How Midlife Relationships Work

(This is an article by the late and brilliant Sue Price.)

Dating Online

by Susan Price, M.A.
Ask more questions, or let us know whether you personal experiences with dating online have been good or bad. we will publish interesting answers! Write me here! – Sue Price

Hi Sue,

I noticed you mentioned once about online personals. I have tried this before with some, shall I say, discomfort. Still, I feel it’s time to make more of an effort to make friends. It appears a lot of dating in the 90′s-2000′s is based online. I am wondering how to write an effective profile and also if you have any site recommendations.

Thanks, Sheila

Dear Sheila,

Thanks for your question! It’s one I am happy to answer in detail. I think the two best sites are Matchmaker.com and Match.com. Match.com is probably the best. I think it’s very important to put a picture up, because far more men answer profiles with pictures, even if they’re not just looking for very good looking women. A picture sort of “personalizes” your profile!

Make it an attractive one that is recent, and close enough to what you look like now that a man could recognize you from it when he meets you. If you don’t have any recent pictures, buy one of those cheap disposable cameras they sell in all the drugstores, preferably one with a flash, and have a friend fill it up with a variety of pictures of you. Then, when you take it in to be developed, ask the store to put the results “on disk”. That makes it easy to put up on your chosen singles dating website.

The Science of Advertising and Internet Personals

By Philip Belove, Ed.D. (all rights reserved.)

In this essay we’re going to think about composing one of those Internet personal ads. These days running one of those ads can cost around $25.00 a month and people usually run these ads for a year or so, so you are looking at spending maybe a few hundred dollars on personal advertising. How will you know if the money is well spent?

“Well,” you say, “it attracts responses.” Fair enough. But mere responses aren’t enough.

A year ago I told the story of a woman who put up a bland profile with no essay and no picture, just answers to the multiple choice questions and within 24 hours she received a letter from a man who said that she was the woman of his dreams and he was just about to give up on Internet personals but then he read her profile and realized he’d found his dream partner and so on…So, clearly, just showing up on the pages can be like walking into a bad bar.

Eliminating the bad and attracting the good are two separate processes requiring separate skills. So , we’re going to talk about personal niche marketing. Looking for a match is not like running for class president or home-coming queen or state representative, or any other activity where you want to generate a huge list of positive responses. All you want is that one person who is good enough and capable enough to partner with you so you can create a great relationship.