Divorced 18 months ago, I’m now interested in dating. I signed up on a few dating sites, but I must say I’ve been disappointed. The men seem so flaky, and they LIE. One man said he “owned a business.” Turned out he was unemployed. Another said he was “trim.” Actually, he was quite overweight. Am I just having some bad luck? Or is the world of online dating filled with men who lie?
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Actually, the world of online dating is filled with men AND WOMEN who…shall we say, stretch the truth. The book, Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner reports on a fascinating study of 20,000 personal profiles on dating sites. Four percent the the people claimed to make $200,000 a year, while in reality fewer than 1 percent of Internet users make that much. Both the men’s and women’s profiles said they were an inch taller than the national average. Among the men, 68 percent said they were “more attractive than average.” Among the women, the figure was 72 percent. As for weight, the 10,000 men came in at the national average for their age group, but the 10,000 women said they weighed 20 pounds LESS than the national average.
Online dating has one big advantage. It allows users to cast a wider net than was possible before the Internet. But wide nets often reel in a fair amount of trash. That’s not to say that you should take down your profiles. Some people find love through dating sites, and you might be one of them. But dating advice today is pretty much the same as it was before the Internet: Spend your time and energy doing things you enjoy. Join groups devoted to doing the things you like to do. In your interest groups, make friends with people you find attractive. One of your new friends might become more than a friend, or might introduce you to someone who could become special.
I turned to online dating sites as I could not find any men during my daily routines. Since I do not go to bars or clubs, I could not find them in church. I’ve ran into some liars and also some men with some real social and mental issues, in which I stopped communications. I tried several free and about two sites with fees. After months of checking the sites off and on I did manage to find a very nice man that I’ve been dating for several months. We have a lot in common that we discovered when we communicated by phone. My advice is just to take your time and continue doing what you enjoy and not be so dissapointed if you don’t meet anyone following some scheduled time frame that society has developed about meeting someone. When you least expect it, he might just come up to you in a place where you were not expecting, like the grocery store or even at the dentist office! Good Luck