More About My Online Dating Guide
Published on May 15, 2024
My online dating guide can be found here.
Many, many years ago I started researching a technology and purchased a website to assist me with that. After a time, I had no use for the technology, but I had a website.
Eventually, I decided to convert my site into a blog where I could describe my online dating experiences. Perhaps embarrassingly, I had kept notes on what was working and not working for me when I was dating. I was already married at this point but still felt a desire to share what I had experienced. Eventually this desire resulted in a fair number of posts on my site. This guide is a compilation of those posts as well as some additional thoughts I have now that I look back on the process many years later.
As time went by, I found it harder and harder to keep my website and guide up-to-date. In 2022, I convert all my content into a easier to maintain format and removed the blog portion of my website as I hadn’t updated it for years.
My hope is this format allows the guide to continue to help people even though it won’t be updated, possibly ever again.
Who is this Guide for?
Given most of the information is based on information from 2004 to 2014, it’s pretty dated. Nothing in the guide ever hits on newer services like Tinder or Bumble. I still think there’s a lot of value here, but if I had to guess, the guide is going to be most helpful for:
- People born before 1990 who have some experience dating online but want more information
- People born after 1990 but who may want to focus on some of the older dating services like Match.com or eHarmony
- People confused or frustrated by online dating and looking for any help they can find
- People who recognize that there will be a lot of details that are out-of-date, or will become out-of-date as time passes, but can value the core principles discussed here.
About Me
I started dating online in June of 2004. I hadn’t dated for years prior to that, going on only a handful of dates in my recent memory. I was reluctant to using an online dating service and was only able to start once my loneliness outweighed my pride. I tried most of the big services at the time: Match.com, eHarmony, Yahoo! Personals (which is now a part of Match) and a few small niche dating websites.
In the beginning, I made a lot of bad decisions. I unintentionally gave women the wrong impression about who I was. In my first seven months of online dating I only a few first dates, and none that went particularly well.
Thankfully, I did begin to understand how things worked and my last five months of dating online were the opposite: I went on dozens of dates and frequently had two or three first dates scheduled in one week. I hated my first few months of online dating but loved my last few.
On June 9, 2005, one day short of a full year of online dating, I met the woman who would become my wife. It wasn’t long before I knew I wanted to date Kate exclusively. Perhaps one of the strongest measures of my success was that when I made this decision, I had to contact six women and cancel pending first dates.
That’s not to brag: I don’t find myself particularly attractive or funny or anything else that would warrant this success. It really came down to figuring out how things worked best for me. After that the success came naturally.
Kate and I were married in April of 2007 and are as in love now (2024 at the time of this update) as we were in the beginning. We have two boys now. I am so grateful for the opportunity that online dating provided. I hope that you will give online dating a chance. Maybe it will change your life too.
Author: Brad
Brad initially struggled with online dating but over time became quite successful using it. He met his wife using online dating and has been giving advice and helping people improve their results since 2007. He has written a Free Online Dating Guide to help others find success with online dating. You can learn more about his personal experience using online dating and running this website here.
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