Swipe, swipe, swipe…
Are your thumbs tired from all that swiping? Girl, I hear you. Online dating is exhausting. You have a great profile, lots of cute pics of you and your dog and your friends and your adorable nephew and you doing your favorite activities, all while looking fresh and fabulous, of course. You know you’re a catch, your family knows you’re a catch, your friends know you’re a catch. So why aren’t you happily coupled already?!
With all the dating apps out there today, it’s tough to say for sure if you’re even looking in the right place, given all the niche sites out there now. Match based on dog preferences, music tastes, celebrity look-alikes, farmers tans). I mean, do you really need to have an active profile on ALL THE SITES?! I need a nap just thinking about it. Thankfully, Consumer Advocate has done a lot of the legwork for you! Check out this comprehensive guide to the top online dating sites, their features, services, and what to watch out for when using them. This site is GOLD if you’re getting into online dating, truly.
But seriously. In a city of an estimated 18.1 MILLION people here in this sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, and on a planet of 7.3 BILLION people, there’s got to be SOMEONE out there for you, right?! Absofrickenlutely. So what gives?
First and foremost, “online dating” is a misnomer. You do NONE of your dating online. A more apt name for the whole process would be “online MEETING.” You meet online; you date offline. As we have more and more real-time online interactions, it can be easy to feel like you are offline! Heck, you can join practically ANYONE on their day-to-day endeavors via Instagram & SnapChat. But don’t be fooled. You’re still online! And offline is where the magic is!
To be clear, I’m not suggesting abandoning online dating altogether. Quite the contrary! I am suggesting it be used for the very powerful tool that it is-- an instrument of MEETING.
So if offline is where the magic is, GO TO THE MAGIC AND GET OFFLINE ASAP! Have a few phone conversations or FaceTime to vet the guy. There’s a lot to be learned about a guy through his voice, conversation style, listening abilities, capacity to ask meaningful questions. But even the phone still isn’t fully real life!
With all the crazies out there, I’m not advising anything stupid. This person, no matter how many phone calls you’ve had or how deep you’ve found yourself on his IG feed, is still a stranger. Be smart; be safe.
What I’m suggesting is that you get offline and into the real world as soon as possible. No pen pals allowed. The difficulty with keeping things online for too long is you begin to fall in like with the highlight reel, not what is actually real (we all know the highlight reel is a version of reality as seen through the rosiest of colored glasses).
So keep your expectations low (as in, based in REALITY!), and proceed to getting offline as soon as is humanly possible, so you can meet a real person in real life, and not find yourself disappointed by a figment of your imagination. (Or maybe reality will be disappointing, but at least you’ll know and won’t spend weeks or months (and valuable brain space) building up something up that wasn’t for you in the first place.)
As John Michael Montgomery crooned, “Life’s a dance, you learn as you go.”
Give those thumbs a rest and put on your dancing shoes, ladies!