Dating News

 Don’t pursue a long-distance relationship with a   stranger online.

 “Staying local drastically reduces your odds of being scammed, since most scammers target victims outside their areas to avoid        being caught or prosecuted”

 Never reveal personal data to someone until you meet face-to-face and develop a level of trust. While it’s tempting to share every detail of your life with a person you think you could be in love with, that’s exactly what the scammer is counting on.

   Pay attention to language. Many of those who commit these crimes are from West Africa and the former Soviet republics. If  their command of English is fuzzy, that’s a “big red flag,” writes Elizabeth Bernstein in the Wall Street Journal.

 Use search engines to check out suitors. When Bernstein met someone online who seemed too good to be true, she cut and pasted one of his e-mails into Google. Lo and behold, the exact words popped up on several websites devoted to romance scams.

Upload a potential paramour’s photo on tineye.com. According to Bernstein, this will allow you to see where on the Internet the photo has appeared. Many con artists use a photo they’ve swiped from a Facebook page.

Stick to paid online dating sites. If members shell out money to register, that means credit cards are on file, Bernstein points out. But don’t assume these sites are free of predators. They just may have fewer of them.

Be suspicious if someone wants to immediately start communicating through IM and e-mail. They may want access to your computer in order to steal information.

Ditto someone who claims to be a soldier. There are an increasing number of scams in which con artists take photos of soldiers from social networking sites and then pretend to be trustworthy members of the military. They’ll ask potential dates for money to buy special papers they claim are needed to come home or talk to family. But Christopher Grey of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command told the Associated Press, “There is no such thing.”

Don’t open attachments from a stranger. If someone sends you a photo in an attachment and you open it, you may have unwittingly allowed a virus to infect your computer.

Don’t fall for a sob story. Jody Buell, a peer counselor with romancescams.org, says that many scammers claim to have lost a spouse, child, or parent in an accident or say they have a relative who is very ill.   Another common ploy, says the FBI’s Tim Gallagher in the Wall Street Journal:Your suitor is at the airport on his way to visit you, but his credit card has been declined.

Dial up your date ASAP. According to Bernstein, someone who sounds plausible online may be an obvious fraud on the phone.

Check sites such as pigbusters.net and romancescams.org. If he has conned others, he may show up there.

Report any suspicious behavior or fraud to the Federal Trade Commission, says Grey.

Never, ever wire money to a stranger.

Nobody likes first dates.

They’re awkward, they usually involve some kind of drink or meal that you’d rather not share with a stranger, and there’s always that hesitant question at the forefront of both your minds:
Are we going to have sex later?

Thanks to a lot of poodle skirts and antiquated ideas about dating, first-date sex has become a topic of controversy, with many of us still believing in the shameful stigma attached to it.

Despite our generally enlightened attitudes in this new-age hookup culture, we’re still viewing sex on the first date as a make-or-break moment, leaving most of us to agonize over what the right move is.

We’re so caught up in society’s expectation of us that we disregard our own personal desires. We’re too busy trying to decipher what the other person is thinking that we don’t listen to what we actually want.

Why put all this power and judgment into the guy’s hands? And moreover, why would you want to be with a man who judges women in this way?

Sex should not be viewed as an exchange of goods, whereby women give it as a “down payment” on a relationship and men receive it as a “thank you” for taking her out to dinner. And having sex on the first date shouldn’t negatively impact your chances of a long-term relationship

Let’s strip sexual activity of all it’s damaging implications and bring it back to what it is: just sex.

Here are the 7 science-backed reasons why you totally have sex on the first date

1. He won’t think less of you

A 2013 Cosmopolitan poll found that 83 percent of women believe men will think less of a woman who has sex on the first date. (That’s a lot of mind-f*cking, ladies!) But the reality is that the majority of guys, specifically 67 percent of those polled, maintain they absolutely don’t. So we can now all put this common fear behind us — the numbers don’t lie.

2. You’ll keep him coming back for more

Who says that having sex on the first date will turn away guys? Have you met them? They love sex! If you’re confident and enjoy what you’re doing, then they’ll be more inclined to return for seconds.

In this scenario, having sex on the first date actually benefits you and increases your chances of a second meeting.

3. Cuts the sexual tension

If you don’t have sex early on, the pressure to have it builds too greatly. Each subsequent date becomes a constant mind-game of “Should I keep waiting? He’s taken me on three dates, should I just do it?

Maïa Mazaurette, columnist for GQ magazine in France, agrees saying, “Because Brits and Americans are wary about when to move the relationship into the bedroom it makes us more prudish when we finally get down to it.”

When sexual tension builds, you’re likely to become more awkward and over-analytical about why it’s not happening. Think like a Frenchwoman and don’t be afraid to take a bite out of that baguette!

4. Chemistry is chemistry

Jeff Wilser says it best, “If there’s chemistry, there’s chemistry, and from the guy’s perspective, it doesn’t really matter if we hook up on date one or date seven.”

You don’t need to turn sex on the first date into this momentous decision. If you both are into each other, then there’s no good reason not to enjoy each other more.

5. They want it!

According to the 2012 Singles In America study, 41 percent of New York men regard sex on the first date as “very appropriate” or “somewhat appropriate.”

So don’t be hesitant on the guy’s behalf. Chances are he wants it just as badly as you do, and he isn’t condemning the act either.

6. You find out if you’re really connected

Sexual compatibility is important part of a relationship. By having sex on the first date, you get to establish that special connection early on. And if it’s enjoyable, it’ll only increase your attraction to one another.
““In this day and age, more people recognize sex as an important component of a successful relationship, not something to be ashamed of,” says Justin Lehmiller, PhD, a social psychologist at Harvard who studies relationships and sexuality.

“For those people, it’s important to establish sexual compatibility early on, and having sex on the first date may be the right move for them.”

7. ….You get to have sex!

Even if you eventually find out you hate this person, at least you haven’t wasted your time. Stop stressing about how it appears and look on the brightside, you’re getting it in!

Philip N. Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, assuages all our fearful reluctance with some profound logic: at the end of the day, it’s not about sex, it’s about your attraction to one another.

All that matters is how much the couple like and are attracted to each other, which determines how many dates they have, and whether the guy calls back.

It appears that the first-date-sex couples usually don’t last because people don’t know each other very well on first dates and they have a high rate of failure regardless of sex.

What are you waiting for?

Online dating, once a fringe and stigmatized activity, is now over a $2 billion industry. Over 40 million Americans have given online dating a try, and over a third of the American couples married between 2005 and 2012 met online.

The first prominent online dating site was Match.com, which launched in 1995. eHarmony started in 2000, OkCupid in 2004, and more recently, a wave of mobile people-swiping apps, like Tinder and Hinge, have become wildly popular.

But is this a positive development or something to be concerned about? Is online dating making the world better and dating more effective, or is something important being lost or sacrificed as a result? The way the current trend is heading, what will dating be like in 2030, and will that be a better or worse time to be on the dating market than 1995? Ideally, what would dating look like in 2030?

______

Tim’s Answer: I think this is a no-brainer positive development. The key thing is that it’s not online dating—it’s online meeting people followed by in-person dating. I think the term “online dating” is part of the problem and makes people who don’t know much about it think it refers to people forming entire relationships online and only meeting in person much later.

Simply considered as online meeting people, it makes a ton of sense. I’ve already expressed my argument for why in two posts: one on how critical it is to find the right life partner and how seriously we should take that quest, and another on why going to bars is a terrible life experience. The first step in ending up with the right person is meeting the right person, and for something so important in our lives, we’ve had no real system for doing it efficiently and intelligently. For socially weird or anxious or shy people, trying to meet a stranger in public is a nightmare, and even for someone charming and outgoing, it’s a grueling task that requires a lot of luck. The alternative that often happens is meeting someone through friends, which can work, but it’s limiting yourself to single people your closest friends and family happen to know.

Effective dating definitely needs to take place in person, the same way your grandfather did it, but I see no good reason why meeting people to date in the first place can’t be systematic and efficient. Yes, there’s something special about the romance of meeting someone in public and hitting it off right away, but that rarely happens—and for the most important mission in most of our lives, it makes no sense to crush your ability to meet great people to try a first date with because it’s not as good a story to have met them online. I have a friend that goes on two or three first dates every week with people he already knows are potentially good personality and physical matches for him—that’s how you find the right person, and good luck keeping up with him meeting people the old-fashioned way. And for people who have no interest in serious dating and just want to find people to hook up with? Online is a much better way to accomplish that too.

As for the current online dating options—they strike me as a good first crack at this by humanity, but the kind of thing we’ll significantly improve on to the point where the way it was done in 2014 will seem highly outdated in not too many years. Now that the stigma has diminished, you know this industry is going to race ahead because there’s so much money to be made by whoever can be innovative. So in 2030, I think we’ll be somewhere very different, and I think today’s nine-year-olds will have really incredible ways of finding love when they’re 25. Maybe I’m a future stubborn old man about dating being in-person, but I believe that needs to stay that way and the innovation in this industry should hone in more and more on optimizing the process of getting the exact right people on first dates with each other—that’s its job.