Confession: Despite being the ripe, not-that-old age of 26, I'm still a sucker for Halloween. There's something I just can't help loving about a holiday that encourages dressing up and eating candy. And then there's my very favorite part of the Halloween season: the scares.

From the horror movies to the haunted houses, something in me demands to be scared and loves every second of it. But there are a few times terror is not on my to-do list, and online dating is definitely one of them. Fright on a first date? No thanks.

It seems obvious, but humanity is a strange and wonderful thing and...well...it turns out not everyone feels the same way I do. There are those who want their romance to come with a side of scares, and there are dating sites that cater to their special need for fear.

Steve Harvey has been dishing out dating advice to women quite successfully over the years, because he knows what it was like to be a man playing around without really wanting to commit. His book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, was a best-seller among the hundreds of dating advice books to hit the market. Now, he’s teamed up with Match.com to create a dating site called “Delightful” that competes directly with marriage-minded sites like eHarmony.

"Women want to date with the goal that it turns into a relationship," Harvey told The Chicago Tribune in a recent article. "It kind of breaks my heart when I have women on my show who've been on 50, 100 dates. Something's not right if you have to go out with 100 people."

This comment made me wonder - has Steve Harvey actually tried online dating? Tinder? Most of us have been on at least 50 dates, if not more. I don’t think there’s something wrong with people dating in those numbers, because there are so many opportunities now to meet people.

But I do agree that most daters don’t really invest in getting to know the person sitting in front of them on any given date. There are too many options to be that committal, so they typically move fast. Steve Harvey’s comment rings true when we consider how much time we invest with such little return. I write about this in my book Date Expectations.

Website Delightful aims to change those statistics, with a little help from Harvey. Sam Yagan, CEO of the Match Group, said in a statement, "To take [Steve’s] power and his outlook on relationships and his views on love and combine that with the technology and algorithms that we know to work creates a powerful new category." In other words, the celebrity factor is key in the marketing of the new site.

Others have tried this before. Take the host of The Bachelor Chris Harrison, who last year launched a video-based dating app called At First Sight, hoping to capitalize on his celebrity. It hasn’t quite taken off like Tinder, despite its appealing premise of seeing a short video of potential dates, rather than just viewing photos.

Harvey and Match expect their approach to be different. After all, Harvey is a dating advice coach with his own TV show, and has helped many women find lasting relationships. He is an expert, not just a celebrity.

"We're going to help women get themselves out of the hunting game," Harvey said. "And we're going to make a concerted effort to get men on here who are looking more seriously for a relationship instead of just dating a lot of people."

As for how they will compete with successful marriage-minded sites like eHarmony, Yagan is a little unclear. Instead, he compares Delightful to OkCupid and Tinder, which are known more for their hook-up appeal, saying that at the end of the day when people want relationships, they will look to Delightful instead.

Yep, you read that headline right. And the news comes straight from the mouth of Christian Rudder, co-founder of OkCupid and writer of the OkTrends blog, so you know it's worth paying attention to.

Messages are usually the most private part of an online dating site, but Rudder gets special access and he's used it for another interesting wave of online dating research.

First, he took a look at the history of technology and how it altered the way we communicate. The notable moment came in 2008, when Apple launched the app store and everything went mobile. The effect on OkCupid users' writing was practically instantaneous. Smartphone-using singles started typing on teeny-tiny keyboards, and as a result message length has dropped by over two-thirds in the 6 years since.

These days, the average message is just over 100 characters. It seems like nothing, but users have adapted. Messages that get the highest response rate are now only 40-60 characters long.

Then Rudder examined how much putting time and effort into messages leads to better results. He looked at messages between 150 and 300 characters and plotted them against the time it took to write them. The outcome? Taking time to craft your messages helps, but only to a point. A peak is reached at around the 120-second mark, and after that you're just overthinking it.

There are also those out there who maximize their time by – sigh – cutting and pasting. And there are a lot of them. All told, 20% of the sample registered 5 or fewer keystrokes per message. “Sitewide,” writes Rudder, “the copy-and-paste strategy underperforms from-scratch messaging by about 25 percent, but in terms of effort-in to results-out it always wins: measuring by replies received per unit effort, it’s many times more efficient to just send everyone roughly the same thing than to compose a new message each time.”

So there you have it. Like it or not, cut/paste is here to stay. It may be a little less effective, but it's far more efficient. Those who choose the CRTL + V strategy are actually just harnessing technology and hacking the online dating process – and doing so is probably making them far more successful than you, person who spends an hour personalizing every message.

RIP faith in humanity, hello more time to spend watching cat videos on YouTube.

Normally the type of scares we talk about come October are the ones that involve zombies and werewolves and candy-craving kids hopped up on too much sugar, but around here we're more concerned with a different kind of fright.

Over the last 8 years, I've spent a lot of time reading, writing, and occasionally even following online dating advice. And whew...there is some scary, scary stuff out there. Plenty of people get it right, but let's be honest – plenty more get it wrong, so wrong it's almost scary how bad it is.

I spend most of my time on the good advice, but Halloween puts me in the mood for being horrified so today we're taking a detour to Terrortown. All of the advice you're about to read? Don't follow it, unless you want to be an urban legend singles tell to scare each other off online dating.

Online dating is...well, let's just say it's not the easiest thing you'll ever do. It falls somewhere between “Waiting in line at the DMV” and “Your friend vomiting on you while you hold her hair after a night of too many tequila shots” on the frustration scale.

And yet, we can't keep ourselves away. There's something undeniably alluring about clicking profiles and swiping right, so we make the best of it and keep on going.

No doubt you have an online dating horror story of your own – or maybe even enough to fill an entire anthology – but you don't have to stumble from one bad date to another. There are good dates to be had too, and these 7 rules will help you find them.

1. Get Online: This is gonna sound crazy, but you can't meet someone online if you're not online in the first place. I know taking the plunge is scary, but it's less scary than not taking the plunge. Stop procrastinating and brave that first step.
2. Prioritize: You probably have a laundry list of Wants and Don't Wants, and that list is holding you back. Knowing what you want and need in a relationship is a good thing, but narrowing a person down to a list of qualities is limiting. Is anyone really going to match up with every single thing? Probably not, so prioritize your list and focus only on the top few entries.
3. Understand The Algorithms: Online dating sites seem mysterious at first glance, but their inner workings are hardly sorcery. Algorithms work by analyzing both what you say explicitly and the behavior you exhibit. So if you say you're into tall, dark, and handsome but tend to click on shorter blondes, the algorithm will adjust to present you with matches you'll actually be interested in based on your behavior.
4. Stay Short And Sweet: Shorter profiles tend to fair better than longer profiles. What you want is something brief but informative and intriguing. One sentence won't cut it, but one hundred is too many. The goal is to...
5. Create A Curiosity Gap: All those annoying headlines from BuzzFeed and Upworthy? This is why they're so successful. They create what's called a “curiosity gap” by offering enough information to pique your interest, and nothing more. Describe yourself if a few fascinating words, and leave them wanting more.
6. Be Positive: Use positive language in your online dating profile. Talk about what excites you, what you're passionate about, and the dreams you have for the future. People want to be around others who make them feel good, not those who dwell on the negative.
7. Think Like A Marketer: You are the product you're selling. Who is your audience? And what is most likely to hook them? If you know who you want to attract, you can figure out how to attract them. You'll have the most success when you can target your profile to the partner you want.

A new study by German researchers shows that men who are looking for more casual sex are more willing to spend money for the new iPhone 6 rather than purchase a cheaper Android phone.

According to website Science of Relationships, Christine Hennighausen and Frank Schwab of the University of Wuerzburg asked 350 men and women how likely they would be to buy an Apple iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy Ace. (The Samsung device sells for about 20% of the price of an iPhone.)

The experiment showed that men’s desire to purchase an iPhone depended not only on whether he was in a committed relationship, but whether he was looking for a long-term relationship or just casual one-night stands. As it turns out, men in committed relationships were no more or less likely to purchase an iPhone as compared to an Android. But single men who were looking for long-term relationships were less likely to buy that iPhone compared to single guys who were looking to score.

This phenomenon isn’t new. A few years ago, OkCupid did a study and found that daters with iPhones had almost twice as much sex as Android users. This was broken down further by gender and age, but the research was there – iPhones are definitely a sexual turn-on.

The researchers in the German study asked the participants about their sexual behavior, with questions such as “How many different sexual partners have you had in the past year?” and “With how many different partners have you had sex on one and only one occasion?” Higher numbers indicate a tendency toward flings, or a casual dating strategy.

When the researchers disregarded the men’s mating strategy, they found that uncommitted men were more willing to purchase the cheaper Samsung phone. So just because a man is single you shouldn’t assume he’s just looking to score. Apparently, his willingness to buy that iPhone depends on whether he is marriage material or prefers promiscuity. So the fact that more men seem to be buying Android phones is a good sign for ladies who are looking for long-term relationships.

The researchers found that more women in the study chose to purchase Android phones rather than iPhones, though their decisions weren’t influenced by their dating strategies as were the men’s.

Another interesting finding: single men who did purchase those iPhones tend to have them on display when there are women around them. This is not surprising in light of the findings – and the fact that those men put down a few hundred dollars to be first in line to get their shiny new devices, so they might as well show them off and see what happens.