Online Dating

You might have missed a recent article in The New York Times about how group dating is becoming a new way to date.

Instead of meeting a match one-on-one like you would with most online dating sites, some are now offering to set you up on a group date with five to eleven matches - 3 to 6 men and 3 to 6 women total, to offer you more choices and a more relaxed and engaging first date.

The reason? Group dates tend to take the pressure off of individuals. You don't have to make a list of interesting things to say or questions to ask, or try to keep conversation going whenever there's an awkward pause. Plus, it's like having three to six dates in one night!

Best of all, you increase your chances of clicking with someone. It maximizes the chance you'll hit it off with someone in a way that speed dating doesn't. For one, you get to spend more time with your potential dates and really get to know them, instead of being rushed through a five-minute meeting and going on a first impression.

Group dating is an interesting proposition, and has been met with a lot of interest. Online dating and now even speed dating sites are opening up to this concept. So what are the drawbacks?

Some people tend to be more shy and reserved, especially around new people. If there is a gregarious, fun person in the group, he might steal the attention away from other great dates by leading the conversation or suggesting what to do next. It's hard to compete for attention. The beauty of a one-on-one date is that there aren't really any distractions and you can focus on each other.

But there is something to be said for a relaxed, no-pressured group date. There isn't an expectation of sex or romance by the end of the evening, at least not with one particular person. You don't have to plan the date in terms of picking the place and paying for both you and your date - the dating site offering the group date experience plans a location to meet and each person is responsible for her own tab.

If you're new to dating or if you've been through a recent break-up, this might be the best way to dip your toe in the dating pool. Instead of working up the nerve to go on a date, a group date is like dining with new friends, which may or may not lead to romance.

It’s funny: when we think about romance in our everyday lives, we tend to think in concrete terms, like, “maybe I’ll meet someone nice while I’m at this party.” When we think about online dating, we begin to fantasize: “Maybe I’ll meet my ideal image of a perfect date.”

It’s unclear why we jump to such extremes, but it probably has to do with the fact that media depictions of online dating are pretty extreme: online dates are usually either terrible or wonderful. Often, they’re absolutely awful until the protagonist meets that perfect match. One doesn’t often see a more accurate depiction: people who are perfectly nice human beings, maybe even attractive, but simply lacking that spark of chemistry.

It’s a good idea to analyze your expectations: are you falling into the beauty-or-beast trap? Falling into this trap can actually affect your dating experience. Consider: if you’re expecting everyone to be either beastly or your ideal, you don’t quite know what to do with those who fall somewhere in the middle. As such, you risk erring on either side: on the one hand, you might be so pleasantly surprised that your date is not an ogre that you agree to more dates, even though you’re ultimately not compatible. Or, even worse, you might overlook someone who does have relationship potential because you weren’t falling out of your chair at the sight of them.

In either case, you would have been better served if you had realistic expectations and confidence in knowing your own priorities. You would know to trust your gut if, ultimately, you’re not feeling that spark of a connection, even at the end of a night. Conversely, you might also be willing to open up and get past the wow-factor of a first impression. Because you’re prepared for a gray area in your dating prospects, you’re able to give the matter serious consideration, instead of trying to shoehorn your dates into Angel and Devil boxes.

You’re also more able to view your dates as real people, rather than caricatures: you’re not just adding to your collection of “terrible first date” anecdotes, or building a cutesy “how we met” tale. Real life is often far more nuanced than fiction, and being prepared for the former allows you to enjoy that distinction.

So as you take on the world of online dating, ask yourself: are you expecting either a beauty or a beast? Or are you prepared to meet real people who are far more interesting than either?

We all love reconnecting with old friends on Facebook - including checking status updates just to see what everyone else is up to. But when you're unhappy with your own life, this could be the worst thing you could do.

Have you ever been frustrated by a string of bad dates, checked Facebook, and suddenly noticed all of your friends are posting pictures with their new boyfriends or changing their status updates to "in a relationship?" While it might seem like everyone is coupled up except for you, it's not reality. But Facebook can make us think so.

How often do you post pictures of yourself when you're feeling down - sitting alone on your couch watching TV? Probably not many.

Well, your friends aren't going to share their lonely nights on Facebook either. They won't share the fact that they weren't invited to that awesome party, or the fights they have with their boyfriends, or the issues that come up soon after they get married. These are the parts of a relationship that people don't want to share. Which is why Facebook isn't an accurate depiction of reality. If you feel depressed after logging on to Facebook, you might want to take some time off.

Social media is a great tool, but it can also be harmful if we take it too seriously. You don't want to sabotage your own love life, yet that's exactly what we do when we obsess over everyone else's Facebook status.

Following are some tips to help you focus on you, instead of everyone else on Facebook:

Don't look at Facebook before a date. It can put you in a bad mood, make you more judgmental of your date, cause you to obsess about your successful Facebook friend, and generally change the whole vibe of what the date could be. If you approach your date with a relaxed and confident attitude, trying to have a good time, you likely will have a good time. If Facebook is getting you down, leave it out. With every new person you meet, you have a new opportunity to connect. So let it happen, without Facebook clouding your view.

Don't share your date stories over Facebook. Your friends might love your crazy dating life and offer their opinions, or maybe their own bad date stories, but do you really need them? There's no need to have a public forum on how your dating life is going. Just focus on yourself, who you're meeting, and having a good time. This isn't a contest.

Don't friend your dates too soon. There's too much temptation to see who he's friended and who he's dated. If you're just getting to know him, keep it limited. You might get the wrong idea from his Facebook page, like he would of yours!

Facebook is a great tool, but it's good to know when to disconnect.

Somewhere in the back of our heads, rattling around with all the other information we ignore like "You really shouldn't drink that last shot of tequila," we know that having an online account means accepting the risk that that account might be hacked. But no matter how many times we hear horror stories of it happening to someone else, we never quite believe it could happen to us.

Imagine the surprise, then, that Cupid Media users must have felt when the service was hacked early in 2013 and the names, e-mail addresses, and plaintext passwords for 42 million accounts were exposed. Ouch. That has gotta sting.

Ars Technica reports that "The cache of personal information was found on the same servers that housed tens of millions of records stolen in separate hacks on sites including Adobe, PR Newswire, and the National White Collar Crime Center." An official from Cupid Media explained that the hack appeared to be connected to "suspicious activity" that was detected on the site in January and officials say they believe they have notified all affected users, but those actions and explanations are likely to do little to appease users whose personal information has been compromised.

The Cupid Media hack will go down in history as one of the largest passcode breaches on record so far, a dubious distinction made even worse by the fact that the data was in plaintext, rather than a cryptographically protected format that requires significant effort to crack. Because many Internet users reuse the same passwords on multiple websites, a hack on this scale can give thieves instant access to tens of thousands of sensitive accounts tied to a user's e-mail address.

"Making matters worse," Ars Technica speculates, "many of the Cupid Media users are precisely the kinds of people who might be receptive to content frequently advertised in spam messages, including male enhancement products, services for singles, and diet pills."

And making matters even worse than that, a review of the Cupid Media user records that were exposed reveals that a significant portion of them were protected with weak passwords in the first place. More than 1.9 million accounts were protected with the password "123456." Another 1.2 million used "111111." How is it that, in this day and age, there are still people who think those are secure passwords? Have they never seen the Internet before?

Take note, online daters: the more random your password is, the safer it is. And please, please, never use the same password on multiple sites.

The power of the Internet has certainly changed how we date, especially with the popularity of online dating. Social media has made it really easy to access information about your dates, too. A lot of your dates will be checking out Facebook and Google to learn more about you before you actually meet in person. And chances are, you'll know more about them too.

I encourage people to do some research before the date. A few of my friends were horrified to discover their matches had engagement websites for their upcoming marriage to someone else, yet they were still online dating! Another saw that one of her matches had a police record. You don't want to be caught off guard or misled, so research is important.

Police records aside, how many of you research dates a little more than necessary? Do you really want to know what junior high school he attended, or what he ate for breakfast yesterday morning?

A quick look at Facebook or Twitter can tell you a lot about a person, but dating should be more mysterious. Don't you want the excitement of getting to know your date over time, discovering little quirks and habits for yourself? Or would you rather everything be out in the open, like her background in conservative politics or his experience growing up in a commune?

There's another argument to be made that sometimes we know too much, too soon. When you spend so much time researching someone you haven't met in person, building this idea of who he is in your head, you'll likely be let down in real life when you meet and there's no spark. You might even feel cheated. After all, you thought you really knew him.

But seeing someone's online persona - who he is through social media - can be a bit misleading. A person's social media presence isn't typically who he is in real life. People are much more complex. It's better to think of someone's blog or Twitter page as just a snapshot compared to who they really are as a whole.

It can also be misleading if you're emailing a potential date back and forth several times, becoming more emotionally attached to a virtual relationship. Maybe neither one of you feels compelled to meet in real life, at least anytime soon. But when you do this, you're not getting a complete picture of who your match is. You're falling for an image that you've built up, and one that might not even be real (catfishing).

Instead of getting hung up on your virtual interactions with dates, it's better to meet them in person sooner rather than later, and it's also good to learn about him in real life as you date, not just over Facebook.

It can be tough to get back on the dating horse after a relationship tumble. For many, online dating is a way to ease back in slowly. Since you’re just perusing profiles, not approaching people in person, you can move at your own pace, without risk of rejection.

However, once you start to send first-contact emails, you’re back in the world of contact with humans once again. And while many still find online dating to be easier in terms of rejection, there’s a certain amount of “toughening up” you might want to prepare for.

Etiquette is slightly different on online dating websites. Whereas in person you’re expected to give a polite, thoughtful response no matter what your level of attraction, it’s not uncommon in online dating for your potential match to suddenly disappear or break off contact without warning. No, they probably haven’t been abducted by aliens or moved into Witness Protection - they’ve just decided they’re not interested. Once you’re used to this cultural difference, you’re not likely not going to spend much time wondering what happened - after all, you’d never even met in person - but it’s still a form of rejection, and it can still sting, especially the first time.

Online dating is still mostly anonymous, and some choose to take advantage of that by forgetting their manners. While downright abusive emails are not unheard of, they’re not exactly common. Still, it isn’t unusual to come across any number of lesser remarks that are loaded with “blunt honesty” - comments on appearance, age, interests, and more. Again, for many such comments “come with the territory” and are so much water off a duck’s back; why should you care about a cowardly boor on the internet? But if you’re new to online dating, or especially new to the internet, it can be a bit of a shock.

So as you prepare to plunge into the dating pool, ask yourself honestly: are you ready to face rejection, even if it’s in the form of no response? Are you ready to ignore emails that might be out of line, or will you be genuinely hurt by the slightest criticism? There’s no shame in understanding your own limits. Online dating is meant to be more efficient and easier; if it would only be harder for you, there’s nothing wrong with waiting or looking elsewhere. On the other hand, sometimes knowledge is all we need to toughen our armor; being aware of the less polite aspects of online dating might be all you need to be prepared.