Who Makes the First Move On Dating Sites

Looking for Love in the Comfort of Her Own Home

In the non-cyber world of regular dating, there are many established dictates and traditions regarding who makes the first move and when to make it. In the "old days," a woman had to wait for a man to ask her for a date. Today, women can be bold and take that first step in both traditional and Online dating. However, some folks are still bound by tradition, which finds many women waiting for the guy to make the first contact. This is no longer necessary.

You see someone you like, go for it!

You have several ways to make contact when using the Internet for dating. The various dating sites have different names for the same things, so here we shall use match.com terms for simplicity.

First, there is the fact that someone looked at your profile. Keep in mind this doesn’t mean they are interested. They may have thought your thumbnail photo looked intriguing, and when they clicked on your profile, they were now

able to see how many front teeth you are missing, and they moved on.

Do keep in mind, looking at someone's profile is the most subtle way to let prospective

dates know you “may” be interested. After all, they get a notification about everyone who

has looked at their profile, and if you look at them a few times, they get the hint that you

may be interested. Again, try to keep from jumping to conclusions. They may merely be

showing your goofy profile to all their friends while laughing their heads off.

If you look at someone a few times and they then check you out, liking what they see,

they may very well contact you. They figure that if you are interested enough to come

around a few times to view their profile, you probably want to be contacted. You, too, can

take this indicator and feel free to contact anyone you wish if they have looked at you

more than once. What’s the worst that can happen? They ignore your contact. If you think

about all this mind reading, it's more like Zen dating, but it works.

So, how do you actually contact someone who strikes your fancy? You can “wink” at a

person, which means that you send them a wink. It's pretty simple and easy to do. You

press a button and they will be notified that someone (you in this case) has winked at

them, or shall we say, showed interest.

It actually makes sense to see if someone is interested in you before you make more

advanced contact; however, there are those women (more than men) who abhor winks.

They protest that if you want to get something going on, you should email them. Don't beat around the bush. And while that might be construed as a sado-sexual comment, it's not!

I suppose those women get so many winks, are impatient, and they feel that it is a cheap

way of communicating. It’s not. If you wish to test the waters, go for it, and send that wink

unless they say, "no winks" in their profile. If they are interested, they will either email you

or wink back if they, too, are a bit shy and fearful of rejection.

Next comes actually sending the person an email through the dating service. This is a

good thing. They never see your real email, and you don’t see theirs. The email comes to

your dating service account, and you can then respond with a reply or not. This helps

prevent stalkers from bothering you.

Some dating services offer additional features that allow you to communicate with prospective dates, such as video chatting or texting, all in a secure manner that keeps your phone number private.

Once you have established a relationship by using your dating service email, you can

eventually give them your personal email address to continue the communications, or give them your phone number and have a conversation.

It’s all good. You now have several means to contact your potential date to see if things

look good for an actual date.

Next,  we shall decide if you should respond to those people who wink or send you emails.