Door Valentines: Lucky In Love Online

In places like Door County, where “small town feel” equates to knowing the entirety of the available dating pool (or feeling that way), singles looking for someone to date often hop on the online dating bandwagon. In time for Valentine’s Day, I caught up with two Door County ladies well versed in the online dating world for their tips to getting lucky in love online.

Do go the distance. Door County is roughly 75 miles long and there is a good chance that, if you’ve been here and been single for at least a few years, you know 85 percent of the available dating pool. Expect to travel to make online dating work – setting your dating radius to 150-250 miles will increase the number of potential matches for you.

With your profile, less is more. Anything you write about yourself in your user profile is going to feel very declarative. As one of our experienced online daters said, “There’s no way you can boil yourself down to one paragraph.” Keep things brief and use your profile as an invitation for conversation.

Think hard about your profile picture. Life’s not fair and neither are stereotypes, but in the case of your dating profile picture, stereotypes are exactly what you should keep in mind. Dead animal in your photo? That screams “macho alpha male.” Holding your sister’s baby? “I want to settle down, like, yesterday.” If that’s what you are going for, great! But if not, proceed with caution. Oh, and for the sake of everyone, no selfies in the mirror of you holding your phone. And please wear a shirt.

Spelling is important, but so is content. Not everyone has superior editing and spelling skills. If you happen upon a profile with less than stellar grammar, give the person a chance. They may have other skills that got lost between forgetting “I before E except after C.”

Get on the site, but don’t “hang out” on the site. The point of being on a dating site is to meet people. If things feel okay, go ahead and agree to a meeting in person, even if it might feel too early (i.e. you’ve only chatted with them a few times). Your profiles and online conversations may declare a promising future but being face-to-face will show you if you are really compatible. If not, you didn’t invest too much time.

Have a float plan. If you agree to meet someone in person, make sure you inform friends and/or family about your plans: where you are going, what time, your date’s full name, and their dating site username. Then pick a time to check in with them during the date.