Navigating online dating

My rollercoaster ride of 9 years of online dating taught me a lot about who I am and what I wanted and needed from a partner. It also took a pretty big toll on my mental well-being where, for a long time I never really felt I grasped the process to make it work for me and I often wished there were pointers and tips I could have utilised to make the journey easier to navigate.

There is no getting around the fact that you need to be resilient and have the strength of will to continually bounce back from the disappointments of online dating from having to spend an evening with someone you have nothing in common with to being ‘ghosted’, to being two, three or four timed. Online dating sites seem to offer a licence for even good people to behave badly.

Of course the pitfalls are offset by positives too, the most obvious one being meeting a life partner. But there are no guarantees that will happen.

By the time I started dating my now long-term partner I’d learnt better strategies to healthily navigate online dating when I realised that the key to successful online dating was to change my mindset and throw out any previous approach which often left me heartbroken.

Having a strategy might sound unromantic and counterintuitive to dating but it’s vitally important in order to do it successfully.

Once I realised this, and it did take me years to get to that point, I automatically began to relax and just enjoy the dating process. When I approached dating differently, strangely, success came not long after.

I began to view each date in and of itself as a fun night/day out. I enjoyed the actual date as a stand-alone opportunity to dress up, go to an area of town I’d never been and scout out new bars/restaurants/art galleries etc and, importantly, it was a chance to chat to someone new, it was like social networking. This didn’t mean conducting dates in a business-like manner but seeing the date as less of a view to finding a partner and more about getting out and about exploring or doing something that’s fun anyway. I found that having this attitude increased the chance of being engaged and fun which is immediately more attractive in a person anyway.

In doing so I didn’t think beyond any date other than would I go on another one with the same person. I think I naturally got to a point where it was fun enough to have something else social scheduled in my diary.

I approached each date with that in mind where dating became an extension of my social life/network opportunities.

In doing so it allowed me to keep in mind who I was and what I was looking for in life in general which made it easier to honour that with honesty and integrity.

This didn’t mean not ever compromising or not being open to new opportunities but it helped preserve the important milestones and goals I wised to achieve while also being open to new ones that dating presenting.

It helped to keep dating fun and not laden with whether that person was suitable life-partner material and the consequent stresses and disappointments that come with it. I didn’t know if, in doing so I would actually meet someone but I knew I wanted to enjoy life regardless of whether someone special was in it or not but it happened anyway, just as I was getting the hang of the process!