Diversify Your Dating Life

I got a message from a woman tonight who told me, "I just wish I could be able to tell from a guy's online profile whether or not we'll have chemistry. There must be a simple way to be able to read a profile and know if we're going to get along?"

Let me tell you something: profiles lie. People write the most ridiculous things in their profiles - I think of online profiles as Fantasyland half of the time.

It's like an advertisement for a new weight loss pill: "lose 300 pounds in two minutes!" In their online profiles, everybody seems to write things that express who they want to be and not who they really are.

For instance, if someone is in his or her late forties, they always write, "I'm 48, but I'm a young 48. I don't look like I'm 48." Nobody thinks that they look like their age. You either look good for your age, or you don't.

I'm 46 years old, and I look good for my age. I know people who are my age that don't - and they admit it. Some of us look good for our age, and some of us don't. It's the way life is. The way we are depends on the way we take care of ourselves - our exercise routines, our genes, everything.

So stop building yourself up on your profile. Let the reader make a decision based on your photo about if you look good for your age. When you build yourself up like this, you're setting yourself up for failure. If you say, "I really look great for my age," and somebody upon seeing your photo disagrees, then you will take it as a personal insult.

Profiles are just fantasy - and often nothing more. People write whatever they want to write. They don't tell you the truth! If someone is slightly overweight, they aren't going to tell you that in their profile! They will give you this beautiful picture of who they are.

We're people, and we all have our faults. We all have flaws. And the only way to find that out is to go out and meet people. If you took the amount of time you spend online dating and actually went out into the real world to talk to people, you wouldn't go back to spending so much time with online dating.

You can't make one thing your only resource. You need to do what I call the '20-20-20-20-20 rule.' 20% of your life can be online dating, 20% can be meeting men or women in supermarkets, 20% can be meeting them in coffee shops, 20% can be parties... whatever it is.

You have to diversify your portfolio - your dating and people meeting portfolio. If this year, all you invested in was the S & P 500, you'd be down about 20% in the stock market right now.

If you bought real estate in 2005 thinking the market would get better, you'd be down about 40% - 80% right now, depending on the market that you're in. Life is all about diversification.

The next time that you are angry with the internet, or angry with people in their online dating profiles, ask yourself: are you diversified in the way you meet people? If you're not, you are never going to meet anybody.

So get out there and diversify!