First, you should know that your initial results will likely be far from a fairytale ending. Dating sites usually make you take some kind of personality and lifestyle assessment in order to come up with your ideal “matches.” Some of these assessments are rather generic, so your matches will be far from tailored or vetted. With generic matches you might get matched with someone who’s only common trait is your love of pizza.

Other dating sites force you to take very specific and probing assessments. The result? You may get rejected! These dating sites only accept what they deem as healthy, happy, stable people as candidates, which is far from fun for our mostly neurotic population. Even if you are accepted, you may not have a match within two hundred miles. Makes finding a date a little more difficult, doesn’t it?

Nothing is free and good sites charge a monthly fee. On top of having to pay for internet access, a decent computer and a digital camera to get your picture on the web, you’ll have to pay what is sometimes $20 a month to get your information out there. When you add all this into the cost of the actual preparation and dates you go on, it makes dating a much more costly affair than it needs to be. There are totally free dating sites and you can do things cheaply, but remember, you get what you pay for.

Sometimes what you THINK you want is not what you should be having. While some people are enlightened enough to know exactly what they are looking for, the majority of us only delude ourselves into thinking we know. Part of the dating process is trial and error, and dating sites will usually match you with a number of the same kinds of people, which theoretically can become the equivalent of banging your head against a brick wall.

Dating sites can be extremely helpful, especially for those with busy lives. There are plenty of stories out there about people finding the love of their lives online. It can also be useful to check out a dating site if you’re just getting back into dating. However, as with almost all online offers, it is important that buyer beware. A healthy dose of skepticism can be your best friend. Best online dating sites that are superior offer a free trial for you to test drive their wares.

One of the many ways to build trust in a relationship is to be predictable. Forget what people say that you must stir things up. That’s not true at all. You need to be constantly consistent in you relationship to build some trust with your partner. You also have to be reliable too because that goes much further that just coming up with new things to keep things exciting.

Don’t keep secrets from your partner. Never try to commit the mistake of lying by omission. Once your partner finds out that you’re keeping a secret, they will find it hare to ever trust you again. When you start lying to your partner, it will become worse and worse. Little lies may sound not dangerous at first but eventually, those little lies will become bigger and you will have to come up with more bigger lies to cover up the little lies that you started with. This cycle will go on and on until one day, you will realize that you have lied to much although you never meant to in the first place.

Be sincere in what you say. Don’t just say things for the sake of words, do it and show it to prove that you really mean what you say. Your words have to match what you do. You have to prove the sincerity of your words through your actions. Your actions have to at least speak louder than your words.

Don’t be afraid to tell your partner what you need. Your partner can’t read your mind. So communicate your needs as much as you can so that your partner will know how to cater to you.

A relationship requires a lot of work. It requires work for it to be successful. You will come to terms with crisis, emotional problems and questions in your relationship. Embrace them and work hard to make your relationship stronger. As your relationship grows, you will also grow with it.

Guest post. Author Recommends Dating Sites: Mywolfbook.com - Meet friends online, Make friends online.

Mandi and I appreciate comments and emails from readers. We sincerely try to provide help and guidance in the online dating arena, and when someone spends the time to write a well-written email like this that has a strong opinion of a site, we feel it’s in your best interests to print it.

We received this email from Stan, and decided to print it in its entirety to warn you of his opinion and experiences with Chemistry.com. I have to admit that I’ve been having some of the same issues since I joined; in fact, it’s been several weeks and I haven’t even had email correspondence from anyone on the site.

Thanks, Stan, for taking the time to write this:

borderline scam?

Hi, not sure if you guys tried out chemistry.com but it’s a borderline scam. Supporting that site is going to lead to disappointed readers.

The problems with chemistry.com are numerous.

dating preferences ignored

1. It ignores your preferences. It keeps matching me up with people who would have no interest in me or vice versa. For example, I describe myself as average in build, and it matched me up with someone who only wants to meet athletic people.

2. Distance. The site is insane. I live near LA. I have millions of people all around me and it keeps giving me matches that are 50 miles away. Do you know how long it takes to go 50 miles in LA? Lots and lots of hours!

garbage profiles

3. Garbage profiles. They match you up with people who sign up for free accounts! Those usually don’t bother with pictures and have a few sentences describing themselves. Worthless.

4. More Garbage. On top of that they keep matching you up with inactive accounts as well as the trial accounts. These are people who can’t contact you.

5. They’re not even showing my profile to anyone. It’s been days since my “Interest” count jumped. By “Interested” it means someone saw my profile, doesn’t even mean they’re really interested in me. How is it that they can find 10 matches a day for me to look at, but can’t find anyone to show my stuff to?

This is a complete scam. My “active list” currently has 23 people on it from whom I’m awaiting a reply. None of them have replied – you know why? Because they’re not there.

By “reply” it’s not like they have to send me an email. They simply hit an accept or reject button. Being that they’re not even rejecting me, it’s hard to not be suspicious.

no way to get your money back

This site is a scam and I’m seriously considering contacting my credit card, the better business bereau, the chamber of commerce in their home city.

At this point I just want my money back and their policies don’t even allow that.

This site is a scam. Please warn your readers.

Thanks Stan, for your input. We also have an article about my personal experience with Chemistry.com.

OKCupid! Is Worth Checking Out

For those of you who haven’t tried it – OKCupid! is really worth a look. First off, it’s a FREE dating site. That’s right, FREE. No gimmicks, no spam (I have a specific email I used for them, I would know if they sold my address.)

However, even more than the fact that it’s free (did I mention that already?) is that the technology behind the search as a least as good as, if not better than expensive dating sites like E-Harmony, Chemistry.com and Match.com.

Improve Matches

By answering questions for yourself and then how your ideal match would answer, they are able to better match you with someone you’d actually like to date. The more questions you answer, the better suited your matches will be for you.

The questions are multiple choice, select 1 answer for your self, and depending on the question, multiple answers for your ideal match. What I really like about this is we don’t always want our partner to mirror us in everything. If I would do one thing, but want a guy to do something slightly different, or if it’s something that is not that important to me, I can specify in my answer.

You also can mark how important a question is to you, even making it a “Key Question” that someone must answer before they can message you. Unlike the hours of profiling at E-Harmony, you can answer 1 question and move on, or get obsessed and answer 100 in one sitting. Most of the questions are USER written (monitored by staff) so these are things people who actually use the site care about.

Match Percentages

All the profiles show you what percentage “Match,” “Friend” or “Enemy” you are with the person you are looking at. Based on the number of questions you have EACH answered, you will see a “Maximum Possible Match” percentage. If one of you hasn’t answered very many questions, your percentage will be lower.

OK Stalkers!

No, not real stalkers – but the Stalkers feature allows you to see who has viewed your profile, and how long ago. It helps to know if a guy is interested in you before you "Woo" him. You can turn these features off; you won’t show in others stalker reports, but you won’t see who viewed you.

Quick Match

This is a great feature. With a few basic criteria: Age Range, Location, Gender and Orientation, you can quickly browse through potential matches. They have you rate them 1-5 stars on Looks (let’s face it, we all care about what the photo looks like, at least they are honest) and Personality.

They do have a “can’t tell” button if the photos are blurry, the profile doesn’t have a photo, or if they didn’t fill out their profile. After you rate, it moves to the next user. If you rate someone 4-5 stars for looks or personality and they rate you 4-5 stars as well, you will both be notified via email.

What I love about this is if I find a guy good looking, it takes the worry out of what he thinks about me. I know for sure the guy is interested in me. Getting those emails with the subject “4 or 5 Star Match” is a real ego booster.

Personality Awards

This feature is a little harder to understand and get used to. To really understand it, check out their FAQ’s which are actually an entertaining read. Basically, they compile all the data from the Questions and Tests you can take, and based on magical numbers I don’t understand, figure out where you are in certain categories versus the rest of the population.

For example, on my profile I have the following awards: More of a Planner, Less Compassionate, More Independent, More Extroverted and so on. These are all dead on. Now sometimes I will see one and think where did they get that, but the awards change based on the questions and tests you take.

Notes

This is GENIUS! You can add a note to a profile, they don’t see it but you can review. So you can leave a note if you messaged someone, if they were rude, anything that will help you know what’s going on.

Dead to Me

The ability to prevent certain members from showing up in any of your match lists. This is great when an ex or a co-worker keep popping up in your list.

WTF Reports

Directly from their site “WTF Reports allow you to compare your Match Question answers with those of another user, and see what sort of "damage" it did to your Match Percentage with that user when you answered questions differently.”

So now when you wonder why a guy doesn’t seem quite right for you, you can see what’s really going on. You can even control the ability to pull a WTF Report, so that they can’t do it without your knowledge / approval.

There are lots of other great features on the OKCupid dating site…and all this for the low, low cost of NOTHING. At that price, I urge you to check it out.

Keep in mind, that no matter if an online dating site is free or costs tons, make sure you read 10 Tips for Staying Safe When Using an Online Dating Service and remember to watch for Red Flags.

Three months for the price of one on Chemistry.com! You save more than 50%!

Here’s how it’s going so far…

An Evenly Sliced Personality

What really sucks about my personality test on Chemistry.com is that there are 4 quadrants, and I am very close to 25% on each of them. Which means they can match me up with absolutely anybody and it’s supposed to be a “great match.”

What’s With the No-Photo Profiles?

It doesn’t look to me like they’re paying much attention to my likes and dislikes with the matches they’ve made. Maybe it’s too soon to tell. But I really don’t think the guy that looks like a thug in a Harrah’s t-shirt who wants to go bowling once a week fits my profile at all. And why do they even bother sending me profiles with no photo?

Flunking Essential Relationship Questions 101

There are “relationship essentials” questions, and you rate each item as important to not important to you in a partner on a sliding scale. I think I’m flunking that part.

For example, one of them is extremely clean and neat. Well, I guess maybe I’m too analytical, because I focused on the extremely part…and since I don’t want a neatness fanatic that bitches at me every time I leave a magazine in the wrong place, I rated that somewhat low. Now I’m thinking it makes me look like a slob.

All these guys are highly into fashion and style too. Hmmm.

It’s Either Sincerity or Bullshit

Oh dear, am I being snarky once again? The one thing I do like about most of the profiles I’ve been reading (except for the incoherent one where a man and woman must be ONE and can only be complete with EACH OTHER) is that these guys seem to have put some sincerity and thought into them. Or else they’re all bullshit.

Oops, there I go again!