My relationship of three-years ended a year ago and I now find myself back in the world of being single and dating. I am forty –six years old and I think about when dating was not so difficult and challenging. In my younger days of dating, I usually met people through friends, at parties, at clubs or at church. These were places that encouraged two adults to have a conversation and get to know each other. Wow, how things have changed!

We are at a time in our culture where, according to some, dating via the Internet seems to be the best way to met other singles. Honestly, I can’t keep with all the sites that are now being used. We have Match.com, OkCupid, eHarmony, Plenty of Fish, and BlackPeopleMeet.com just to name a few. A single friend recently said to me, “You have to get out there and be on as many sites as possible.” I responded with an eye roll and, “Oy”.

From my experience, my takeaways from online dating are as follows:

• First, it’s just very hard to spend eight hours at work behind the computer and then go home to spend several more hours looking for a suitable mate.
• Second, some people on these sites would prefer to chat online or via text message all day instead of meeting in person. I believe we have become a society of multiple personalities – an online personality and an in-person personality.
• Third, as alluded to in my second point, when you finally do manage to meet in-person, the conversation is sometimes so bad that you wonder if this was the same person you spent all that time texting with, earlier.
• Fourth, you realize he/she must have used a picture from ten years ago. At this point, the only thing you want is a quick exit.

Everyday I still go back and forth with this dating thing. At forty-six, my patience and tolerance seem to be getting shorter and shorter. Every week I have a check-in with my single friend in Atlanta and he is having the same struggle. At the end of the conversation, we decide to keep looking for that special connection. I guess you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you can find your prince.

Please share your successful dating experiences. And stay tuned for my future blog on the state of relationships with this question to ponder: Have we become complacent and let our standards go just to be in a relationship?  Hmmmmm……..