One of the biggest mistakes I see my clients and friends make is that they sign up with an online dating site and they don’t make the time to really take advantage of what the online dating site has to offer! One of my clients, Jane, was getting all these matches in your inbox and let them sit there! She was busy with work and her social life. She actually told me it was overwhelming to get all these matches.
Another client complained she didn’t get any people contacting her. I asked her how many people she had contacted. She told me she didn’t contact anyone, she waited for men to contact her!
So how do you make the most of the service you are paying for? My dating advice to Jane was to break it down into different activities. The first one is research. That meant reviewing the profiles to see who interested her. I asked her how much time can you devote to research a day or per week. She agreed upon a half hour every other day.
The next activity was emailing or contacting the men. It took time to write the emails thoughtfully. When she got an email response, she would read their responses and write back. That could take fifteen minutes to half an hour. She decided to do this activity every day.
Last she had to make time for talking on the phone and actually going on a face-to-face meeting, the proverbial “coffee date”. Of course, Jane would make time for that as the opportunity arose. This is where many people can get tripped up. Most people don’t want to wait more than two weeks for the next response when you have established a good rapport back and forth.
I noticed that timing and pacing are important in online dating. When two people are both interested in one another- the initial email contact to meeting can take a month or less! When one person appears not available or drags (their mouse!) between contacts, then the person who is motivated can get frustrated and move toward another more interested prospect.
So it’s important to make a time commitment to the online dating process once you have invested your time putting up your online profile and spent money signing up for the service. If you put yourself in the online dating arena, then you need to invest the time to really see how this process can work for you.
How do you want to make the most of your online dating experience? Are you setting aside enough time in your week to really take advantage of this opportunity? How do you feel when people don’t follow through on a timely basis?