What’s Up With Dating Sites?

I also know what it’s like to be stuck in a repetitive pattern of dating the wrong people over and over again. I got out of my repetitive cycle by changing somethings about myself. In fact, I’m pretty convinced from personal and professional experience that making positive changes in yourself is always the best thing you can do for your love-life.

These days, when someone is looking for love, contemporary dating sites are very inviting. The fact is they’re getting your business by playing on your ‘hope’ of finding someone to love. How realistic their offerings are is something you should think about and know.

Keeping yourself realistic will protect you from the kind of repeated disappointment that can negatively influence your natural need to give and receive love. This need in you is definitely something you’ll want to take good care of out there in the dating world. So let’s look at the promises dating sites are making these days and figure out what’s real and what’s fantasy.

Predicting who will fall in love with whom is the objective of a host of different dating sites. Selling the hoped for consequences of a secret formula is obviously big business. The question is how valid and reliable are their predictions? Some dating sites promote the belief that ‘personality’ dimensions are the key to predicting love.

Others believe that a couple’s ‘interests’ are key. There are even sites that claim to be able to successfully manipulate the elusive ‘chemistry’ of love. I even found a site or two that suggest the best way to find love is to limit your dating pool to friends of friends.

The bottom line is, your hope of finding love is being manipulated for a price.You have to know that love is unpredictable and uncontrollable. So how do you make a business out of something that’s unpredictable and uncontrollable? You create the belief that love can be predicted and controlled. Now you’ve discovered the real secret formula of love.

Lonely hearts with expendable cash will be attracted to the hope you are generating. Whether or not the formula you’ve paid for is effective is not as important as the belief you’ve formed that it can be. With this belief in hand you will risk and hope for the best while at your best.

In Love 101 we learn that you can’t control the ‘chemistry’ of love with an oversimplified formula. You simply can’t determine when and where it will emerge. Love is the last bastion of mystery in human experience. It’s our greatest asset and it’s beyond human control. The only things you can do to increase the chances love will emerge in your everyday life is to increase your preparation for love and your exposure to eligible people.

The need to prepare for love is largely ignored in contemporary dating circles. Most people figure the experiences they’ve had earlier in their lives prepared them well enough for love. A lot of people who are looking for love believe things about love that interfere with or delay the finding of love. The solution is to prepare yourself for love by challenging what you were taught about love that does not help you give or receive love in your life.

The best way to prepare for love is to conduct your own Love-Life Review. This essentially involves reflecting on what you’ve been taught about love in your life and whether or not what you’ve learned is helping or limiting your love-life. I suggest your review include evaluating your own ability to love (how much giving of love do you do in the course of an average day?), your ability to receive love (do you let people who love you love you?), figure out which love-life task you are currently trying to accomplish (find love, sustain love, commit to love, leave love, live alone), and whether or not your expectations (or beliefs) about a lover are realistic.

Here are five (5) corrected expectations or beliefs about love that can be particularly troublesome:

1. Accept that love cannot be controlled or predicted by anyone. Getting this one right will automatically give you a required shot of humility. If you’re going to play in the field of love you’d better understand that love is bigger than all of us.

2. Accept that some people cannot love or be loved. The sad fact is some people in the world just don’t have an interest in whatever love they might have inside. Whether or not you believe that people are born good with the potential to love (which I do), the great tragedy of human living is that a percentage of people will never let themselves love and be loved.

3. Stop trying to ‘fix’ people, make them change, or love you. This one will result in a load of free time. Trying to make people change is a wasted effort in futility. Nobody changes because you want them to. They change because they want to and only if they want to.

4. When love emerges take care of it without controlling it. Control destroys love, pure and simple. One of the best ways to take care of love is to do whatever it takes to solve problems together without blame.

5. The best ‘food’ for love are the friendship values: honesty, equality, freedom, and trust. These grow love faster and stronger than anything else. Remember, this still doesn’t guarantee love will stay a life time. It remains a risk no matter how long you’re together.

Exposure as the other thing you can do to increase the chances of finding love is pretty straight forward. You increase the number of eligible people you are encountering in your life. Here’s where you can be a little creative. So once you’ve done a little ‘preparation’ for love by getting yourself straight on the inside, you can arrange for more exposure to eligible people on the outside. Once you’ve done that, you can hope their personalities are compatible with yours, share similar interests, feel a little old fashion chemistry, and oh yes, are referred by your best friend.

Comments? Welcome. Dr. Tom Jordan