Dating

Most of us know Gandhi’s famous quote: “Be the change you want to see in the world” – but how many of us practice these words of wisdom, especially when it comes to dating? More often than not, instead of seeing what we can change in ourselves, we are looking at our dates – judging and criticizing and wanting them to change.

Let’s face it – dating is rough. It requires patience, persistence, and a positive outlook. Again and again. And while you might feel more patient than Mother Theresa, it’s the part about persistence and keeping a positive attitude that’s hard to maintain. When we complain about how we’re not meeting any “good” men or women, or that people behave badly, or that online dating doesn’t result in a long-term relationship because it’s all about hooking up, we are perpetuating the stereotypes.

Dating doesn’t have to be fraught with bad behavior. It doesn’t have to be so hard. We just need to shift perspective a bit. You can’t control other people, but you can control yourself – your attitude, your outlook, your emotional reactions.

That said, you can start by looking at your own habits and where you can change. While you might think you’re the perfect date, chances are there’s room for improvement. If you’re not enjoying yourself, then why not see where you can change? Following are some small shifts to make to help change your perspective on dating from negative to positive:

• Be courteous to all your dates. Emma Watson was recently interviewed about her dating habits, and she thinks men and women should hold doors open for each other and both sexes should offer to pick up the tab. If we all are treating each other with respect and kindness, it makes the experience of dating a little better for everyone.
• Really listen. There’s nothing worse than trying to have a conversation while competing with someone’s phone. Social media and work emails can wait. Leave the phone off the table for an hour. Pay more attention to details. See what you can learn from the person sitting across from you, instead of obsessing over what else might be going on that you’re missing.
• Be curious. Everyone has a story. Even if you don’t see a romantic future in front of you after the first five minutes of meeting, ask questions and engage. People can be fascinating and multi-layered. What you see on the first date is only the tip of the iceberg. You never truly get to know someone if you don’t maintain a sense of wonder and curiosity about getting to know them.
• Cultivate your own sense of self. Being single is a magical time – you have the freedom to pursue whatever you want - to pursue your passions no matter how impractical, like learning Italian or kite surfing. Work towards a career goal. Travel. The more experiences you have, the more you get to know yourself, and the more you have to share with a future partner. This time is all about you – so enjoy it while you can!

Think you’ll have a better chance of meeting a new love through friends rather than Tinder? According to a recent survey by website Mic, you’re probably right.

Mic, a news website catering specifically to Millennials, decided to get to the bottom of dating apps and online dating to figure out how people in relationships are actually meeting. As it turns out, for all the buzz of Tinder – (and good news for the online-dating averse) – more couples have met through friends, work and in real-life social situations as opposed to over the Internet.

Mic surveyed more than 2,300 people between 18 and 34 years old, and it turns out, the vast majority of them – almost 39% - met their SOs through mutual friends, despite being part of the Tinder/ dating app generation. The next largest group – 22% of respondents - met through real-life social situations, such as at parties or bars. Eighteen percent met at work. When it comes to online dating, less than 10% of respondents met this way, and less than six percent met through social media. (Although to be fair to social media, this is quite extraordinary, considering it hasn’t been around nearly as long as online dating has.)

The latest Pew study reveals that online dating is gaining acceptance among the masses - 59% of Americans now believe that this is a good way to meet someone. But apparently, the majority of folks still aren’t meeting their next relationships that way.

There is a reason most people still prefer to meet through friends. Having the endorsement of someone you like and trust goes a long way, especially in the dating market where bad behavior is part of the experience. It’s like a little insurance policy against meeting someone – a total stranger - who might end up being hurtful or even dangerous.

This is evident in the dating app world, where meeting strangers online is commonplace. However, the fact that most apps have some type of verification through social media – for instance, requiring users to have a legitimate Facebook profile before being able to use the app – shows that there is a desire for validation before agreeing to a date. Some apps have taken this process a step further, connecting people online only through mutual social media friends (as with Hinge), or being an invitation-only app, such as with The League.

So what does this mean for the next generation of online daters? Dating apps and online dating are definitely here to stay – but it looks like the technology will keep gravitating towards mutual connections, either through social media or in real life.

Singles in the US are feeling totally emojional.

The days of the regular ol' smiley face are long gone. America has upped its emoticon game and we're officially living in the Age of Emoji.

Match.com is back with another installment of its annual Singles in America study. This year, they surveyed a nationally representative sample of over 5,600 US. singles aged 18 to 70+ years and one of 2015's hot topics was emoji use.

“If you had asked me a year ago what I thought of emoticons and emojis, I would have said they are fun and entertaining, but I probably wouldn’t have thought they could help our understanding of human behavior,” writes Dr. Justin R. Garcia. “But as more and more people of varying ages in my own social networks – family, friends, colleagues, dates – use emoticons and emojis...I’ve come to appreciate them as something more than funny little characters.”

To the uninitiated, emojis are practically another language. Even to the initiated, there's bound to be a character or two that's just puzzling. And to a growing number of behavioral scientists, emojis actually are a new form of nonverbal communication to be studied. “In an age of rapid mobile interaction,” Dr. Garcia writes, emojis are a 21^st century system of emotional expression and interpersonal engagement “that can help us understand human affect.”

When asked why they use emojis, US singles offered three top reasons:

• PERSONALITY: They give my text messages more personality (49% men, 53% women)
• EMOTION: It’s easier for me to express my feelings (37% men, 36% women)
• CONVENIENCE: It’s faster and easier than writing a full message (21% men, 18% women)

When asked which emojis singles favor for flirting, the following were the top three responses:

• Winky face (53% of singles)
• Smiley face (38% of singles)
• Kissy face (27% of singles)

Emoji users shared several traits. 62% want to be married (compared to only 30% of non-emoji users) and are more likely to place a high value on finding a partner who is a good communicator. Emoji users are also much more likely to be actively dating and to have sex.

But don't take things too far. While 40% of singles use emoticons and emojis regularly, nearly 75% agree that you should limit your use to 1-3 per conversation. Any more than that, and you may text yourself straight out of a date.

For more on the service which conducted this study you can read our Match.com review.

Just when you think you've got this dating thing figured out, you enter a new stage of life and everything gets flipped on its head.

Life in your early 20s was very different from life in your late 20s. Both still have some sense of freedom and finding yourself, but things change as you approach 30. You're more comfortable with who you are and have a better idea of where you're going. You're older (duh) but also wiser, and that means a shift in who and how you date.

Dating in your late 20s/early 30s is a different game with a whole new set of rules. Like:

Expand your reach. When you were younger, you probably looked for dates in the same few places. College parties. Your classes. Local bars. But now that you're older, you have starting looking elsewhere – including places you never thought you'd look. Put yourself out there in ways you never thought you would, whether that means taking a tango class or joining an online dating site.

Be direct with your dates. If casual dating is your thing, keep with it. But if you're in the market for something more serious, you have to put in the work to find it. The sooner you can separate the good ones from the horror stories you'll tell your friends later, the better. You have to be upfront with your dates. Don't think of it as “coming on too strong” - you're being honest about what you want (and what your dates want) so you know right away if you're not compatible and no one's time is wasted.

Stand firm with friends and family. This is usually the age when friends and family start peppering you with questions. So...are you seeing anyone? Do you plan to settle down? Don't you want children? Why are you still single? They mean well, but it will probably make you want to throw things at them. There's probably nothing you can do to stop the questions – even if you know you aren't ready for those steps or know that you never want them – but you can be prepared. Come armed with answers you've worked out ahead of time when you know those questions are likely on the way.

Don't compare yourself with others. Whether or not you get those questions, insecurities have a way of creeping up. Your life changes dramatically in your late 20s and early 30s, and so do the lives of everyone around you. Just look at your Facebook feed – engagement photos, wedding photos, baby photos. Wash, rinse, repeat. If you're there and your friends are still getting wasted on Friday nights, that's ok. If you're not there and everyone else seems to be getting hitched and buying houses, that's ok too. Trust that you are in the right place at the right time for your life.

There’s been an uproar lately with the launch of dating app Tinder’s new premium service, Tinder Plus. The problem? The company is charging users in their twenties $9.99 in the U.S., compared to those 30 and older, who will have to pay $19.99 (and even more in the U.K.).

This has notably sparked some outrage from product reviewers and bloggers, who note the enduring problem of age discrimination when it comes to online dating – especially towards women. According to studies released by sites like OkCupid, young women are more sought-after by men, no matter how old the guy is. According to dating site Plenty of Fish, the ideal age of a single woman is 25 for most of their male daters. And according to OkCupid, that number skews even younger – with the ideal age being 21 or 22, even if the men wanting to date them are in their forties. Once female online daters hit the magic age of 30, they are blocked out from opportunities – some reports pointing to as much as an 80% decrease in messages and matches - as the majority of men prefer to meet women in their twenties.

This isn’t new. And it does explain why many people post old photos and lie about their ages (much to the frustration of the online daters who meet them). So what will these daters 30 and above do with Tinder – will they opt in and pay for Tinder Plus, or will we see more of a dating revolt?

According to Tinder, the company’s move to differentiate pricing based on age really comes down to economics. The company has tested pricing, and discovered that older singles are willing to pay more because they have more income. (The company likens it to services like Spotify which offer discounted rates to “students.”)

The problem with this “economic” view, as some reviewers have pointed out, is that older online daters already have a shrunken dating pool to choose from. (And online dating is a bit different than streaming music – with streaming, you have access to everything offered in exchange for your payment; with online dating, you only have access to those who haven’t filtered you out of their searches, which means fewer options for more money.)

As the Washington Post says: “The [age] problem is so urgent, and so severe, that several sites have spoken out against ageism in online dating in recent years. In 2010, OkCupid’s Christian Rudder wrote an entire blog post dedicated to convincing men that the 30-somethings on his site were just as cool and attractive as recent college grads. On JDate — a paid dating site for Jewish singles — the site’s official relationship blogger, Tamar Caspi, went on a full-blown rant over age.”

The latest move by Tinder might affect its user base, but the problem of ageism in dating still remains. If people are looking to meet someone special, then letting go of superficial restrictions like age only helps open the dating pool – and don’t we all want more choices?

If you’re a woman looking for a date, you might have better luck on dating apps than the guys. According to a new report from GlobalWebIndex, there are nearly 91 million people around the world using dating apps, but two-thirds of these users are men. The market skews younger, too – 70% of users are between 16 and 34.

While dating apps are certainly hot right now, they are only making a dent in terms of overall popularity in the online market. The report also states that 6% of Internet users use a location-based dating app, which puts the category behind niches like augmented reality (108 million monthly users), as well as games and social networking with 655 million and 582 million respectively.

Tinder might be the most popular dating app among Westerners with $1 billion valuation this year according to the report, but Chinese dating app Momo seems to be doing three times better with a $3 billion valuation as of 2015. Momo claims that they have 60 million active monthly users compared to Tinder, who projects 40 million users by April of this year. Of those 60 million Momo users, 25 million are in China, but the rest are across the globe in places like the United Arab Emirates, Phillippines, Thailand and India.

But what about the valuations? Considering most of these apps are free to download and use, how is it that they can be worth so much?

The report notes this discrepancy, too. Despite the large pool of dating app users, only one fifth of users have opted to pay for premium services. This research comes as Tinder is rolling out its new paid premium service, Tinder Plus. The initial roll-out of Tinder Plus in the U.K. was not received well, and in fact caused people with the free version of the app to downgrade its overall score in the app market to 1.5 stars. (In rolling out the new features, Tinder had also curbed some of the existing features of its free app – including limiting the number of matches a user could get per day.) Momo has only signed up two million for its paid service.

While other competitors aim to find their place in the market – offering more features, options and quality to the large and growing pool of dating app users - it seems that making money could still be elusive. Most apps draw users in by offering a free product, and then rolling out a paid “premium” service, but the people aren’t really responding. At least not as much as they need to for sustainable growth. The report points out that generating ad-based revenue is still a viable alternative, even if it means in-app advertising to maintain a free service.

We’ll see what the major dating app companies do next.