It’s a quite scary feeling to find yourself alone in middle age, having been in what you thought was a close knit unit for over 15 years. There is an old joke of the woman exclaiming on her 20th wedding anniversary that she would have served less time for murder is in a perverse sort of way quite true in that you become ... institutionalized!
I found myself alone in 2003 and it wasn’t a nice place to be. I did eventually crawl out of my shell but being left only with a laptop, a bed and a kitchen table, a job due to finish and a looted bank account, I felt that life wasn’t altogether good. If this sounds familiar, it maybe time to check the online dating scene.
I signed up to a number of free chat sites, talked in numerous chat rooms and eventually, once I had become sick of the bad language and abusive and immature nature of some of them, I did something entirely out of character and signed up to a website called Meetic. Initially, I didn’t spend any money I thought it was probably all a con and just did the bare minimum to gain myself a profile without a picture and if by magic somebody emailed me!
Whether it was a marketing ploy or not I could not help myself, I wanted to know who or what had sent me this message. I was seriously curious. With nervous anticipation I tried to answer and was at first asked to pay, so I left it but after several days I tried again and was offered a free 30 days and I signed up immediately.
Setting up a dating profile can be quite daunting; you enter personal details and most importantly in order to gain any real sort of serious response, post a picture of yourself. I would recommend that you leave the personal details either hidden (if the site allows) or limited in the first instance, if for no other reason than to give you a controllable degree of anonymity.
What I have since learned is that if you are in the category of individual who wishes to hitch up with an individual whose profile is aesthetically pleasing, you may wish to prepare yourself for a small disappointment at the meeting stage of the process! In my experience the ladies on such sites, spend a fortune on professional photography or simply post somebody else’s picture. My own tips for success are probably not the most responsible, as I believe in following your heart wherever that may lead, I believe in spelling out the truth, though there are millions who don’t, and I would recommend in contrast to my own actions that you exercise caution.
| |
StarReviews Top 3
Dating Websites |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
The tricky bit comes when you want to meet somebody or take them out on a date, I can only offer the "parental" advice (i.e. ensure somebody knows where you are going, meet in a public place, stay around other people etc etc). Let’s face it, I’ve not heard of any real problems through a paying site but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t exercise caution in the first instance. I have certainly chatted online with individuals that appeared a little unbalanced - an Italian millionaires who became insanely jealous if I spoke to anybody online other than her, an individual who actually turned out to live several doors down from my house and was a rather "different" individual. It can be a real eye opener.
I wasn’t looking for anything except a chat, I had already failed miserably in a long term relationship and wasn’t in any hurry to repeat the process. Soon I became bored and my free trial was up for renewal meaning that I was going to pack it in and chalk it up as another "life experience". Quite fed up with my penultimate friend who was a psychotherapist by trade and quite obviously used the site to tout for business, I was ready to shut down the account when I noticed several messages from "anonymous" the kind of person I had entered into my own rule book as one to avoid like the plague!
But hey, I had time on my hands and thought I would put "anonymous" out of their misery before closing the account. They replied quite quickly, the typing obviously wasn’t English but they kind of made sense, so I typed again. They typed back still making sense,so I kept typing. In fact for six months I don’t remember many instances when I wasn’t typing. But eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to see what anonymous looked like so I asked for a picture, and not long after I finished using the site.
Every day when I wake in the morning, I remember that day, the day when the person I felt I knew quite intimately yet had never even seen a picture of before, introduced themselves by Polaroid. I climb out of bed quietly in order to prepare myself for work, I turn and look back at her lying peacefully asleep in our bed and wonder where the last 5 years went!
I can’t give advice because we did everything against our own best advice, but somehow we came through it the other end safely, happily and married.
Tags:
dating,
internet