Your friend has decided that you need help with your social life so she sets you up with a blind date….a friend of a friend of a friend.  You, foolishly, accept.  Now there you are. It’s less than one hour since you were introduced.  You are sitting in a Thai restaurant and you hate Thai food.  The entrée has not yet been served.

His idea of enlightened conversation is who will be in the final four…you aren’t into sports. He knows the weekly TV schedule verbatim….you haven’t sat through a movie in months because you run marathons and volunteer at the local food bank. He says, “Volunteering is a waste of time because you can’t help ‘those people’ anyway.” You look at your watch; see that it’s only been 10 minutes since you last looked at it the last time and wonder how long it is before you can gracefully remove yourself from the situation.  Been there?
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Online dating can be a fun and certainly a rewarding experience for women of all ages. Maintaining your safety while doing it is simply a combination of using common sense and exercising good judgment. Online safety rules are the same as real world safety rules.

You wouldn’t give your name, address and phone number to a strange man that you met in a bar or on the street so you should never do that online either. Play it safe. Get to know this man who could turn out to be Prince Charming before you give out any information that could make it possible for him or others to trace you. Don’t tell a stranger exactly where you work.

Say that you are a legal secretary (if that’s what you are) for a mid-sized law firm….not that you work for Brown, Smith and Jones Attorneys-at-law. It is safe to tell him what city you live in but you should wait to be any more specific than that until you have been chatting and exchanging emails for awhile.

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People have taken to online dating like a duck takes to water…because it works…or, at least, it can work.  Women are, in general, terrified of meeting a man that she has been chatting with online.  All they have heard about are the scary things that can happen…and, I must say, they have a right to be careful to the extreme.  That’s not only wise but vital.  So what’s a nice guy to do?  You aren’t a pervert, a sexual predator, or a weirdo.  You are just a nice guy looking for “the” girl for you.

You must be patient.  Don’t press her for personal information like her real name or where she lives.  Keep your conversations light and fun until she feels comfortable talking with you online.  Don’t try to rush her into meeting face-to-face.  She will think you are desperate or a pervert.  Patience.  Patience. Patience.
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A couple of popular online activities are sharing recipes and bidding at auctions. And both of these easily fit well into online dating opportunities, one of the most popular online activities for singles today.

To help many dates get better acquainted online, here’s what potential cyber-dates do.

Sharing Recipes – People get tired talking about the weather. So a popular subject to turn to is food. Sharing favorite foods and recipes helps break the ice and even forms friendships over culinary skills – or lack of – and tastes. Search your favorite search engine for “free recipes” to share. Take photos of your culinary creations and share them with your date, too.
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No matter what your age, height, weight or physical appearance, there are thousands of women out there eager to meet you and eager for your company…whether short-term or long-term relationships are what you want.  If you have found yourself suddenly “on-the-market” again after a relationship has dissolved or are just too busy with your work to spend a lot of time looking for a lady to keep you company, online dating can open the door to the dating scene for you.
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Almost everything you read about online dating safety is directed at women but men need to be concerned as well.  Perverts, sexual predators and weirdoes come in both sexes, all sizes, and all ages…as do, liars and cheaters.  So men need to stay on guard, too.

It is common knowledge not to readily give out personal information to strangers.  The reason for not doing so is as large as the number of strangers who want that information.  If you come across a person who is giving out personal information and asking others to do the same, don’t do it.  You don’t know what they want to use it for….and you had better believe they want to use it for something.

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