I met my current girlfriend through an internet dating site.
I’m in a mostly male graduate program that keeps me too busy to participate in many activities where I could meet people. When I first got to graduate school, I started doing a few activities on the side (volunteering, etc.) which I hoped would help me meet some new women, but after failing to find any who were compatible with me in these activities, I realized I just didn’t have time to keep quitting and joining groups until I found someone I could date. So I decided to try a dating site. (I chose Match.com – I knew they advertise on T.V., so I figured a lot of people would have heard of them. In other words, they’d have a broader selection of prospective dates than some less well-known sites.)
I made a profile, uploaded some photos of myself, and then started searching the profiles and e-mailing people I thought I’d like to date. I’ve got to tell you, for the first few months I got no responses at all. I think this was in part due to my profile and in part due to my e-mail style (and in part due to bad luck). It’s hard to get a sense of how much information you need to reveal about yourself in the profile to make yourself interesting, without writing too much and overwhelming people. With e-mail, I found it very hard to tell whether I was coming on too strong, or not showing enough interest. In an ordinary conversation you can pick up cues from someone that show whether you need to tone it down or turn it up – but in e-mail you can’t see their reactions. But I read the suggestions that match.com would post periodically about how to improve your profile and how to write that initial e-mail, and I kept adjusting my technique. Eventually, I must have hit on the magic formula (or else my luck just shifted), because I suddenly started getting lots of responses. At one point I had three different people contact me in the span of two days – and they all made first contact with me before I had e-mailed them, showing that they were really interested. I started e-mailing back and forth with several people, and eventually started seeing one in real life. I’ve now been dating her for several months.
One caveat: The big downside of Internet dating is, as is often true with the Internet, people don’t always behave as courteously as they would in real life. If you e-mail someone and they feel you’re “not their type”, they probably won’t even bother to reply with a simple “No thanks.” (I always did reply, because I’m not a jerk.) Even once you’ve started e-mailing back and forth with someone, they may just quit replying if they lose interest or they meet someone better. I’m one who would much rather be rejected than ignored (at least if someone tells you they’re not interested you aren’t left waiting around wondering why they haven’t replied), so at first I found this behavior kind of irritating. But after a while, I learned to ignore it – anyone that lacking in courtesy probably wasn’t my type anyway.
If that’s the downside of Internet dating, there’s also one big plus: you get way more information early on than you would through conventional dating. This means that you can avoid dates with people whom you would eventually discover had something you consider a major dealbreaker. For example, I definitely want to have kids someday, so I’d prefer to date people who are at least open to the idea of eventually having children. If I were to ask someone on a first date whether they planned to ever have kids, I’d seem to be getting way ahead of myself. Thanks to the info in these profiles, I could know the answer without having to ask. I could also see the list of qualities that they wanted in a date. So if someone only wants to date Catholics (which I am not), I would know right away that they probably wouldn’t be interested in me, and could spare myself the trouble of contacting them. Seeing what qualities someone wants in a date can also be revealing of their personality. For instance, I have a female friend who has also tried online dating, and she told me she is open to dating older men, but not those whose profiles indicate that they only date younger women.
To sum up: I’d say that if you don’t feel like you’re meeting enough potential dates through conventional means, then online dating can be a good way to supplement your social life. However, it helps to go into it with reasonable expectations.
