You can take your search much further than you normally could offline. And if know yourself, what you want, and what to look for, you can get great results. This is the stuff advertisements are made of. But with these advantages usually come certain challenges that you’ll need to work through....

By the way, if you don’t know yourself well and what it is you want, that’s fine. Have fun with it and learn. Just don’t expect to meet your match right away. You can use the internet to help you discover these things.

What you can’t do is use internet dating to smooth out all of your rough spots and work some kind of magic for you. This will not be fruitful. Because sooner or later, it all comes down to the weakest link.

As an example, some people who live in areas of low population will get online expecting this to fix that problem for them. They end up blaming the service when they don’t find a lot people from their area online. They were hoping for something that the online world can’t necessarily help them with.

So it may not provide the automatic solution you were hoping for. The question is, what does it allow you to do that you couldn’t easily do before? How can this make up for the original problem? It’s a negotiation. Sometimes you have to give a little before you can take, or in this case, before you can benefit from this new situation called internet dating.

You have to ask yourself, how important is this? In this example, would it be important enough to drive a little further or arrange to meet halfway? Because this is an option that wasn’t easily available before. If not, then there must be other things that are more important. What are they?

Others become cynical and quit when their dates don’t represent themselves accurately or honestly online. It can happen to anyone. It will probably happen to you. But it seems to happen a lot more to some people. There are probably two things going on there. One is akin to the inadvertant but habitual seeking out of abusive relationships. Here, the person is presented with signs of problems to come, but consitently overlooks them. Often the people around them can see something that they can’t.

Or it could be just a simple matter of learning from your mistakes. You don’t get to use your intuition the same way as you would in real life, so you have to develop methods that will make up for this. What I don’t hear about in these cases is any attempt to prevent this by changing the way they do things. This usually explains why they’re getting the same results.

It presents a challenge, but again, how could you turn this around by using the new abilities that internet dating gives you? One way is to be more direct with people in the future. This is easier for most people to do online, and as a result more common.

So learn how to take full advantage of this benefit. It may take some time. But it’s hard to give internet dating a fair chance until you do. What could you learn if you could ask people the kinds of questions that can take weeks, months, even years to get answered otherwise? Remember I said that internet dating can be the fastest way to sort through people?

Here’s the most common challenge of all… getting a decent response to your profile or emails. Profiles in general is a subject that’s too big to get into here, so let me restrict this to email. The vast majority of this involves men. There are approximately 4 times as many men doing this than women. Add that to the fact that men initiate far more than women and you can start to see where response might be a problem.

There are many upsides that can compensate for this. A common one is that men can spare themselves the indimidation factor in approaching women. And if they play their cards right, internet dating can be a real confidence builder. Chatting with women online is a skill that’s not just useful for getting dates online. It carries over to offline situations as well. But I digress…

To this problem, the basic answer is the same. That is, you have to change what you’re doing to get different results. But that’s a little to vague in this case. The problem is that women continue to see the same kinds of emails coming a lot of different men. For the more attractive ones, it’s out of control.

Under these conditions, you have to do something fundamentally different in your approach to stand out… and standing out is the only way to get fair consideration. Just refining your current approach isn’t going to be enough if your current approach isn’t working.

Take a lesson from nature - evolution had the same idea when it gave male peacocks their colorful tails. What you do differently depends partly on you, because it’s mostly just a matter of you being secure in your uniqueness.

But until you are, and until you’ve developed your unique style around that, there are some things that you have to understand. Things that most guys who aren’t naturals don’t know. Once you do, your results will improve dramatically, reinforcing your authentic character instead of calling it into question.

That’s as much detail as I can go into in this article, but I’ll leave you with this… If you want to make internet dating work for you, learn about what you have available to you, use it, experiment with it, get creative, and try new things.

At the same time, you have to be aware of what’s going on in your head. In other words, what are you telling yourself? Become aware of thought patterns that are working against you. If you catch them, stop them immediately and replace them with ones that serve you better.

It’s not so much what’s online or what’s offline that will determine your results. It’s what’s in your head.
By
Laurence Baker