Online Dating

For many of us, dating and romance missteps come early - incredibly early. The kindergartener who gets teased about his little friend, denies liking her vehemently - and hurts her feelings. The fourth grader who hasn’t thought about love at all, but is scandalized when she gets a note asking if she’ll be a girlfriend. And once we hit puberty, the cringeworthy moments are often and painful.

In fact, they’re probably much more painful than most of what we experience as adults. And yet, even though we’ve all got a story that we’d rather tell with our eyes closed, red from embarrassment, we didn’t give up on dating or love altogether.

However, that is the attitude many show to the concept of online dating. One laughably incompatible “recommended” profile, one bad date, and they’re ready to throw in the towel. It’s not unheard of for men and women to choose to leave a site altogether thanks to one subpar experience - and “subpar” here means something along the lines of “I recognized that match as a person I’ve met and disliked,” not “I was scammed for my family fortune.”

The truth of the matter is, we probably have worse encounters just going about our daily lives. In online dating, you can outright eliminate obviously incompatible people without ever having to contact them; that’s not so easily done in a bar or club. You can get a rough idea of the person you’re meeting before you’ve gone on that first date. When you choose to meet, you know you’re both there to assess your compatibility; you’re not playing some game of psychic chess, as you might on a date with a maybe-more-than-a-friend.

So what makes people so willing to give up on online dating altogether? Is it the fact that they have to really think about their own priorities and motivations? Is it that they have to be practical and proactive, instead of hoping they’ll be swept into a fairy tale? Are they wondering if others are judging them as harshly as they do?

Online dating doesn’t have to be some scary ordeal - in fact, it’s often much gentler than approaching someone “in the wild.” Before you move on to the next site or away from your computer altogether, ask yourself why - and whether it’s really worth giving up on an opportunity to find love.

"They've been calling me clairvoyant and I guess I am because I just get these weird 'flashes,' I call them, or premonitions at the oddest times and in the oddest places."

I know I'm not the only one who reads something like that and thinks "Oh God...no thank you. Not in a million years would I trust someone who speaks like that to find the partner I'm going to spend the rest of my life with."

For the past 21 years, however, Janis Spindel has been proving my prejudice wrong. As a professional matchmaker, she has helped everyone from politicians to business magnates find lasting love. She estimates that her matches have led to about 1,000 marriages, even more relationships, and over $5 million in revenue in last year alone.

Sure, maybe it's clairvoyance that tells her who's likely to hit it off, but I think the explanation she gave to Forbes is more likely: "I am a people person from the get-go," she said. "I can talk to anyone, anywhere, any time and in five minutes I can find out more than you could in dating somebody for six months. It's mind-boggling. I ask the questions, I fire them away, and they just answer them."

Spindel turned her natural talents into a professional pursuit after the fourteenth couple she'd introduced called to tell her they were getting married. She began with a 51-gues networking party at Ovo Café in New York City in 1993. 34 people connected in the party, and her business has been successful ever since.

Today her company has 17 employees and a yearlong contract with her (which is good for 12 introductions) runs NYC-based clients $50,000 upfront plus another $50,000 on the backend if they are successfully matched and stay with that person for a year. If you're out of state, the $50,000 on the backend stays the same but the upfront cost doubles to $100,000. And if you'd like Spindel and her staff to travel to you, you're look at a $250,000 fee and another quarter million on the backend if your match is found.

There are other options for those who have less disposable income, but nothing that comes close to "economic." Love is big business, and clients are expected to pay up for Spindel's unique expertise.

Janis Spindel explains her 3 date rule:

Most recently, Spindel has expanded her services to include a gay division and online dating. Her company has started its own free dating site, 2LoveToday, that uses her staff to make matches for customers who want to pay a premium fee. Her next move is to build a presence in India and begin her expansion into Asia. Clairvoyant or not, the woman certainly seems unstoppable.

eHarmony is having a free communication weekend right now. It started the day before Halloween and ends Sunday November 3rd just before midnight (PST).

These free communication weekends are the perfect time for someone who hasn't tried eHarmony to give the service a try. You can not only create your profile and answer the in-depth questionnaire for free but you will also receive your matches and be able to communicate with them at no cost, and with no credit card required. Free communication includes the guided communication process and email. The guided communication process is designed to allow matches to easily break the ice and introduce conversation starters. This is achieved by each match asking and answering a few questions so the person you are communicating with has a better understanding of you as a person. As always free communication events do not include photos, the secure call phone service, and skip to email.

The last free eHarmony communication weekend was at the end of September (see Story). For more on this dating site you can read our review of eHarmony.

If you’re on the fence about trying out online dating, here’s something you might not have considered: try finding a support system. And by “support system,” I mean someone who’s had success with online dating; someone who’s enthusiastic about it - a cheerleader, if you will.

The beginning stages of online dating are highly solitary and introspective; you’re writing a profile about yourself. You’re looking at profiles, but you’re not really interacting with anyone in real time. There’s plenty of time to get lost in your own thoughts and anxieties, over-analyze any response, and talk yourself out of messaging anyone in the first place.

Additionally, you might have a friend or family member who constantly gives you negative feedback - sending you links to urban legends and horror stories about online dating, or who dourly proclaims that they’d never involve a cold computer in their love life. Not exactly a positive environment.

The best way to combat outside negativity is to find an outside positive source. Maybe you have a friend who’d like to giggle their way through the construction of your profile. Maybe you’ve found a forum where a pro can advise you that just because you haven’t heard back from a potential match doesn’t mean you’re doomed in love. Online dating, like many other endeavors, has a bit of a learning curve and gets considerably less stressful as time goes on. Why not utilize the support and expertise of those who want to see you succeed?

Of course, it is always important to remember that you’re a unique individual, and what works for one person doesn’t always work for another; no one’s word is gospel. But in general, surrounding yourself, either online or in real life, with people who are positive and excited about online dating can make the entire endeavor considerably less nerve-wracking. Are you surrounded with naysayers or cheerleaders?

How About We may be the first online dating site that offers a service especially for couples. Their latest venture, How About We For Couples, aims to plan, book, and arrange dates for people who are looking to spice up their relationships. They launched in New York and San Francisco and are planning other cities in the near future. So far, they have 130,000 couples signed up.

The founders noticed a trend among couples of relying on Netflix and take-out meals for entertainment, losing the magic that comes with the headiness and excitement of a new relationship. So instead of sitting on the couch, How About We for Couples provides ideas to get you both inspired and to cultivate relationships instead of letting them go stale.

How About We have been innovators from the beginning. When its founders Brian Schechter and Aaron Schildkrout first started researching the online dating industry, they noticed a fundamental problem: online dating sites don't push people to meet offline and build relationships from there. In fact, the industry's success depends on members sitting in front of their laptops scrolling through endless profiles rather than forming real life relationships.

With this in mind, the founders created an innovative new way to date online - by taking it offline quickly. Members post and view first date ideas, rather than scrolling through dating profiles. An example might be, "How about we...go for a picnic in the park, followed by live music at North Bar?" If someone found that idea enticing, they'd connect with each other and set something up. The focus is not on the dating profiles, but on the real-life meeting.

The problem? It became too successful. Many users of How About We started to couple up, and the company started to lose members. But instead of messing with its success, the founders extended the basic premise of great date ideas to those who are already in relationships.

The How About We editorial team comes up with the date plan, which centers on fun new places to go and creating opportunities for the couples to really connect. If you want to upgrade, you can purchase their concierge service to have How About We plan your date down to the smallest detail, like delivering flowers or hiring car service for the night.

"We're curating the dates for our couple members. The concept is still the same, but we've become the experts," Schildkrout told news magazine Business Insider. "This really filled out the whole vision of the company, which isn't only about helping people fall in love, but also about helping people stay in love."

There’s a common trend in online dating profiles - or, more specifically, in their pictures. It’s not unusual to see someone try to sneak in one (or several) old photos - even if those photos aren’t necessarily more flattering.

In fact, you don’t even have to have an online dating profile to see this in action. Just show someone an old (but still post-adolescent) photo of themselves. “Wow,” you might hear. “I looked so young! And cute!”

“I worried about my weight so much at that age,” one might say with a sigh. “And look: I was just fine. I should have enjoyed myself then - if only I weighed that much now!”

Once I was helping a friend compile photos for his online dating profile, and he tried to include a few that were at least three years old. He actually objectively looked much better in the present: he was dressing in more flattering clothes, he was more confident, and his haircut in the old photos seemed dated.

“I feel like I should include these photos to show what I looked like at my best,” he explained. “I mean, I was in the prime of life back then!”

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we automatically assume our older photos are more attractive?

Well, perhaps we fall a bit into a trap perpetuated by the media and society: that younger is better. Unless we’ve undergone a radical transformation for the better, we tend to assume that our younger selves are automatically more attractive, and that we look worse the older we get. Women tend to fall prey to this more than men - many men consider themselves “baby-faced” prior to a certain point, whereas many women might consider that same phase the height of their attractiveness. While it may hold true in Hollywood, that’s not necessarily the case in love.

However, the real factor may be more internal than external. It may simply be that we are less judgmental of our “former selves.” In the present, it’s easy to nit-pick every blemish, every bump, every flaw. We’re also used to seeing our current selves in a mirror image, and seeing ourselves in a photograph - not mirrored - can feel unpleasant and wrong. Once we get some distance, however, we can see ourselves more objectively - and, in many cases, more kindly.

So as you go to choose your default pictures, ask yourself why you prefer the ones you do. Are these photos that really show you in your best light - photos that friends and family would agree reveal the real you? Or are they shadows from a past remote enough that you can actually see yourself clearly?