Rest assured that online dating is NOT full of people who are creepy, zit-faced nerds who live in their mother’s basement rent-free.   (Granted, there are a few of them still lurking about…)

Here’s a look at the demographics of one of the larger dating sites, match.com. Click here.

If you see yourself lining up with even a few of the major demographics, match.com may be the site for you because (*gasp!*) there are PEOPLE JUST LIKE YOU there!

Go on, why don’t you give it a shot?  There’s a link in my sidebar that gives you a week free to test it out.  You’ll try anything for a week if it’s free, right?

Meet Ruth and Leonard, octogenarians who found love on match.com.  Their story was featured on Good Morning America:

http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=6989018

Their story was also featured as part of a Washington Post article on older women in the online dating scene:

Newlyweds Ruth Johnson-Mullis, 85, and Leonard M. Mullis, nearly 87, of Littleton, Colo., met on Match.com. Both had been widowed. Each said they weren’t interested in marriage but wanted “someone to have dinner with,” Johnson-Mullis says. She had a hard time at first with online dating: She e-mailed eight or 10 men and never got a reply. They were all looking for women in their 60s and 70s, she says. “Who wants an 84-year-old woman?”

“I did,” Mullis says. He had to drive up into the mountains to meet her. There were no restaurants, so she made him lunch. “From that point on, I was a dead duck,” he says. After a three-month courtship, they married. “At my age, I don’t believe in long engagements. No use fooling around.”

So get out there, folks!  It’s never too late to have a relationship to brighten your life.

Old-fashioned:

• Through family, friends or coworkers
• Matchmaking service
• At church or other social circles

New-fashioned:

• Speed dating
• Social networking like Meetup.com, Facebook, Myspace
• Online dating

Here’s a good checklist to see whether online dating is right for you:

• Have you already met all the people you can through your family, friends, or coworkers?
• Have you already met (and perhaps dated) the people in your church or other social group?
• Are you frustrated because you just haven’t met anyone new lately?
• Is your life pretty much work, home, sleep, work, home, sleep?
• Are you wondering just WHO is out there?

If you’ve answered “YES!” to even one of these questions, you may want to give online dating a shot.  I can help you choose the right service, or you can explore them from the list just to the right of this article.

On the one side is your current situation.  You have dated a few people you met through mutual friends or by luck at a bar or dance club.  Things have worked out, but you wouldn’t say you have an active dating life.  Come to think of it, you have nothing to show for it since you’re sitting on this fence.

So you look out over the fence and see all these people on sites like Match.com, eHarmony, Chemistry, Yahoo Personals, ChristianCafe, and more.  Maybe you even have friends or colleagues who met online and are now happily married.

You think:

• “Should I do this?”
• “Can’t I just meet people the old fashioned way?”
• “Why do I NEED the internet to find love?”
• “I wouldn’t know the first thing about dating online.”
• “What kind of people are on dating sites?  Would any of them even be the kind of people I’d want to date?”
• “I’m a senior citizen.  Are there people my age on dating sites?”

Does this sound like you, friend?

Stay tuned for more in this series to help you decide if you should hop the fence and give online dating a try.  Besides, if you’re comfy on the fence, the least I can do is entertain you!

You wake up early, commute to work, spend eight hours locked in your cubicle, drive home, and somehow have to fit everything else in your life in the precious few hours before bed.

Assuming you’ve invested the time in creating a great profile, now all you need are custom searches to make digging through the piles of profiles a bit more manageable.

Ideally, your online dating venture should cost you a maximum of a half hour per day.  If it’s taking longer than that, you’re not working smart.

How To Search Smart:

1)  Set up and save your custom searches.

I recommend having at least five custom searches starting at “Dream Mate” and whittling down from there to someone realistic who doesn’t have any of your deal breakers.

2) Set a timer for 30 minutes to read, write, block.

Starting with your pickiest search, you will want to do the following:

- Sort by username.

- Read through each profile.  If someone immediately turns you off, click “Block from Search”.  There’s no sense in seeing their profile again.

- If someone interests you, send them an email.  AVOID winks, icebreakers, flirts, etc.

- If you get through your pickiest search results, move on to a less picky custom search and do the same steps.

3) When you’re done, you’re done.

Step away from the computer and get back to your regularly scheduled life.  Online dating should feel like fun and not like a chore, so limit your time on the dating site so you can focus on your hobbies, friends, and family.

Here’s the quick and easy way to write a great online dating profile:

1)  Get clear about what makes you… you!

Think about your education, career, hobbies, friends, special outings.  If someone were to see the quick snapshot of your life, what would be in it?

2) Think about the good parts of past relationships.

Your dating profile is not the place to list what you don’t want in a relationship.  Many people make this mistake and their profile turns into a gripe-fest that drives away the very people they’re trying to attract!

What was GREAT about your ex?  Here’s some great things about some of my ex’s:

- He taught me how to rollerblade and I still love doing it!

- He supported me in my new career.

- We had great intellectual conversations and could talk for hours.

Think back to those past relationships and make that list.  If you’re short on relationship experience, think about a relationship that you admire.  Maybe your parents have a great relationship or your roommate and his girlfriend are that couple that are inseparable and sickeningly happy together.  What do they have that you want?

3) Write it all out.

Your first paragraph should describe you in a nutshell.  Use your notes from part one to write this section.  The second paragraph should describe your ideal match.  Write your headline last.  It should be short and catchy and reference something you write about in the profile.

4) Wrap it up with a pretty bow!

It’s best to wrap up your profile with a question or offer – some sort of catch that makes a potential match want to email you.

5) Go back and re-read it out loud.

Seriously.  Read your new profile out loud.   If something is hard to read out loud, it needs to be edited.  Re-word things until it flows better.

6) Have a friend read it.

Ask the advice of someone you know and trust.  They will let you know if you’ve missed anything!

7) Post it!

By the way, just posting your profile doesn’t mean it’s done!  Stay tuned for articles about how to freshen up your profile and get more views!

The only people who should be using Facebook or Myspace for trolling for a date on Saturday night are high school and college students. Facebook makes this fairly easy with their networks. However, those of us who are older and wiser only show our profiles to people we know and trust. There’s just too much at risk to put your entire world out there for everyone and anyone to see.

For those of us in the professional world, social networks are not the place to find your date. Dating services like match.com are where it’s at! Let me use Mr. Williamson’s arguments for using social networking sites and show you why those in the know leave Myspace and Facebook for friends and turn to the experts for dating:

1. Time Commitment- The greatest time commitment in online dating is creating your profile, collecting up good pictures, etc etc. After that, you can spend 15 “smart minutes” a day working towards finding your ideal match.

2. Member Base - Yes, there are millions of people on Myspace and Facebook. The vast majority of them are under the age of 25.   With match.com, you’re assured that users are at least 18. They’re almost equally divided between under-30s and over-30s. There is a smaller member base than social networking sites, but you are assured that the people there are of age and interested in finding a match – just like you!

3. Social Tools- This is another area where dating sites are growing. All have email options, but many are expanding to chat, and some even to voice chat or webcam chat. Some sites, such as Plenty of Fish, offer message boards.

4. First Impressions – I can agree that generally people are more honest on their Myspace/Facebook than they are on their dating profiles. This is why I advocate extensive googling (one of my favorite things to do!).

Need help creating that great profile that gets the attention you deserve? Check out my profile help services!

I’ve seen this question tossed around a bit in online dating discussions.  When filling out your online dating profile, you have to describe your ideal mate.  But does filling out the Ethnicity section make you a racist if you don’t select them all?

I think not.

I do not consider myself to be racist. I have friends ranging from super pale (my boyfriend!) to chocolaty brown (fave coworker!). I would positively die without real Chinese food (though the fake stuff is tasty, too!) and burritos made in places where nobody speaks English.  The world is definitely a much cooler place when you get to experience the things that make every culture unique.

However, when it comes to the type of men that I am attracted to as romantic partners, I find that I am most attracted to white men, followed by Asians (especially half-Asians!) and Latinos.

Would I date a black man if I met one that piqued my interest?   Sure.  Have I, in my dating career met a black man I was interested in as a romantic partner?  Nope.   Does this make me a racist? I should hope not!

But the question presents itself… if you are open to the possibility of finding someone with similar interests and passions who is a different race than you, why not put “Any” under your match’s ethnicity?

I guess it’s the same reason why we put preferred gender, age, height, education, income, family preferences, etc etc etc.

We’re looking for that perfect match.

Does that make us haters of all things that don’t fit into our “About my Match” section?  Nope.  It makes us dreamers… am I the only one?