The Four Most Common Online Dating Mistakes
Online dating might be easier, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get it wrong. If you’re not experiencing much success with your online dating adventures, you might want to wonder if you haven’t made a few of these mistakes.
1. Using The Wrong Photograph
Your photograph is the first introduction to you that people have, and it’s the thing that they’re going to look at the hardest before deciding whether or not to meet up with you. You want something that isn’t staged or airbrushed; that seems natural and that actually looks like you, but that is also as clear and flattering as possible. Dated or blurry photographs are a bad idea, as are any that have other people in them. It’s also a good idea to have more than one photo up, to give people a chance to see you in a few different ways.
2. Writing A Dull Profile
Your profile needs to reflect who you are and what you want, and it needs to do it in a way that is effective and engaging. Bad spelling and grammar, short answers, blank questions and rudeness all give the wrong impression about you – you need to be sure to fill things out thoroughly and thoughtfully, and to use them to represent you as best you can.
3. Sending Unappealing Messages
Women on dating sites get hundreds of messages. Most of them are some variation on “hi how r u” or “nice **** wanna ****” – not to mention the infinitely creepier and more disturbing things we wouldn’t want to print here even with asterisks. Plenty more of them have clearly been cut and pasted between dozens of other women who all got the same message. If you do any of these things, you’re basically dooming yourself to failure; you need to send messages that show you’re interested in the person and you’ve read their profile, and you want to engage them in a conversation that’s likely to make them want to meet up with you. Think about it from their perspective, not just yours.
4. Trying To Talk To Too Many People
The other side of this is that women can feel like they have to reply to all those messages, not least because some men get rude and aggressive when they’re ignored. They have no right to react like that – this is your choice, and you should decide who you do and don’t want to talk to. Limit your replies to only the messages you’re genuinely interested in, and you’ll find that you do far better.