A Tinder swipe here, a Bumble like there… you’re always one swipe away from finding the love of your life. Here’s how to do online dating properly.
Online dating has been a fantastic solution for discovering someone, and it has been like this for quite some time now. It provides a chance to set your scope outside of business and career, to find somebody you can connect with on a much more personal and intimate level, and whom you might’ve not crossed paths otherwise. It can also be rife with challenges around how you sell yourself, what you need to look out for, and where you draw lines in the sand. Even the world’s most financially successful people can struggle in this arena. Still, taking a measured approach can make it possible to better your chances and enjoy yourself along the way.
First Things First
The internet can be a dangerous place, and this applies to the online dating world as much as anywhere else. Online dating scams are a dime a dozen, so before even thinking of stepping foot into the digital frontier, you need to familiarise yourself with these and how they work.
Scams in online dating fall into several key groups, as explained by ExpressVPN’s blog piece. A popular trick involves sharing intimate photos and messages, which can be used to blackmail. Other times, scammers will build trust and then pressure for financial help with a sob story. Don’t share along these lines to avoid such scams until you meet and trust the person. Take a careful approach, and dating apps can be perfectly safe; just measure your steps.
Confidence Versus Overconfidence
You have every right to be proud of yourself, but you also need to be aware that, even if unintentional, confidence can appear as arrogance. BetterUp notes that both tie into self-esteem, but while confidence measures accurate self-worth, arrogance comes from a feeling of superiority over others.
No matter what you’ve accomplished and where you come from, reflecting arrogance will tend to attract people with similar attitudes. Psychology Today explains this is the narcissistic-tolerance theory, where arrogant people gravitate toward each other, and even if you aren’t arrogant, this can create a problem. Coming from a high-powered and high-pressure job, it can take some effort to relax the helpful and necessarily confident part of yourself, but it needs to be worked on to improve your chances of success.
The Challenge of Matching Lifestyles
Love can come from anywhere, but that doesn’t mean that finding a way forward with someone who isn’t in touch with your lifestyle will be easy. Being a successful person means you can go long periods without much free time, and some partners will have trouble finding peace with that. Again, this is not at all a bad thing, but it can complicate the dating process. To address it, you need to be sure that you can find someone who understands your demanding lifestyle and know that if the other person is too similar, it might be difficult to find time together.
Final Thoughts
Practice and patience in dating is the key to success. Like in business, everybody fails at some point, but what matters is how well you can pick yourself back up and adapt. Most of all, remember to enjoy the experience as you go, as even dates that don’t go places can leave you with important memories you can look back on with fondness.