Frustrated with Internet dating? Maybe it’s you…
Whether or not you have been using an Internet dating site to find love, a better question than “Why try Internet dating?” is “Why not?”
Yes, online daters experience myriad frustrations. Here are a few that I hear regularly from my clients:
It takes so much time.
I hate all that emailing.
I feel so exposed.
What if my friends/relatives/clients see me on a dating site?
Love should happen naturally, without this kind of effort.
The only people who contact me are jerks/fat/crazy/boring/out for my money/interested only in sex/not interested in sex/ugly/loaded with baggage/scary/liars.
I can’t write about myself.
I don’t have any good pictures.
Any of these sound familiar? Of course, there is some truth in each statement; otherwise, the complaints would not sound so believable. But none of these excuses are good enough reasons not to use the best tool that has come around to help older singles find love – singles over 30, I mean.
The Internet and dating sites are merely tools, good, sophisticated tools, but just tools, nonetheless. You the user have to learn to manipulate the tools to do what you want. If you are not using the tool properly, or haven’t learned how, it’s no surprise that you don’t get the results that you want.
Think of Internet dating sites like specialized telephone directories. Just as everyone with a land-line telephone gets a listing in the local telephone directory, any single with access to a computer and the Internet can sign up to be listed on an Internet dating site.
We all know how marvelously useful telephone books are. I’ll bet it would be hard to find a household without one. If you have a business, you’d be crazy not to have a phone book listing, because that’s where people go to find a plumber or beauty salon or the closest pizza parlor.
Similarly, Internet dating sites are very, very useful. The biggest advantage is that everyone listed is looking for love. Keep in mind how hard it is to tell if someone is looking if you bump into them in the grocery store. On a dating site, you know. And so does everybody else.
But also, think about how much more information you get about an individual who had listed on a dating site, much, much more information than you would get in a Yellow Pages ad. We never think twice about using the Yellow Pages to find a plumber, let’s say. We may ask a friend for recommendations, but we don’t blame the telephone or the directory if the plumber turns out to be a jerk. Nor do we never hire a plumber again. We use our judgment. We simply don’t use that plumber, and we go back to the phone book for another one.
We don’t throw out the phone book or the phone simply because we dialed a wrong number either.
The phone book is full of people who lie, cheat, and you wouldn’t want to marry. But the phone book also contains nice people, great folks, even, and we all know that. We know how to use the phone book as a tool to contact those folks, and we never even notice the listings we wouldn’t be interested in. We skip right over what we don’t want.
Don’t throw out the Internet equivalent of a phone book for singles, simply because you haven’t figured out how to use it to your advantage. Yes, Internet dating sites are much more sophisticated than a telephone directory, and therefore harder to learn how to use effectively, but the principal is the same. Dating sites list hundreds of thousands of singles, 99.9% of whom you will not be interested in. Same with phone books: 99.9% of the listings in the phone book you will never call and never want to. But that .01% you would be VERY interested in, and the phone book/ dating site allows you to find them.
The anger, disgust, disappointment that you may feel about looking for love online is not the fault of the dating site, that is, if you have picked a good, reputable one. Your frustration most probably is that you have not learned how to use the Internet and dating sites to get what you want. Or perhaps, what you want doesn’t exist, so you need to readjust what you are looking for. But the point is, the solution lies in you – and part of that solution may be getting help to learn what you don’t know about making online dating work for you. This is where hiring a coach can really pay off handsomely – just try me.
Online dating could really help a lot. You can know him/her before you could see each other.
Posted by Jamie Padgett on 06/18 at 07:08 PM