You’ll hear stories about online dating being full of creepy people and in some cases that’s true but these are the same people who live in your town. You don’t go out with them and you don’t need to choose the creepy people either. I met my husband through an online ad and my daughter met her husband through an online ad. I did it back in 1994 just as the www was getting recognized as a real force in the world.

When we first started SexyAds.com we were excited when we saw the first web address on a billboard at the Atlanta airport. I said to my husband, “the Internet is going to take over the world, just wait and see.” We started one of the first dating sites on the net and here we are twelve years later and we’re still going strong. Sure things have changed, people’s use of the Internet has changed but people still care for each other in the same old way. Just the introduction is different.

Online Dating is a great way to widen your circle of friends. When I told my grown children that i found a man in Australia and I wanted to go to meet him they thought I was nuts. “He’ll be an axe murderer for sure!” my daughter said. We’d emailed, we’d talked on the phone, we’d exchanged photos and I just knew I didn’t want to die not knowing if this man could have been perfect for me. So I got on that plane and here we are, 15 years later and still madly in love. Sure we had all the common problems that communicating through a flat screen can cause, PLUS we were on the slowest dial-up connection which I must admit was the fastest available at the time. We tried live voice chat and all we got out of it was, “can you hear me?” and “nah, you’re breaking up.” Imagine how easy it is today with dating sites left and right and not only live audio chat but audio and video as well.

If you’ve been listening to those who diss online dating, it might be that they joined one once a long time ago and nobody but jerks looked at their profile and that colored their experience. You can’t join a dating site and do nothing but list a user name. No photo, no written ad, no contacting others, no blogs, no online chat or video chat, no forum posts.. how will anyone find you? Join a site and put everything you’ve got into making it the best profile you can and then stand out from the crowd. Leave those “waiting around for someone to find them” behind and make the first move. Send a comment to them or a tickle or leave a note on their blog, make a comment on a forum post that someone left, check out the chatrooms. I promise you, if it could work for a little old lady like me who found true love half a globe away, it can happen to you. Good luck!