're a dating service, so we're up-to-speed on the various ways singles meet other singles. We know about blind dates, online matchmakers, speed dating, the bar scene, the singles cruises, etc. We are also aware of the dating wasteland known as Craig's List.

We at Eight at Eight are supicious of online dating in general. It is far too easy to manipulate profiles and pictures to make one appear something other than s/he is. It's the classic bait-and-switch. Craig's List compounds this inherent weakness by being available for free. I know, it sounds harsh, but hear me out on this one. Hold the thought on Craig's List and allow me to illustrate my point.

I recently went to Washington, D.C. for an Eight at Eight event. While there, I decided to do a little sight-seeing. I visited the Holocaust museum (free of charge) and was overwhelmed by the swarm of mostly apathetic pre-teens milling about. They're idly texting, sitting on the floor, doing that odd adolescent mating ritual where they tap one another and giggle. But, overwhelmingly, what they are doing is getting in my way.

After about 45 minutes of mind-numbing annoyance, I left the Holocaust museum without having seen even a modest portion of the exhibits. I walked over to the NEWSeum, the recently-opened museum of American journalism. NEWSeum charges a $20 fee for entry. The result: the place is practically kid-free. No throngs of disinterested juveniles, no busloads of hormonal timebombs. No zit creme, no bubble gum, no teenage games of grab-ass. What I got was a more enjoyable experience. The $20, which at first glance seems a rip-off when so many other museums offer free entry, was a blessing in disguise.

The point I'm getting at is that a sufficient fee keeps the riff-raff out. Sounds painfully elitist, I know. Yet, at the end of the day, you get what you pay for. Let's return to Craig's List, that egalitarian no-frills bulletin board. Who seeks love here? Oh, charming men seeking anonymous lunch hour sex, gold-digging pariahs, World of Warcraft fetishists, and guys like this. I think its safe to say that if CL charged a minuscule fee of, say, $5 a month, the number of posts would drop by half. That's because people aren't there for love, they are there to play. With no barrier of entry into the sandbox, everyone enters at once. The result is an impossible-to-navigate, cliche-filled wasteland of indecipherable abbreviations (DD-Free, NSA, HWP??) and artificiality. Your time and effort to sort through this monotony is worth more than your saving by going the free route.

Eight at Eight costs money. We've been in busy for ten years and we have expanded into 6 markets over that time. We've managed to do so because our service offers value. Your grandfather likely told you "there's no such thing as a free lunch," but he was wrong. There are free lunches, but who would want to eat it?