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Q: Do you believe that online dating works?

A: My 68-year-old mother recently married a man she met online. She didn’t even own a computer, but she walked to the library every day to go online and chat with him. He lived over 800 miles away, and she never would have met this wonderful person in any other part of her life. But now, happily married, she is a huge advocate of the process – as is her daughter!

I have never really understood those who consider online dating sites to be foolish and even dangerous. I often hear the comment, “Aren’t you afraid of meeting some lunatic?” or worse yet, “Only desperate losers try to meet people on the Internet” (Thanks a lot!).

So to them, I pose the following scenario:

Imagine being in a smoky, dark, crowded and very loud bar at 11 p.m. Everyone in the bar has had several drinks, the music is pounding, and you can barely see your own toes through the darkness and smoke. How likely are you to meet someone, have a meaningful conversation, and ascertain if they have similar goals, beliefs and a compatible lifestyle?

Other questions: How can your personal experiences and professional expertise help other members? Are there tips or guidelines you feel all men would benefit from? What's one of the most striking profiles you've seen on TRUE and what made it such a standout? What should men know before they attempt to contact you?

The answer is, you can’t. The only qualifier you have in a bar is how someone looks, as even conversation is tainted by alcohol and screaming over deafening music. That doesn’t get you very far in finding your heart's soul mate.

Now imagine you are home in front of your computer. You browse a dating site, and find three people you think are very attractive. After reading about each of them, you learn that one of them is a militant vegetarian, but you love grilling steaks. Unless you want to hear a speech every time you throw a steak on the barbeque that relationship probably won’t work.

You learn another one is an atheist and you, in fact, are very spiritual and are looking for someone to attend services with. You read that the third one loves German Shepherds, the Red Sox, hiking up volcanos, and she wants four kids – just like you! At this point, you can approach someone you know you have commonalities with and start a meaningful dialogue.

Let’s go back to the bar. If there is a lunatic there, they have physical access to you. They can follow you, harass you and get your license plate number. On one occasion, a man followed me home from the bar to learn where I lived!

How much safer are you online, where you can remain anonymous for as long as you like?

Like my mom, I have met several wonderful men online. Although I have not met "the one" yet, I have never had a bad experience when I met a man in person, and I have made lifelong friends. The trick is to do it correctly – to utilize all the resources on the site to allow you to determine if this person is compatible with you.

A word of caution – the biggest mistake I see men making goes back to one simple truth – if you treat an online dating site as one big bar scene, you will fail.

If you only make judgments based on looks, if you don’t take the time to learn something about the women who interest you, if you immediately offer your phone number and hope they will call, you will fail. If you truly want to meet your soul mate and your lifelong best friend, learn some of the guidelines of online dating.

I used to get annoyed at men for some of the ways they approached this process, but I have come to learn that more than likely, they are just not aware of how their approach translates to the females on the site. I hope I can provide insight so that you will very soon be enjoying the company of that special person.

Other questions:

Do you believe that online dating works? Are there tips or guidelines you feel all men would benefit from? What's one of the most striking profiles you've seen on TRUE and what made it such a standout? What should men know before they attempt to contact you?

Q: How can your personal experiences and professional expertise help other members?

A: I'm a career marketing professional. When I market a product or service professionally, there are several questions I ask myself.

• Who would be interested in what I am offering?
• What are the positive features of what I am offering?
• What are the weaknesses of what I'm offering versus the competition, and how can I work on those weaknesses?
• What have I learned from marketing this product in the past that worked, or didn’t work?

The very same principles apply when you are on a dating site.

One of the funniest headlines I have ever seen on TRUE was “I feel like I just put myself on eBay." I thought it was insightful for this gentleman to realize that meeting people online requires you to market yourself, to package the product and make it irresistible to the "buyer."

In speaking to men, I have come to realize that our online experiences are very different. While men feel they are chasing and doing most of the contacting, women are often inundated by emails and winks and it's nearly impossible, even with our best intentions, to respond to everyone. So how can you make yourself stand out against the other emails and get your response? It’s all about marketing!

Highlight your uniqueness

Remember that no product is attractive to every consumer. Recently, a man wrote to me who had a very specific personality and look – big, bald, earrings and a Harley! His email was very sweet, and let me off the hook if I didn’t find him attractive. He wrote, “ I won’t take offense if you don’t like my type – some people don’t even like chocolate.” How true! Remember that your goal is not to attract everyone on the site, but to attract those who are shopping for the qualities you possess. Think about what makes you unique and then highlight it.

Think about who you want to attract

I like to experiment with my profile to see how words can affect who I attract. I wrote a profile that was very intellectual, referenced my love of art galleries and history, my career accomplishments and the last novels I had read. I received many emails from older gentlemen, learned and accomplished, but on the very serious side.

I then revised my profile to showcase my wit, my goofy side, my love of amusement parks – and my responses radically changed over to much younger men, most of them, to be honest, too young for me.

Market yourself

One mistake I see often are men who don’t market themselves, but instead put forth a laundry list of qualities a woman they date must have. This is an immediate turnoff. All it says to me is that you are concerned with your own preconceived ideas and do not care if your personality is compatible with mine. As a matter of fact, if all you tell me is what qualities your ideal woman must have, I know little of your personality, except that you would be very demanding of me.

Be real about who you are

Seems obvious doesn’t it? It doesn’t take long to realize when someone misrepresents themselves to have trust gone. I once met a man whose photos indicated that he was a model. He wrote to me, we struck up a conversation and he made me laugh more than anyone I have met before or since. We chatted for a few weeks, then agreed to meet. When we did, he was approximately 100 pounds heavier than his photos.

I genuinely liked the man, so I happily left with him for our date. When we arrived, the maitre d’ called him “Dr. Smith”. I asked him, “You’re a doctor?” and he said “No, you just get more respect that way.” As the night wore on, it became increasingly obvious that very little about this person was real. And that was his downfall.

Honesty always trumps whatever deficiencies you may think you have. We all have them and quality people are less judgmental then you think.

Other questions:

Do you believe that online dating works? How can your personal experiences and professional expertise help other members? What's one of the most striking profiles you've seen on TRUE and what made it such a standout? What should men know before they attempt to contact you?

Q: Are there tips or guidelines you feel all men would benefit from?

A: I cannot stress this fact enough. There are some things that men do (or don’t do) that immediately send them to the trash file.

They may be wonderful people, but I will never know that because they are doing things that make them undesirable to the female searching for a quality guy. I have come to believe that men are not aware of how these actions will quickly turn a woman off .

However, a few simple changes in your approach will almost definitely yield a much higher response rate, and hopefully the relationship you are seeking.

Join the site

I do not work for TRUE, and they are not paying me to write this. The fact is, if you don’t join the site, you cannot effectively communicate with someone. We're not talking large dollars here. I suspect you spend more than $25 in a single night on the town!

Trust me, sending wink after wink (some men have sent as many as 30 in one day!) to let me know you are interested, when you can't communicate on the site, is annoying, not flattering. I want to be able to converse with you, and to know that you think a small investment is worth it to meet me, and other quality women.

Post a photo

As a member of this site, let me lay it out there for you. You are not likely to get a response without a photo. Yes, I am an advocate of reading profiles. But think of it this way: You walk into a bar, and there is a pretty woman you’d like to meet. She is surrounded by other men, but you are very interested in her based on how she looks. You promptly put a bag over your head so she can’t see you, and expect her to pick you because you assure her she won’t be disappointed. It doesn’t work.

I will respond to an average-looking man with a photo posted long before I will to someone who claims to be stunning looking, but is invisible. We live in an age of digital photography, when it's completely possible to obtain a nice photograph of yourself. Would you go out unshaven, unshowered, in a grungy T-shirt and expect women to fall for you? It doesn’t work.

I once was chatting with a man who complained that very few women responded to him. He was funny and articulate, but his photo was admittedly not too flattering. He looked overweight, tired and unhappy.

One day I pulled up his alternate photos, and there was a young looking, well-toned version of him, very happy and handsome! I asked him how long ago that photo was, and he said “It’s actually more recent, I lost a lot of weight.” I immediately told him to make that photo his primary and ditch the other photo completely. Twenty-four hours later he told me he had 50 emails, and last I heard he was happily dating a woman from the site.

You need to present your best self! Not a glamour shot, just a happy, smiling version of the every day you! Not everyone is looking to date a GQ model, but we also don’t want to date someone who hasn’t showered and is scowling at the camera.

As a side note, I am not sure why most men think shirtless photos are necessary, but unless they involve a boat, a beach, or a weight-lifting competition, it’s a little creepy. Also it's bad form to post photos of you more than a few years old.

None of us are getting any younger, and I don’t expect you to look 18, but deceptive photos only earn you distrust when the real you is revealed. I’ve heard many men with the same complaint about women, so I know you understand it’s never acceptable to mislead people.

Headlines, screen names and profiles

I just have to say this, as it has bothered me for years. You are not clever if you put 69 in your screen name or headline, yet so many men do this! If you are 35 years old and therefore can claim it as your birth year, fine.

Otherwise, it appears frat-boyish, immature and certainly not attractive. The same goes with other veiled sexual references, boasts of prowess or self-indulgent adjectives (Absolutely Stunning Guy, or Hottest Man You’ll Ever See).

Headlines and profiles should reveal something about your personality. Are you romantic? Playful? Funny? Active? As a creative, romantic and funny person, I gravitate toward headlines that convey such qualities. Some of my favorites include, “Modern Day Pirate Seeks Damsel," "Do You Want to Go to Napa?” and “I’m Not Dead Yet!” (referencing a favorite Monty Python movie). They're favorites because they spoke to me about our commonalities – romance, wine- tasting and comedy.

I am amazed on a daily basis by men who use the words lonely, sad or desperate in their title. Remember I mentioned marketing yourself? No one is looking to be around a depressed person. This immediately sends a guy into the delete file for me.

To turn the tables a bit, I once spoke to a very accomplished businesswoman who was complaining that none of the men she was meeting online took her seriously. I looked at her profile and her headline highlighted her – shall we say – rather substantial physical endowment. No wonder it was difficult to get guys to listen to anything else!

Your headline sets the tone for who you’d like to meet and how you would like to be perceived.

As for profiles, it's very important you make an attempt to fill them out. “Just ask me” is not appropriate, neither is “no answer.” I do not care how attractive you are, if you can't even take the time to give me some insight into your personality, I'm going to assume you have don't have one!

First contact: Winks and emails

Winks are certainly an appropriate way to show interest in someone. However, if your object of interest should respond, please have a way of continuing the communication. Sending multiple winks because you can’t send an email reduces you to a weird, cheap and mute cyber-stalker.

When you contact a woman, please do not immediately ask her if she has IM, or if you can have her email or phone number. The same applies with providing your own phone number. One of the inherent benefits of a venue like TRUE is privacy and security. No one knows who I am until I am comfortable that I want them to have that information.

IMs, emails and phone numbers are traceable and therefore negate my security. In a first contact, requesting such personal information appears pushy and forward, and you should respect a woman’s right to feel safe and comfortable in the process.

If you find a woman attractive, feel free to tell her so. However, calling her "sexy" or "honey" in a first correspondence is tacky, and although having your boyfriend call you “hot” is very flattering, from a total stranger it appears to be the cyber version of a catcall from a construction worker. It will get ignored. It goes without saying – I would hope – that it's always inappropriate to speak in sexual terms to someone you’ve never made contact with before. There are other sites for that.

Finally, just as you are not attracted to every woman who writes to you, I'm not attracted to every man who writes to me. This can be based on looks, on a profile, on an impression, age, or any other criteria. This is not something to be taken personally, remember, “not everyone likes chocolate!”

If you write to a woman and she doesn’t respond, please respect that and move on. If she politely turns you down, do not continue to contact her to plead your case. Also, be patient; some people check their email daily or hourly, and others may not check for days. Everyone's life is different.

When I first joined TRUE, I received over 100 emails in the first 48 hours. I suspect this is a fairly common experience for new women on a site, as I have spoken to many of them. In any event, I did make an attempt to answer everyone, even with a polite “No, thank you.”

The four or five gentlemen that I felt I had a lot in common with, and was truly interested in speaking to further, I set aside so that I could respond to them when I had time, thoughtfully and with the attention I felt they warranted. I received an email from one of these men about 12 hours after he originally emailed me.

He told me I was a “stuck-up, nasty witch, a horrible person and my kids were probably terrible, too.” Wow. I can only assume this was because he perceived that I wasn’t going to respond to his email. Truth be told, I was going to, but thankfully he beat me to it; and, from the tone of his email, I think I dodged the bullet on that one.

When you write to someone, simply point out a few things you have in common (to prove you took the time to read a profile), express your interest in talking further, and continue your search. The right woman, when she doesn’t feel pressured or coerced, will answer you, and you will likely start a nice friendship.

Other questions:

Do you believe that online dating works? How can your personal experiences and professional expertise help other members? Are there tips or guidelines you feel all men would benefit from? What should men know before they attempt to contact you?

Q: What's one of the most striking profiles you've seen on TRUE and what made it such a standout?

A: I think in general, the profiles that stand out are the ones that have shown some thought and introspection.

Like a headline, the profile gives you the opportunity to portray those facets of your personality that make you unique and worthy of meeting. I think anyone who has been online for any length of time can spout off what the "standard” is when writing about oneself. It seems everyone on the site is funny, caring, easygoing, wants to travel and is looking for honesty.

So, in a way, those aspects of the profile are “givens” and a lot of women will automatically disregard those as the exact same profile as the ones they read previously.

However, a well-written profile is one that clearly illustrates your points.  

“I want to travel” would perhaps be better written as "I have always been interested in touring Europe by bicycle, staying by the roadside in a tent, and I would love to find someone to have that adventure with." Well, I love to travel, too, but my idea of a trip is a fluffy bed and room service. Being specific about who are and what you like will help you connect with someone who's right for you.

“I am funny” is always best illustrated by a funny profile showing some wit. Don’t go overboard, just crack a joke here and there to prove your point. I almost guarantee , as a funny person, that if your profile makes me laugh, I will write to you just to tell you I appreciate your humor (keep it clean and unoffensive).  

“I am well-read” is better written as, “My favorite quote from Shakespeare is …” This will allow women with similar literary interests to determine that you did indeed mean you read the classics, and not only the box scores. 

Let your personality shine through and the profile will really capture her. A word of caution – writing “I don’t know what to say,” or “Just ask me what you want to know” does absolutely nothing for your attractiveness to the women browsing the site. I know I look for someone that I can carry on a conversation with. If you cannot articulate your thoughts, or show me that you even have any thoughts, I immediately think conversation will be painful. 

Finally, I will say that trying to generate a response by writing an insulting profile is a major turnoff. I once read a profile from a man who said “I have found most women to be money-grubbing, nasty and disloyal. So if you are only interested in my car or my best friend, DON’T APPLY.” Wow, he sounds like a lot of fun, doesn’t he? Cynicism has no place on a dating site!

As with every other aspect of this process, market yourself by writing about those things that make you a unique and great person. You will find many women who share your interests, just by putting yourself out there.  

Other questions:

Do you believe that online dating works? How can your personal experiences and professional expertise help other members? Are there tips or guidelines you feel all men would benefit from? What's one of the most striking profiles you've seen on TRUE and what made it such a standout?

Q: What should men know before they attempt to contact you?

A: I truly appreciate anyone who notices me and takes the time to contact me. It's flattering and does not go unnoticed. But it's tough to respond to everyone, so those folks who really read my profile will understand what qualities are attractive to me, and will likely generate a response – someone who understands being a single parent, someone intellectual with business savvy, a wacky sense of humor, an active lifestyle, and who has a meaningful spiritual life, for instance.

I'm not saying that a man without all these qualities isn’t a perfectly wonderful human being. It's just simply that at this point in my life, I understand what works for me. 

I urge men who want to write to any woman on the site to be true to themselves and what is important to them. When I receive an email from a man who’s profile clearly states he doesn’t want children, I know my chaotic household would not work for him.

Be honest with yourself about the kind of woman you're looking for – not just what your mental image of her might be. Don’t let an attractive photo alone sway you in your convictions and beliefs, and you'll likely find your true match.

Learn about your most compatible matches

Take any of the family of tests that make up the TRUE Compatibility Test to learn more about yourself and the kind of person who will rock your world! Try the TRUE Interests test, the TRUE Personality test, the TRUE Communication test, the TRUE Sexploration test, the TRUE Romance test and the TRUE Commitment test!