When it comes to committing to a relationship, men can take a lifetime deciding whether they are really ready for the relationship or not. It can be quite a frustrating moment for women. The biggest problem that women face with men is that they never seem to grow up. When will he begin to understand and accept love with all its responsibilities, complexities, and rewards? Why is it that the prospect of being committed and settling down seems so cumbersome and scary to men? The important question is - can a woman break through a man's supposedly secret barriers and make him commit to a relationship? It is definitely possible and the following steps will show how easily you can make a man to commit to the relationship.

When is he going to grow up?

Men perennially have their growing up issues. The fear that men experience rises from the belief that if they take too many hurried steps towards adulthood then they might lose themselves or their identity or individuality. It is a fear that most men are born with. A man will always weigh the potential consequences of growing up and definitely ponder upon what it will actually cost him. Will the relationship strangle him? Will it take away his freedom? Will he be able to watch baseball games in the middle of the night? These are just reflections of the fear that has the ability to consume him and thus he will always be scared of committing to the relationship. So how can you make him commit?

You need to start from the basics. Here are the two most important secrets that most women never know about how they can easily make a man commit.

Secret#1: You need to identify what your man responds to. This is the easiest way to get into his world. For example - if your man loves trekking all alone, get indulged. That is not just his hobby but his own space and soft spot. Tell him about these new places that he can go off for a trek. Get indulged in his trekking as if you were trekking with him without being over-burdening. The more interest you take in his trekking, the more easily he will open up and accept the responsibilities of the relationship.

Secret#2: Men are born with the ego that will put Kull the Conqueror to shame. Massage their ego! You need to make a man feel as if he has conquered something. You won't believe this but a task as menial as pushing an elevator button or opening the door of a restaurant is quite important for a man. For example, something as menial as parking the car, you have two options - you can argue that your man has not parked in the right place or you can let him park where he wants. If you go with the first then you have already lost him but if you go with the second then you can be rest assured that he will accommodate all your desires just the way you accommodated his desire to feel conquered.

The bottom line is that you should never try to convince a man for commitment just glide with him through his world and he will automatically become committed to the relationship!

The dating service Coffee Meets Bagel was built on three simple principles:

1. Your friends are the best conduits for your dates.
2. Meeting quality people doesn't have to be complicated or awkward.
3. Unless you choose to share it, your dating life should be private.

Instead of offering the overwhelming number of potential matches that most dating services do, Coffee Meets Bagel sets itself apart by highlighting only one person each day. You can either "like" or "ignore" the profile, and if both parties indicate interest in each other, they're directed to a private phone line (courtesy of Twilio) where they can text message for a seven-day period. If all goes well and they choose to meet up in person, CMB offers a discount at a local restaurant or café.

The idea is a solid one, but Coffee Meets Bagel has not yet managed to achieve the mass appeal of its biggest competitor in the mobile dating sphere: Tinder. Still, CMB has received $2.8 million in funding and recently launched its largest app update yet.

The big news in CMB-land is a new IM system within the Coffee Meets Bagel app. Like before, the IM feature has a seven-day expiration date, but now users can chat immediately without having to switch back and forth between apps.

Instant messaging is hardly a revelation in the world of online dating – in fact, it's downright standard – but CMB has found a somewhat unique approach to implementing it. With in-app messaging, Coffee Meets Bagel now has far more control over its users’ experiences, and many more opportunities to learn about their users by studying behavior data.

CMB is a “quality over quantity” dating experience. The focus is on making meaningful connections between users, not on connecting as many users as possible. On top of that, users are never introduced to random strangers, but rather to Facebook friends of friends. The company has found that members who exchange text messages within the first 24 hours are more likely to exchange their real phone numbers later on. They also, on average, chat at 2.6x the volume of those who didn't swap texts within the first day.

That unique approach to mobile dating, plus the new IM system, may be what Coffee Meets Bagel needs to take things to the next level. But founder Dawoon Kang says that stigma is still the greatest challenge faced by dating services:

“What we observe is that a lot of people hesitate because they don’t want to feel like they are ‘actively’ trying to meet someone. Making people understand that a dating app is just another channel of meeting someone has been a challenge.”

Most women will agree that they prefer equal partnership when it comes to romantic relationships. This mean they each have equal say and an equal role to play in things like finances, child care, household chores, and major decisions like where to live or whether to start a business.

It makes sense in our culture, as the majority of women are pursuing both careers and families. They want a partner who respects and supports their ambitions.

But what if the reality is different from our post-feminist ideal of equality in relationships?

New research by New York University doctoral candidate in sociology Ellen Lamont is challenging the way many women still seem to accept certain elements of “the man’s role” both in terms of dating and marriage.

Maybe some of this rings true for you: Lamont found that when dating, women seem to prefer the man to ask them out and to pay for the date, a more traditional role. Also, women like to leave it to the man to make decisions about the trajectory of their relationship. That is, they wait for him to say “I love you” or to commit to being serious first. Essentially, this puts the man in control of the relationship.

It seems dating and courtship play a big role in how women view long-term relationships. If during the dating process, women put the man in the driver’s seat (so to speak) and let him decide where things are headed, then how is it possible to easily transition to an equal partnership once they are in a long-term, committed relationship?

“[Women] want traditional courtship and egalitarian marriages and I just don’t think that will be possible,” she said. “Their justifications for traditional courtship are based on beliefs in essential biological differences between men and women and they reinforce these beliefs in their dating practices.”

Lamont chose to study women who had some form of college education to better understand women who are balancing both career aspirations and wanting a love relationship. Even with education and ambition, many of the women still subscribe to “traditional gender norms,” according to Lamont.

“Women were supposedly so desperate to get married, while men were supposedly so reluctant,” Lamont said. “I wondered if women’s so-called desperate behaviors that are so frequently highlighted in the media were actually the result of the powerlessness they feel about the process of getting engaged.”

It’s an interesting point, and maybe one worth considering as we move forward into a bigger and more technologically advanced dating pool.

The women surveyed ranged from 25 to 40 years of age.

If you’ve tried out Tinder (or any dating service, for that matter) you’ve probably run across your fair share of bizarre conversations. It's a strange world out there. Sometimes the weirdness borders on amusing, but all too often it's annoying or downright creepy.

Thankfully, the Internet makes it easy to disengage from the creeps. It takes no effort whatsoever to ignore a message and hardly anything extra to block or report a user. But where's the fun in that? Why take the high road when you could take the low road, where all the fun is?

Anna Gensler, a 23-year-old artist, has a much more interesting way of dealing with the deadbeats of online dating. She began drawing nude portraits of the creeps who contacted her via Tinder, and posting the results to Instagram (NSFW, of course) alongside their offensive messages. And then, for the cherry on top, she sends the finished product back to the culprit for a final review.

Slate spoke with Gensler about her unique approach to turning harassment into art. “I feel like this gets me in trouble a lot,” she said of her inspiration for the project, “but when someone does something I think is rude, I always want to give them a taste of their own medicine. I’m an artist, and I try to use art as my weapon, even though that sounds so lame. So I thought, ‘What is something I can do to make me feel the way that they’re making me feel?’”

She settled on drawing them “sad-naked,” the most immature thing she could think of, because “their pickup lines are the most juvenile, basic things, but also still oddly offensive.” Each of her portraits is based on the guys' profile pictures, but modified to be as unflattering as possible. The subjects are all made chubbier, scrawnier, or just not particularly well-endowed.

Not satisfied with taking on the creeps of Tinder, Gensler joined OkCupid in hopes of finding new subjects worthy of her artistic intentions. She even put a blatant warning on her profile – “I’m going to draw you naked if you send me rude messages” – and a link back to the Instagram. Whether or not it deterred potential creeps is unknown, but it did intrigue a surprising number of nice guys who found the project funny and requested a portrait of their own.

And what about the guys who receive Gensler’s works of art? “There are a few approaches,” she explained. “Some of them get really angry and say a bunch of mean stuff. Some of them get a little bit offended ‘and say, “Why am I so fat? My facial hair doesn’t really look like that. My nipples are smaller than that!’ They think I didn’t do them justice. Some people just block me. But a couple of guys have actually said smart things after I sent it to them.”

MillionaireMatch.com has just surpassed the 2 million member mark and is celebrating with a new digital billboard in Times Square.

“Join the 1%: Don’t get left behind,” the ad reads. It's a slightly odd choice, given the bad rap of the 1% and the fact that the term was coined due to protests in New York City in the first place, but it also begs the question: how many MillionaireMatch.com users are actually millionaires?

Darren Shuster, North American CEO for the dating service, recently spoke with MarketWatch about the milestone and their membership. Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

On what it means to be a “certified millionaire”…

“You can become a “Diamond Member,” which shows you have $1 million in assets or a large income, a minimum of $200,000 a year. Then you can search for other Diamond Members who’ve had their income verified.”

On online dating’s notorious reputation for being full of fakes…

“MillionaireMatch has as many fakes as most dating sites. Some people are great, some people are phony, some people get a lot out of it and some people quit in a week. You have to know who is exaggerating and who’s not. Some people say they own the car and the house, but they’re leasing the car and they’re renting the house.”

On sexism…

“People say all sorts of things when it comes to love or money. Women are attracted to wealth whether the website exists or not. We’re not exactly reinventing the wheel here. I’m sure there are people who will call it sexist and call it weird, and will say things like, ‘How could you go after them for money?’ If you met someone and they both have a sense of humor and good physical condition, who would you go for? I’d go after the woman with the big bank account. Wouldn’t you?”

On the clientele who make up the MillionaireMatch userbase…

“Some of these people are making $100,000 a year. On paper, they’re a millionaires. But they’re not necessarily bringing in $40,000 a month. Women are smart and intuitive. It’s almost like crowdsourcing to weed out the phonies. They’re probably our best security.”

And finally, the big question: How many members are actually millionaires?

“That I would rather not disclose, if I can help it. Most of the men have a million dollars or more at least in assets, including their house, and have money in savings. We have a fair share of those.”

To find out more about this dating service you can read our review of Millionaire Match.

If you tried to access PlentyOfFish on May 20^th, you may have run into a major roadblock. The site’s 503 page simply said “The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. Check back shortly!" Behind the scenes of the service outage, something a little more sinister was going on.

Around 7am that morning, POF received a warning of an impending DDoS attack. It isn't unusual for large websites to receive similar threats that turn out to be fake, but in this case the threat was real.

The DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack hit just before 8:15am. Such attacks are launched from thousands of computers around the world that have been infected with malware. Without the owner's knowledge, each computer repeatedly sends false requests to a site until it’s overwhelmed. The initial attacks took down the Plenty of Fish website, followed later by the company’s mobile apps on iPhone, iPad and Android.

POF was quick to note that although the attack was large, it did not compromise anyone's data in any way. “That said,” the POF blog noted, “these requests can overload our servers and can even cause ISP problems, so we quickly worked with our ISP to identify the offending traffic and tried various means to block it.”

Later in the day, another message was sent to POF, this time asking for money in exchange for ending the DDoS attack. POF refused to negotiate, and by 1pm they had successfully blocked the attack and returned all services to normal.

“We’re still on high alert and working hard to respond to attacks like this more quickly in the future,” concluded the blog post about the attack, “but in the meantime I’m happy to report that all of you are back to doing what you do best; sending messages, going on dates, and forging meaningful relationships. Thanks for your patience today.”

DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly popular and increasingly powerful, thanks to new methods being used by attackers. The attack on Plenty of Fish was 40 Gigabits in size, making it much larger than the attack that took Meetup.com off-line for nearly 5 days last month (which was “only” 8 GBps). The list of companies that have been attacked in this manner is increasing all the time, including Basecamp, Vimeo, Bit.ly, and Moz.

The good news is, that although DDoS attacks are irritating for users and even more frustrating for the companies who fall victim, they do not put users’ data in danger.