My Internet dating rules

Abbreviated and effortless Internet dating rules for really smart people:

1. Find a contact or be contacted, look at the profile, send an "I like your profile" message and wait for a reply.
2. Look at the reply, revisit the profile and decide if - "worth more"
3. Send email: "I don't have time for emails, here is my phone number, call me or let me have yours and we can talk."
4. Five min about anything on the phone and you can suggest, "You sound interesting, could we meet for a coffee at (your favourite coffee vendor), located somewhere convenient for both of us.
5. Meet for a coffee. Arrive early so you can observe her manners as she walks in.
6. OK, this is a bit of a stressful situation, but neither has invested much yet.
7. Chat and see if you want to meet again.

Good luck.

My procedure, when 63 years old.

• I posted my picture and a true profile, including what I was looking for. If you want a younger woman, say so. I only looked for women close to my age (+- 3 years) who lived close, within a 50 km radius. (There were thousands and thousands of women nearby.)
• I contacted a few (only the ones with a picture) by brief machine-generated "I like your profile"-message, expected to be contacted by others and sat back.
• I got 100 messages, "I like your profile."
• I read all their profiles and replied to 40; "I don't do emails, call me."
• I had 25 phone discussions

IMPORTANT

Make a logbook with many pages and write down, as you speak: "I said", "She said" because that is the ONLY WAY that you can remember your past discussions when you talk again.

At every phone call, check for discrepancies. She talks about work, sports, hobbies, desires, & more. If anything is different a second time, she is a LIAR and a CHEAT. Hang up and tear out her page, never to be contacted again.

• My 25 telephone contacts, some of whom I spoke to several times, led to 17 coffee dates. (I read my notes from our tel-discussions before we met)

• Some weren't what they said, the photo was different, she weighed 175 lbs, not 130, she walked with a limp, she had a sick child, she lived off welfare (true) but dressed to the hilt, too much make-up for a coffee date, she smelled of tobacco (an absolute no-no for me) or just gave off the wrong vibes when we met.

• A few deceived me a little still, as I found out later. One invited me to her house before we went to a dance - It wasn't HER HOUSE. I was too polite to back out, we went dancing, I took her home and tore the sheet about her out of my book.

• One was great, lots of fun. We went to a dance and enjoyed ourselves. On the way home, she said almost in passing: "I am so glad I took two tonight". Two - what? "Pills" --- GOODBYE, I don't want to ever deal with people who take "happy pills".

• One had a nice job and lived in a nice house, where she had the upper floor and she supported her old immigrant parents, who spoke no English, she could only "go out" when she wasn't looking after her parents, i.e. they were sleeping or watching TV. Impossible.

Summary: Use your time and money effectively, don't waste anything on anyone who doesn't start out perfect. No troublesome kids, no exes to deal with, no bankruptcy, nothing that sounds "strange".

Use your brain, you are on a mission to find a nice woman, just not performing a mental exercise... ! 

It took me two months, from the beginning to end before I had "connected" with Rose and discarded all of my notes.

Good luck, my friend - you need to get out of a rut now...

Good site:  www.match.com - largest paid site in the world, owned by Microsoft. $ 22.00/mo The more you tell about yourself, the better the matches sent to you.   

Largest FREE site in the world:  http://www.pof.com/ with many, many millions of contacts. Too many fakes for my liking.

Don't hesitate, you'll be amazed at what you will find, but - REMEMBER - NO lengthy emails or online chats. Go straight to the telephone.