Happily ever after

As kids, fairy tales con us into thinking life is a package deal with ‘happily ever after’ at the tail end. We aspire to meet our prince and ride off into the sunset with our knight in shining armor, and our anticipated worst case scenario is the potential need to kiss a couple of frogs before our dreams come true.

Reality kind of sucks. In my case at least, the tales I’ve had to tell made grown men cry. I had to put myself out there, over and over again, for years. My ego was bashed by words, actions and apathy. From cyberdating to singles events to blind dates and pick-up bars, you name it, I tried it. And when nothing worked, the alternatives were also plentiful – some entailed eating copious amounts of chocolate until I felt ready to get back on the bandwagon, other more effective solutions included group life coaching and long conversations with wonderful friends.

The advice never stopped, including: “Have you thought of losing a little weight?”; “Stop trying so hard and it will just happen”; “Do something with yourself. Wear some make-up" (and its corollary: “Try being yourself and a wear less make-up”). “Go and study something” (I have a diploma and two degrees, spent 8 years at university, and I should GO AND STUDY?????). “Make it well-known that you’re single” (at times I wondered whether there was anyone left in the western world who didn’t KNOW that????). And, of course, the final nail in the coffin on my dreams for love and marriage: “Just come to terms with fate and have a couple of kids on your own (A serious consideration but I have seen friends do the single mother thing and I think they are worthy of more respect than the Pope!). Yet I seriously considered each and every one of these options, even trying a few of them on for size along the way.

This blog was one of the more therapeutic ways of dealing with my dating experience. I reasoned that if I could make other people laugh at my own experiences, that might make the experiences more worthwhile and seem less serious than I felt they were. I must admit, however, that I only had the courage to start publishing the blog when I found myself in the first healthy relationship I’d been in in years, and had a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

So six months ago I put together the first entry of Jaded Date, and almost religiously I sat down each Saturday after that and put a different experience down on paper. Months later I could not believe that I still had anything to write about, especially considering that my relationship was still bounding along and I certainly had no new material to draw upon. And then, just as I had been inspired to start writing, three weeks ago I woke up one Saturday morning and found I no longer had anything to say on the subject. Like Forrest Gump when he stops running, ‘just like that’, I ran out of steam and left my blog dangling in the air. I had a big trip coming up – my boyfriend and I were going abroad together for the first time - there was a lot to organize, and a dating blog just didn’t have the same pull it had had for the preceding months.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that when I came back from the trip, my boyfriend would no longer be my boyfriend.

He would be my fiancé.

In an uncharacteristically romantic gesture, a beautiful diamond ring was handed to me on the first day of my trip, and I’ve been wearing a monster-sized grin ever since. I now know what it feels like to walk on air, and I am hugging every moment of this joyous time as if there’s no tomorrow.

This is my last entry of Jaded Date. This journal allowed me to exorcise the demons left by dozens of disastrous dates interspersed over the last 15 years. It did not give voice to many of the wonderful experiences I had along the way, or to the truly meaningful and life-shaping experiences (good and bad) I had with significant people over the years. Some things are better left unpublished, even though I have no doubt they played a more significant role in shaping the woman I’ve become than the one-off experiences logged on this blog.

One thing I’m certain of: I am truly grateful for it all. For the bad dates, the failed relationships, the coaching, the friends who experienced this all with me, the friends, acquaintances and strangers who constantly wanted to introduce me to new people, and to the wonderful prince charming who showed up at the perfect time in my life and allowed me to crawl into his heart and get truly comfortable.

Perhaps happily ever after is possible after all……

Age Matters

A friend asked me this week what the biggest deterrent of dating online was for me. She is about to join the world of cyber dating, and has the tactic that forewarned is fore-armed.

I cannot lie – the range of put-offs I could mention is extensive. But most fall into the category of false advertising: the profile photo that was taken at least 15 years and 15 kilograms before the date; the guys who tell you they have to leave the date after 10 minutes because their mother is sick, only to mysteriously pop up on the dating site 20 minutes later without bothering to hide their profiles first; the guy who writes that he has brown hair but fails to mention that the last time he could prove that statement and discern his hair color was a decade previously. The liberties people take with their profiles are so wide-ranging they warrant a blog entry all of their own.

But pressed to come up with the number one offender in the cyber-dating arena, I had to focus on the primary disincentive of all time – failure to respect the age gap.

Now don't get me wrong – age gaps are problematic both ways. I have friends who deliberately advertise the wrong age on websites to ensure that a younger crowd get access to their profiles, and there are a few who never actually reveal the few years that were shaved off their 'sheet' when they meet the unsuspecting prospects in person. I have never been one of those people, and while I never put in too much detail on my dating profiles, what I did insert was accurate.

While age was never a major issue for me one way or another, there is a limit to the age gap that I think one should respect. One thing I learned early on was to listen to my instincts as far as age is concerned. For example, when I thought a guy was too young for me, he WAS too young for me. I learned this the hard way...

I met a man (and I use that term very loosely) through the web who was more than 5 years younger than me chronologically, and at least 15 emotionally. While I expressed reticence about dating someone who could easily be my baby brother, I admit to having had just a little curiosity as well. And when he insisted on meeting me despite the concerns I expressed, I obviously couldn't help but feel flattered by the insistence and attentions of someone who was still in his twenties. However, my curiosity was piqued for all of a minute after we met, following which I literally watched myself transform in his eyes from sex kitten into the equivalent of a predatory grimalkin. While in theory an 'older woman' obviously sounded appealing to this kid, in practice he was distinctly, palpably, uncomfortable. The date was so short it would have taken him more time to blow out the candles on his next birthday cake!

But putting off youngsters is not something I have ever had to deal with on a regular basis. Their fathers? Now that's a different story. Perhaps the font size on the web is too small for older men to see the 'what age group I'm in' area, or perhaps due to their accumulated life experience they just think they know what we need more than we do. But I want to state this for the record: I am not a care-giving society for the geriatric single.

When I was in my early thirties and dating up a storm via the internet, on any given day I was guaranteed to hear from a representative of the elderly. In fact, so many post-50s contacted me I felt like changing my profile to read as follows:

If you think you are too old for me, you ARE too old for me! This is a simple equation, gentlemen. If you and my parents could have gone to kindergarten together, you are too old for me. If you asked one of your kids to teach you to surf the Web in order to join a dating site, you ARE too old. And if I specify that I am looking for a man between 35 and 40 on my dating profile, and you are between 55 and 60…you guessed it…you ARE too old for me.

So, if you think I'm cute, you're close to 70, and you see potential in me that you'd hate to overlook - I recommend you fix me up with one of your age-appropriate children.

It's not me, it's you

Learning to cope with rejection is just part and parcel of dating survival. If I had a dollar for every time I'd heard the excuse 'it's not you, it's me', someone would have married me for my money years ago. Other classic - yet over-used - let-downs include 'I really just want to be friends', 'My life is too full for a relationship right now', and the oldest one in the book, 'I thought I was ready to date again but now I realize it's too soon'.

The rejection one faces can happen way before ever meeting. In fact, with Internet dating one is forced to become painfully aware of how many people choose not to 'date' or 'contact' one just by seeing the difference between the number of people who check out a profile compared to the number of times one's approached. That said, I'm also aware of how many profiles I would go into with no intention of ever contacting the man behind the snapshot, for many reasons that have nothing to do with attraction, rejection, interest or lack thereof. With the Internet in particular, if you don't have thick skin it's not the place to look for a match.

And then there are those who prefer to dissipate into thin air rather than dealing out a face-to-face rejection. Dating etiquette dictates that after a first date, there is no obligation to call again. Personally, I have always appreciated a call after a date, even if it was just to say 'you're nice but not for me'. However, I also understand that people who are dating constantly may get tired of constantly rejecting their dates or having to explain themselves, so when the call didn't come I never took that personally. What I find incredible, though, is that some men choose to not call again after several dates. I dated one guy six times – including a visit to his parents one weekend – before he decided to call it quits. He just didn't tell me. In the week after our last date, not knowing we'd met for the last time, I called, sent a text message, got no reply and gave up. I wavered between worrying whether he was dead, and wishing he was. Eventually I saw him pop up on the same dating site we'd met through, and simply wrote him off as a loser.

For a while, what seemed to be my personal forte was preparing potential partners for marriage and opening them up to true love. Unfortunately, much of the time it was not me they actually married or fell in love with. There was one phase where three men in a row realized how much they loved their ex-girlfriends as soon as things started getting serious with me, and by the time the third one got engaged I was ready to advertise my services to desperate women who couldn't convince their guys to tie the knot. It got so bad I found myself interrogating potential partners about their ex-girlfriends before we started dating, just to assess the reconciliation risk before getting myself in too deep.

Admittedly, the easy letdown is certainly not my strong suit either. In cases where direct attempts at a pickup are made, when perfect strangers make a move, I have always tended to say I have a boyfriend but thanks anyway, regardless of how true that response has been at the time. For some reason, men I meet in all sorts of everyday situations often mislead my big smile and friendly persona for some kind of romantic interest, and I've got the 'thanks but no thanks' response down to a fine art. However, in dating situations this excuse obviously doesn't hold water, and on more than one occasion I have found myself dating someone several times, not because I was in the least bit interested, but because I just didn't have the heart to let him down.

So it seems that to date well today, skills need to be honest both in dispensing the rejection and coming to terms with it when it comes your way. I am not an expert – both areas are a personal weakness, and I turned to a world-class expert on this topic for tips. Cynthia Heimel's books are highly recommended for daters and non-daters alike, and their titles can really be used as back-pocket cheat sheets for desperate daters. So if you're reading this and need some new rejection material, some ideas for good let-downs, or just want a good laugh, check out the following great guides and use the titles as your own:

• "If you can't live without me, why aren't you dead yet?"
• "Get your tongue out my mouth, I'm kissing you goodbye"
• "If you leave me can I come too?"
• "When Your Phone Doesn't Ring, It'll Be Me".

You might end up on your own, but at least you'll have the last laugh

Rules aren't meant to be broken

Anyone who ventures into the murky waters of modern dating should be equipped with a guide for the wary companion. There are more rules in the dating world than in any other sport I know. And to succeed in dating I firmly believe one has to have a sporting approach – go out there prepared, practice between dates, be aggressive but fair, and more than anything: know the rules, choose when to play by them, and more importantly, know when they should be broken.

There are some basic rules of chivalry that one cannot and should not take for granted. Dating in Israel made that blatantly clear to me, very early on in my courtship career. If I had to wait for my dates to open car doors for me, I would have spent more time waiting than dating. Even the obvious – such as having the door of the restaurant opened for you – is far from clear in the holy land. On one of my first dates ever in the country, I almost had my nose broken when I followed my date into a restaurant without considering that he would close the door behind him. It simply shut directly on my blower. I've taken precautions ever since.

And then there are the rules of engagement – whether to a do a post-date summary, announcing your desire to meet again, or your reason for not wanting to. This tends to be a woman's dilemma, as every man I've ever dated, regardless of what he was really feeling, said 'So we'll talk' at the end of the date. One has to wonder whether they even realize that they are saying that, or whether the phrase has become as natural as asking 'how are you' when you serve someone in a restaurant or shop, with no expectation of getting any kind of genuine response. So on occasion, the woman may choose to bite the bullet at the date's end and respond honestly. Examples include "I don't think we SHOULD talk", or "You know what? You're nice but not for me". Or my favorite let-down line of them all – "You may be Mister Right, but you're definitely not Mister Right NOW…".

Should this not happen, or even worse, should you actually WANT to see the guy again, the waiting game starts the minute the first date ends. There are so many rules here, and so many more exceptions to the rule, that it's all-but-impossible to know what to anticipate at this juncture. There are some schools that dictate a grace period of two days between the first date and the follow-up call. Sooner could be interpreted as clingy, desperate or plain obsessive. This is true except in situations where you're also truly interested, in which case he could call five minutes after the date ended and you'd be delighted. Of course, everyone who's ever dated also knows that if he doesn't phone back after three days, it's a lost cause and you should move on. Again, that rule can be bent if you're really interested, and any excuse under the sun would be considered reasonable when he makes a half-hearted plea for date two even weeks after you first meet.

For a few lucky people who are introduced to one another by mutual friends, there's the possibility of receiving post-date follow-up insight from the matchmaker. These rare situations may even elicit constructive criticism on dating technique or personal style, and they should be welcomed or even cherished. One of the funniest stories of post-date feedback was related to me this week by a friend who had gone on a mediocre date with a man who left her fairly apathetic. In fact, he seemed far more interested in his new cell phone and her job in the cellular industry than he was in her during the evening, and she had no expectation – or inclination – to hear from him again. So she was surprised when his number appeared on her ringing phone at the crack of dawn the following morning. A few seconds after she answered, she realized he had not intended to phone her at all, but for some reason his new cell phone was calling her number. She hung up, only to get repeated phone calls from him throughout the day. She stopped answering the calls, but her cell phone recorded his casual conversations until it ran out of space. She was shocked to find that for much of the time, she was the topic of his banter. She had a live recording of his play-by-play account of their date, heard a dissection of her personality and dating techniques, and to add salt to her wounds, had to hear him tell more than one fellow passenger in his car how obvious it was that she was more interested in him than he was in her (a clear case of mistaken date autopsy). While we all seek feedback in one form or another at one time or another, this recorded testimony of the bad date was just a little too much for my friend to take, and thankfully the ex-date soon learned to lock his keypad and the repeated calls stopped coming.

What does not offer much flexibility in Dating 101 is the issue of who pays. It's very clear, regardless of how liberated you are or the society you live in is. Men are burdened with payment obligations on date one, and they should take that into account when recommending a place to go. Personally, a drink or cup of coffee has always been my chosen form of blind date – making it a cheap date for whoever paid, and preventing long evenings waiting for a creepy partner to gnaw his way through his entrée before I could leg it out of the restaurant. Of course, any girl worth her salt would offer to pay half at the end of the date, and any man worth dating twice would refuse. At the most, the girl pays the tip while the guy foots the bill.

This ritual gives a lot of leeway for people who'd like to indicate their level of interest. For example, on a few occasions where I wanted it to be crystal clear to my date that I was not interested in a second date under any circumstances, I found myself insisting quite vociferously that I pay my share of the bill. It seemed to be the only fair thing, considering there was no chance of a return on investment for the poor guy across the way. Similarly, when I was interested in a second date, his refusal to take money for the bill gave me an opportunity to suggest that I'd pay next time, giving him a clear indicator that there'd better be a next time.

Which leaves us with the poor guys who, on occasion, leave their means for payment at home and are placed in that super-awkward position of having no money at all on their first date. A friend of mine told me recently that she had gone on one such date, where she ended up footing the entire bill because her date had no wallet with him. The fact that she never heard from him again didn't make her any more sympathetic to the guy. When discussing this at home, it was pointed out to me that this could be the ultimate dating test – pretend to leave all means of payment at home, resulting in a win-win situation. Either you have a bad date but it doesn't cost you a thing, or you have a good date and a great excuse to see her again under the guise of repaying the favor. And simultaneously your date's reaction to your 'tale of woe' will serve as a clear indicator of her generosity and understanding. In fact, the idea seemed so ingenious it made me wonder why it doesn't happen more often.

What is crystal clear to me is that these rules are ridiculous. There are too many to remember, they are restrictive and frustrating and make dating feel like one long complicated game without a referee or line judge. But what is even more clear is that when both of you are really interested in the relationship, none of the rules matter. Whether he calls you in a minute or a day, he pays or you pay, when it's right, it's right, and none of the regular rules of play come into the equation at all.

Love on a conveyor belt

On a recent trip abroad, while waiting for my luggage to arrive on the conveyor belt, I was struck by a tangible sense of déjà vu. The experience was particularly powerful when my luggage took a long time to arrive, and the thought crossed my mind that it might not arrive at all. The déjà vu I referred to had nothing to do with luggage at all, but rather the feeling most singles I know have - that they may have missed the boat where finding a life partner is concerned.

As the luggage goes around and around on the belt, one is often tempted to pick up a case that looks exactly like the real thing. How often do we even pick up the wrong bag, only to realize our mistake and return it to the carousel and its rightful owner? And on the rare occasion, someone else's case could be taken home accidentally, resulting in all sorts of inconvenience to get it back to whom it belongs. The same thing happens with dating. More than once I hoped I had found 'the one', only to realize sooner (or later) that I had been mistaken by good looks or hypnotic charm. In those cases, delving a little deeper made me realize that the contents of the case didn't fit me at all, and I had to put the relationship aside and keep looking for the right thing.

With the baggage carousel, the experience almost always ends well – even when one's luggage does not appear immediately, it either arrives late (sometimes a little worse for wear), or it gets sent to you later on. The search for the perfect partner does not come with the same kind of guarantee – and the vague sense that your partner may never arrive on the 'conveyor belt' underlies almost every dating experience there is.

The analogy of baggage and dating does not end at the carousel. Baggage is something we each take with us, to some extent or another, into the dating relationship. I certainly cannot claim to be baggage-free, and doubt whether anyone has ever left a relationship without a few 'take-aways' from the experience. I often find myself analyzing my reaction to situations in light of the personal baggage I bring with me from previous connections, and I've spent many first dates trying to work out the extent of my dates' baggage as well. There are some giveaway signs in this regard. The guy who spends the first date going on endlessly about his ex-girlfriend is a clear example of someone who needs to put his bags back on the conveyor belt. Other clues can be found in the man who's over 35 and still lives with his parents, the guy who declares eternal love after a week (you can be assured that he'll change his mind after two), and the divorcee who wants you to meet his children the same day he meets you, cause he's "just sure you'll hit it off". Stay away from all of those – they are usually not just carrying luggage that is overweight - they are also often emotional time bombs just waiting to explode.

Another similarity between the luggage carousel and dating is the never-ending cycle of bags that keep arriving. We are expected to identify our own bags out of a range of hundreds or thousands of other bags that appear constantly. Dating today feels the same way – with countless ways to meet people and a never-ending supply of singles available at the click of a mouse, one is often overwhelmed by the variety and the temptation to stay at home and have intimate relations with a tub of ice-cream can be quite overwhelming at times. But that feeling of spotting your bag on the conveyor belt, of recognizing that it's yours with absolute certainty, the relief that it has arrived and you can go home and get on with the rest of your life, is well worth the wait. And THAT'S the feeling to hold on to when preparing for the next date, or making that call when you're given a number, or writing that email on the dating site of the day. The feeling is priceless – at the end of the day, you could end up finding your perfect match out there, but you have to stay at the carousel until it happens.

Beware of anticipation

One of the most profound dating survival books ever written is Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo's 'He's just not that into you'. These dating gurus shed light on many of courtship's mysteries with very simple, logical explanations. They help daters understand why what seemed like a perfectly reasonable first date never culminated in a second, why men can be sexual even when they aren't attracted to the person they're sexual with, and more importantly, why not to take rejection too personally. It's an absolute must for anyone who's in the dating jungle.

What the book does not do, however, is guide hapless pre-daters. There is clear market demand for some niche material on how to limit anticipation before the first date, and, even more importantly, how to make educated decisions regarding whether you WANT to go on that date or not in the first place.

When friends introduced me to men in the past, it was clear that the first phone call had a single objective: to set up the first meeting. As such, there was no burning need to impress or spend time getting to know one another on the phone before going on the date. That's not to say that the first call isn't important – I was recently told that it was my chatty, friendly phone manner on an initial call made my suitor far more eager to meet me than he had been before we spoke.

But with Internet dating, things are not nearly as black and white. The phone call is the last 'test' left before making a decision to take things a step further and actually meet. And many a good potential dater has fallen at this critical phase. Yet even getting to a point where there IS a phone call is a fairly advanced stage in the Internet dating relationship.

First you need to make contact on a site. Then you need to get a response (certainly not a given thing – I would estimate only 10-15% of people respond at all, and at least a third of them just respond with a polite "just-not-that-interested" email). Once the 'reach-out' and 'initial response' phases are through, there tends to be a period of varied length where emails or text messages are exchanged. This is often the phase where candidates drop like flies. Bad spellers, incoherent authors, even people who take so long to respond you can't remember what their profile looked like – all can easily result in elimination from the dating game. And then someone pops the question: "Can I have your number?".

This is the point where my first warning is definitely called for. When initially embarking on the journey of Internet dating, the email phase can take weeks or months. Certainly for me, this was the most intriguing phase of the cyber-dating process, where witty writers sent short, funny notes all day long and there was an excited sense of being wooed constantly. The anticipation grew and grew until you simply HAD to meet, and often it just took an initial glance at one another in person to realize that there was absolutely no chemistry and that all the writing back and forth had been in vain.

I clearly remember a vacation I took in South Africa where I met someone via computer just before I left. Since there was no time to meet face-to-face before my vacation, we chatted on messenger while I was away, with the intention of meeting on my return. The chatting rapidly progressed from the exchange of a quick note in the morning and night to constant emailing and obsessive checking of the messenger throughout the day, not to mention enormous phone bills due to excessive trans-Atlantic text messaging. We communicated beautifully, he made me laugh out loud with his witty retorts, and the anticipation was so intense by the time I returned from my trip, I almost asked him to meet me at the airport.

One of the funniest things he did at the time was his response to my request for a photograph (While I'm not obsessed with how my dates look, I do like to be able to recognize them when we meet). His response was to send a picture of himself from thirty years before - the cutest four year old I'd ever seen. That should have set off alarm bells rather than butterflies deep inside, but in my naïve way I simply thought that if he had been such a cute kid, he surely couldn't have changed that much.

Alas, all it took was one face-to-face meeting to realize that not only had he not grown up into anything to write about, but I strongly suspect that even the picture of the four year old was not of him but of some other child. Three weeks of anticipation were extinguished with three minutes of personal contact, and we parted ways so I could rush home and delete all the needless correspondence that had preceded the disastrous date.

This leads me to the next warning – people who refuse to send photos don't want to be seen. Of course, you could interpret their reluctance as them being so good looking they don't want people to date them for their physical appearance alone. I'm sure that happens once in a millennium. However, the likelihood is far greater that they don't think you'll date them if you see how they look. There are many excuses for not sending pictures – they just got a new computer so they don't have a photo; they really aren't photogenic so they refuse to have photos taken; or my favourite, they will only send a photo once they've seen YOURS (then you never hear from them again). I don't really get this one – surely if you intend to meet in person anyway, and you don't think they'll go for your look, would you prefer to be rejected via email on the basis of your photograph rather than in a face-to-face meeting, where your actual personality has come into the equation as well?

And now for my final warning: ignore the little voices that arise in your head after a good phone call, whispering 'he's the one' in your head before you've even met him. Those little buggers are there to mess with you, and you can never know that someone is the man of your dreams until you've spend time with him. Overblown anticipation for a first date is a sure-fire way to kill any chance you had in the first place. No first date can live up to the expectation that the one meeting will be the beginning of the rest of your married life. Take your anticipation and crumple it up into a little ball of interest, then stick it in your back pocket till you've gotten to know your mystery man. And don't worry, that little bundled ball will not go away all together. It won't even crease – it will simply pop back up again when the time is really right.

16,378 eligible bachelors are online now

Internet dating is probably one of the most interesting social revolutions we've witnessed. Certainly in the dating world, the advent of the online matchmaker has turned blind dating from a random act of faith and human kindness to a very focused, studied, formal act of guided navigation. To do it well, one needs fine-tuned skills, both in the way one projects oneself in a profile and in the way one sifts through the dozens of inappropriate potential suitors to find those who wouldn't constitute a complete waste of time. The term 'searching for a needle in a haystack' has never been more appropriate than in cyber(dating)space, except that in this case the 'needle' is constantly on the move, looking for a find of its own. The fact that Internet dating EVER succeeds is really a miracle, when you think about it.

Yet it does succeed. One of my best friends met and married the love of her life through the Internet, and I hold them to blame for the many years I persevered in my own quest for love via computer. If it worked for people I know, surely it could work for me too?

The issue with Internet dating is that there are thousands of people 'playing the game' simultaneously, all the time. That makes the need for quick decision making an imperative – nobody has time for three or four dates before they decide whether to become a couple or not; not when they know they can go home and find one of 20,000+ eligibles just waiting to wink, nudge or shoot them with cupid's arrow. So meeting someone from the Internet has an unsaid rule that by the end of the first date you have to be in deep infatuation if you're going to see one another again.

I remember one particular date that seemed to go very well right until the end. He was a busy lawyer who lived near the ocean, and we met for a walk on the beach near his home one evening. It was a busy beach and I was comfortable with his company. The date was fun, he had a good sense of humor and we seemed to have quite a lot in common. Had friends fixed us up I would have given them bonus points for the good match, and in this case I felt like I had finally navigated well through the dating site I was on at the time. At the end of the date, we came up from the beach with sand up to our knees, and when he took my hand to help me up over the rocks we'd sat on, he didn't let go. But when he asked whether I would like to wash my feet off at his apartment, I felt like agreeing could give him mixed messages, and thanked him but declined his offer. I had a towel in my car and preferred the idea of going home sandy than going to his home at all. It was at that point that he told me that he would not be calling me again. I was really surprised – we'd had a nice time, we seemed to get on very well, yet when I turned down an offer to wash my feet at him house, he was put off? I asked him straight out what made him so sure we shouldn't meet again (another side effect of cyber dating, where you allow yourself to be as frank and direct as you like, since you know there is no way you'll meet your date again). He also gave me a very direct response: that he was not prepared to invest time and effort in dating someone if he hadn't checked out the chemistry in bed yet. It seemed like a true waste of resources to woo someone and find out too late that the intimate side of the relationship required work, so he preferred to 'nip the courting in the bud' as it were, rather than take a chance on bad bedding. When I recovered from my shock and gave this some thought, I realized that this was just another characteristic of the cyber dater – the need to condense weeks or months of relationships into the smallest amount of time to ensure your return on investment in the dating site was worthwhile. Makes me think we should call it 'microwave dating' instead.

Yet another feature of cyberdating that bears mentioning is cyber-amnesia: The forgetfulness of the serial dater who approaches the same person time after time, with no recollection of having made a move previously. One of my friends who's a guru of online dating told me he has a very specific technique – he makes dating a project, whereby at the beginning of the month he sends the same general email to 30 or 40 women on a site, without looking at their criteria at all, and then he waits for responses. He takes the profiles of all the women who respond and only then does he take the time to look at their profiles and see whether they are interesting or not. So for those women out there who have been contacted by someone who caught your eye, yet didn't hear back when you responded to their contact, that could be the reason you've been looking for.

I also had to learn not to take things personally when I was dating on the web, otherwise the exercise could turn into an ego-bashing episode of note. One guy corresponded with me for weeks, seemed to be very interested, yet when he asked me to send a photograph he quickly responded that I was not his type and that I'd not be hearing from him again. Since we'd never even met, I didn't take it personally, I simply expected just that: to never hear from him again. And if nothing else, the incident got me to post my photograph on the site for all to see, just to avoid a similar incident in the future. Much to my amusement, he did contact me again, using the same witty first email he'd caught my attention with months before. He'd forgotten we'd been in touch, and he also seemed to have forgotten that I was not his type, since my photograph was now available for him to see and he'd approached me anyway. I replied to his email by copying and pasting his response to me from months before, and that seemed to really do the trick – this time, I really did not hear from him again.

Even more extreme was the guy I actually MET a couple of times, went on some mediocre dates with, before making a mutual decision not to pursue a relationship with one another. Within 6 months he had contacted me twice more, on two different sites, with absolutely no recollection of having contacted me or met me previously. It made me wonder if he's actually dated so many women he couldn't keep track any more.

The moral of the story? That may be as elusive as the cyber dating industry itself. I would say keep things in proportion, don't take rejection to heart, meet in public places, and most importantly, have an escape route in mind. After all, if your next date doesn't work out, there are still 16,378 more singles online right now….