This is a guest blog by William Phelan, founder and CEO of Perfect Partners.ie.
Online dating is quick, exciting and it has helped countless people to fall in love. But everyday more and more people are discovering that it’s simply not their thing.
The key aspects of online dating, which are completing a personal profile, uploading sensitive information and flirting with strangers online, are much more difficult than these dating websites would have us believe. How many of us are able to capture our own personalities in a 500 word statement, or convey our true beauty through a photograph? Are we even any good at picking out likely matches on photographs alone, or at choosing a trustworthy partner based on an online profile?
And the research supports this. OkCupid found that male users are likely to lie about their height, income and age, whereas women are more likely to lie about their weight and build. While online dating might mean that (some of us) are having more dates than ever before, at the same time the quality of those dates is decreasing. Lots of users of online dating sites are just doing some casual ‘relationshopping’ rather than actually looking for a relationship. It remains true that you are more likely to have a good date if you are set up by a friend than if you meet someone through an online site.
Many of the problems of online dating are neatly solved by online matchmaking, because online matchmaking is less like choosing from a sea of personal profiles, and more like going on a date that has been setup by a mutual friend. Matchmakers take the guesswork out of dating by putting the human element back in. If you sign up to a matchmaking service, instead of being asked to complete a profile that will be evaluated by others, you are asked instead to come and chat with us over a coffee.
We talk to you for as long as it takes to get a sense of what you are looking for and what kind of person will make for a good match. You don’t have to worry about anything more than turning up and being yourself, and we’ll take care of the rest, right up until the point where we set you up on a date. We take the technology out of the equation, remove the worry that personal data will be leaked, and because everyone that we send on a date has been personally screened, we also greatly reduce the risk of someone being disingenuous.
You don’t have to worry about selling yourself, and instead can focus on being yourself, because only then are you likely to be in the right frame of mind for finding love. In a world of Ashley Madison scandals and Match.com data leaks, it’s not so surprising that many people are asking for less online dating and more online matchmaking.
By William Phelan
William Phelan is an expert on dating services. As the founder of Perfect Partners, a matchmaking service based in Dublin, he has helped hundreds of people of all ages to find meaningful and lasting relationships.