Let me tell you about my own experience of dating over the internet. Sixteen years of it, and a happy marriage that came out of a site — that is not nothing, is it. On top of everything else, I even ended up working with such a site. Over that time I worked out a set of rules and principles that are worth following if you want to improve your chances. Those principles, by the way, are what led me to a happy marriage.
I did my best to be brief without doing too much damage to the storytelling, and it still came out long. All the same, if you are serious about sorting out your personal life, I do recommend reading it. It is all from experience.
1. Quality costs money
This is the most cynical and the truest principle. So I will state it right away and not come back to it The first site I used only let you start a conversation if at least one of the two had a paid account. That was convenient: on the one hand it “protected” me, a pretty young freeloader, from other pretty freeloaders, and on the other, those who had money for the site were by definition more solvent and more dependable. But at 18 I did not appreciate that. Why pay when I am the clever one anyway?
Then came all sorts of completely free internet dating sites. There you could find sex, every kind of perversion and every kind of mentally unwell person. Sites like that work without any meaningful algorithm; you might as well stand at a busy crossroads with a sign saying “I want sex!” The chance of finding anything serious there tends to zero, or goes into the negative. I met my husband on a site my friends warmly recommended, which cost 40 euros a month with a minimum six-month subscription. Everyone had to pay. My husband was the third date I went on, and out of the year I had paid for I was actively on the site for exactly one week. The other two men I met that week were also splendid people, level-headed and looking for a serious relationship (at that price!), but our characters did not quite match.
2. A site needs a twist of its own.
That, in fact, is what you are paying for: not a catalogue of photographs of the sex you fancy with pop-up ads down the sides, but a twist that will help you find the relationship you want.
I have been on a site aimed at exporting Russian beauties abroad — the competition there was ferocious, predictably enough. I have been on a site that matched couples by Human Design (though I was there for the reading of my own Design), on a site matching by horoscopes, on one matching by wish lists, and even on a terrifying site where city girls were found as wives for… farmers deep in the German countryside; the thought of driving a tractor in stilettos simply finished me off. The twist of the site where I met my husband was that you were judged by your mind first: you could pick people by age, profession and compatibility, and the photograph was revealed by its owner at will, and only once a conversation had started. The compatibility mechanism there was soullessly automated, though, and did its sums from a filled-in questionnaire. The man with whom I had 98% compatibility was a mirror image of me: for two hours we enthused about macroeconomic trends and our legal practice, but we could never have lived together, let alone slept together. The twist of our own site won me over completely: trained counsellors analyse each member’s character and match couples on the compatibility of those characters. In other words, they do the preliminary selection and screening, and they see to it that people match in character. And they do match!
3. Speaking of character…
There is a long-standing rule that the couples who last are made up of an introvert and an extravert. I can confirm it, because otherwise they have nothing to give each other. Two introverts can at least “sit in the same trench” for a while, but even they will get bored of it. What two extraverts can do together is, to a deep-dyed introvert like me, a mystery. When you meet over the internet you cannot tell this straight away… unless you know what to look for.
You can go further, because character is far more than that. It is formed in childhood and it determines how we see other people, how we behave in different situations and how we solve problems. By the way, how much a person will irritate you — or, on the contrary, charm you — also depends directly on character. On compatibility of characters, to be precise. I have yet to see an electronic algorithm anywhere that detects that compatibility. What we do detect it with is a personal interview and testing. It does not guarantee passionate love and a knight on a white horse. It guarantees that the two of you will be able to help each other grow and, at the very least, to understand each other. From my experience, that is an excellent start.
4. Know what you want.
You can put it down to metaphysics, to quantum mechanics or simply to luck. We always find exactly what we sincerely want.
Psychology says we “dock by our neuroses”. At 18 to 20 I went to internet dating sites as if to a freak show — and duly collected my specimens. People who are not ripe for a serious relationship will always find excellent sex and a thoroughly careless attitude towards themselves. The hunt for a “rich sugar daddy” is harder: there are not many of them, demand is high and competition is fierce. Which, incidentally, is why they are not on dating sites — there is no need. So if someone on a site is posing as one, run; the payment for the sex will be the unreachable star Aldebaran, or something of the sort.
Knowing what you want helps you filter — and filtering is what the work of anyone actively looking for a partner comes down to, online or not. Type “I want such-and-such” into Google and see how far the results match your expectations. I am a believer in clear keywords: “dependable”, “caring”, “fair”, “wants a family and children”, “even-tempered”, “comfortably off”, “hair colour such-and-such”, and so on. Believe it or not, in everything I have ever done, from buying shoes to job-hunting, stating my wishes clearly got me the result I was after far faster. As I wrote, the time from registering on the site to meeting my husband was one week. Timescales vary, of course, but when you know what you need it is far easier to sift out what you do not. Give it a try.
5. Know yourself.
Naturally, to know what you want you have to know yourself. The saying “be careful what you wish for” is precisely about those who do not know themselves. It is about the women who always fall in love with domestic tyrants, and about the men who scold girls for being silly and childish while never so much as glancing at older ones. And about a great deal else.
When I got to know myself, I understood why the men I had met before started to irritate me after a while. When I got to know myself, I understood what I had to offer. When I got to know myself, I understood the kind of people I could live with for a long time and without needless rows. How can you get to know yourself? You can do it by treading on rake after rake as you wander blindly across the field. Or you can get a simple, convenient user manual in a very convenient format. That is exactly what we offer at our Club.
6. Agree the rules of the game.
I consider this rule just about the most important one, because here nobody can help you but yourselves.
Yes, we have a twist that others do not. Yes, we filter out the people who are not all right, and also the ones who are all right but with whom you are unlikely to last. Yes, we will help you understand your character and your own possibilities. And yes, we will show you where and how to look for genuinely suitable partners. But any relationship needs rules of the game of some kind, and those cannot be worked out in your head — they can only be said out loud: the budget, shared time, what is off limits, what is essential, how many children are planned, and so on. Here I am powerless to help. All I can do is repeat it twenty times over: grown-ups talk to each other! And for grown-up partners who trust each other there are no shameful subjects.
The rest is a matter of personal preference and of your own growth.
Want to give it a try?
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