Its not an exaggeration to say that all that lies between you and the end of your single days is the skill with which you complete your profile.



The kind of information that youll be asked to reveal about yourself will vary from service to service. Dating sites put a huge amount of effort into coming up with the right questions to make matching easy without putting off new members. Some sites for example, will ask you to tick just a handful of boxes and write one short paragraph. Others will have section after section that grill you about your personality, your interests, your hopes and your history.

In general, its a good idea to complete all the sections of a dating site profile however many they may be. You dont have to do it all in one sitting and you can certainly come back to fill in the gaps later, but as long as you have spaces in your profile that remain unfilled you can give the impression of looking evasive and less than completely serious.

The good news is that the bulk of the profile wont take long to complete. Even the most demanding sites dont ask you to write more than three or four mini-compositions about yourself and your ideal date, and the majority of just about any dating site profile is always a series of checkboxes about your likes and dislikes.

Fill these sections in as accurately and as quickly as you can and move on. For the most part, cyberdaters skip right past these parts of the profile. They look too much like shopping lists. Mostly they help the sites matching engine far more than the dater looking for a match. The fact that someone likes jazz more than rock, or comedies more than documentaries, doesnt really tell you whether theyre going to like you or whether youre going to like them.

A few checkboxes though are important. When you come to tell the world the age range of the person youre looking for, its important to be realistic. Many men in particular like to think that because there are so many women on the Internet, they can use it as a way to meet women half their age. Thats not impossible but at best its going to need a long wait and at worst, its going to be a compete waste of time.

Internet dating can bring all sorts of people together. It can certainly match people up who are looking for something very specific and even a little unusual. But when you begin looking for someone online, you want your profile to be as inclusive as possible. Once the emails come in, you can then start to focus on the most attractive responses. If youd like to meet someone in their early twenties for example but would also be happy with someone in their mid-thirties then its best to choose a wide age range that casts a big net than focus on one particular group and change when you feel youre not having any luck.

When it comes to describing your own age range though, honesty is always the best policy. Theres always a temptation for cyberdaters in their early-somethings to shave a few years off and slip back into an earlier decade. It happens a lot (and its a good reason to be suspicious of people who claim to be aged 29 or 38 etc.) But its just not worth it. At some point you will have to spill the beans and spilling them in front of someone you really want to impress is far worse than being honest to someone you havent met and might never meet. If the passing single really doesnt want to date someone your age, its best not to meet them at all than date them and get the rejection face-to-face.