Online Dating Blog

When dating online you may find yourself asking: Why did he stop responding? Did I scare her off? Did I say something wrong?

These are some of the most popular questions I receive from readers, both men and women. They will often send me their email communications to try to help identify where things went wrong…or if they went wrong at all. I want to offer some advice to any readers out there who might have these same worries.

Be Patient

Probably the most import piece of advice for you to follow here. Some people are just slow to respond. If you are talking to someone and he or she says that life is busy at the moment, remember that the next time they are slow to respond. Don’t mess things up by jumping to conclusions. I’ve had several instances where people have sent me an email asking for advice and before I was able to respond I receive another email from them saying something along the lines of, “False alarm! He ended up emailing me a few hours after I contact you!”

Date Multiple People

A big part of my guide discusses how dating multiple people at one time takes much of the stress and worry off of online dating. Because you have many opportunities for success, everything is not measure by your interactions with a single person.

This is especially true in a case like this. If you are communicating with one person, you’re always waiting to hear from them. If you are communicating with several people you’re often not waiting for anyone in particular. You will feel more comfortable and you aren’t worried about how you “messed things up”. In turn, you’re not writing the what-did-I-do-wrong emails and scaring them off (because you looked at best insecure and as worst like a potential stalker).

Don’t Obsess

If you’ve ever seen the movie Swingers you know that some people have all kinds of rules around how quickly a man should call a woman. The point of these rules in large part is to give the appearance that you have all kinds of other things going on in your life.

I’m really not one for following arbitrary rules. However, if you simply can’t deal with people who respond slowly and find yourself hurting your own chances, have a plan and stick to that. For example, agree to write someone you’re talking to once every two days or once after they send you an email.

I know when I was dating online I scared a woman off with one of my responses when I could have just said nothing at all and been fine. Rules like this aren’t normally necessary but if you can’t help but sending 3 emails asking if everything is okay it would be far better to have arbitrary rules like this.

The One That Got Away

With online dating people do have success. You may be talking to a great man or woman only for them to disappear and this very well could mean that they’ve found a relationship they want to pursue more seriously. This is a risk you need to accept when you date online and by talking to multiple people at once you’ll cause this situation to bother you less.

Just be prepared that this sort of thing happens to most of us if we date online long enough and don’t take it as a personal insult.

Don’t Endlessly Chase Someone

At times, a guy will contact me and will send me a chain of emails that he has had with a woman looking for an explanation as to what he’s doing wrong. Often I’ll send him a response similar to this: “You’re not doing anything wrong but I wouldn’t pursue her any further”. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a woman and actually putting in an effort but there is definitely a point where you need to draw the line.

Try to be honest with yourself when looking at your communication. Often when I look at an email chain I can immediately see that things aren’t going anywhere but the person asking for advice is holding onto any shred of hope possible.

At the end of the day if someone is interested in you, they’re going to write you back and they are going to show interest. It may not be as quickly as you want but if the interest is there, the emails will be there too. At times I chased when I should have stopped so I understand how hard it can be to call it quits when we are so driven to succeed. I’ve been there and I understand but I also understand that contacting a new person is most often a better use of your time.

Learn From Your Experiences

I have actually given people the advice I’m covering here and at the end they agree they need to stop pursuing someone. Then when they start talking to a new potential date, they end up sending me questions again!

For me, the best teacher was actually getting out there and dating. Don’t toss out the lessons you learn as you date online more actively. Try to start to recognize when things aren’t headed in a good direction. Be purposeful about detecting what is working and what isn’t. This is more of a general rule for online dating as opposed to one limited to how quickly you are getting email responses.