Let’s start by validating the second half, because that’ll be quick.  You are doing it wrong.

Do you have enduring love and fulfillment?

IF YES:  Then you are related to me and just reading this article to be supportive.  Thank you and I love you.

IF NO: Well then it seems clear that you aren’t doing a very good job of finding enduring love and fulfillment on Tinder, Christian Mingle, Adult Friendfinder. FarmerLove, or whatever.  Since you don’t have it and whatnot.

I am going to give you three brilliant and compelling reasons that online dating is your ticket to enduring love and fulfillment, and then I’m going to tell you how to do it right in seven easy steps.  And then you can just send me money and fruitcake.  But not the shitty kind.  The good kind.

Here we go.

You can use the process of online dating to strengthen character traits in yourself that make you more attractive to higher-quality prospective hunny bunnies.

These same things will increase your influence in other aspects of your life and generally make things richer, more interesting, and more fulfilling in lots of categories – which just makes you even MORE attractive to potential hunny bunnies.

You develop resilience.  If you are going to be awesome at one thing in life, make it resilience.  It is the Swiss Army knife of your character.  If you know your resilience, you are free to try anything, learn anything, fail and try again.  It is the foundation of courage – and nothing in life seems to require more courage than love.  Knowing that when life lands a punch, you can get up and shake it off makes it way easier to set down the Hot Pocket and go back to school, learn Chinese, have a passionate love affair, or simply speak the truth.

Online dating is like a boxing gym for training your resilience.  People are strange and wonderful and awful.  They have their own heavy stuff and it often (usually) has NOTHING to do with you at all.  So if you take it personally, you will very quickly find yourself either sitting in the corner sobbing or even worse, deciding that everyone sucks and love is for lobsters and idiots, but not for you.

But if you are up for the journey, put on your Teflon suit, throw your shoulders back, have the courage to be ferociously kind and true, and go hunting for treasure.  As you go, you’ll gain skills for bouncing back.

You practice courage.  Once you know and like who you are and who you are becoming, feel comfortable with your boundaries and resilience, and can see what is important to you, it is time to step off the cliff.  But know this (!!!):  All of those things will NOT erase your fear when you are about to do something hard.  You will still shit your pants occasionally.  But it will not kill you and you will get something absolutely magical in return.

Our lives atrophy without courage.  Our love withers and dies without courage.  Practicing courage is the taking vitamins of character.  Online dating is fucking scary.  Not just in the “you could accidentally click on one of these guys” way, but in the “oh shit this could actually work” way.  Especially in the “my bullshit is hanging out and somebody is going to see it and know I am an inadequate fraud” kind of way, which is the scariest way of all.

Show up.  Have the courage to look nice and smell good.  Be yourself.  Speak the truth.  Allow the other person to do whatever they need to do and don’t take it personally.  But when the door of opportunity, joy, fun, intimacy, animal-like fornication, or other yummy things swings, walk through it.  Sprint through it.  Course-correct later.  And if it turns out you shit your pants, then maybe that will be the funny story you tell your grandkids.  Or maybe you go home and rinse off and eat 4 cupcakes – and try again next week.

You deal with jerks.  One of my most successful online dates (there have been hundreds, literally) was with a jerk.  Not the horrible person kind of jerk.  Just a well-intentioned horse’s ass.  He was clearly a little angry at life and wanted to argue.  For about 10 minutes I tried to steer the conversation without success.  And sitting there listening to him was like being driven through a bunch of low

shrubbery on the back of a moped without a helmet or face mask.  Out of control, mildly painful, irritating, persistent, invasive, and uninteresting.  So I stopped him and with no anger, but just a heartfelt desire to be somewhere else said simply “I can see that you are a nice enough man, but I think you are in the mood to fight with somebody and I’m not interested in spending my evening that way, so I am going to go home.  I’ll gladly pay for my drink.”  And he said he understood, very politely paid for my drink, and let me go.

So while on the surface, meeting a more enjoyable companion would have been more pleasant, short of finding a magical soulmate, the gift to me in being able to kindly and calming hear myself say, in effect, “The next hour of my life is more valuable to me than this” and then go home and enjoy an evening scrubbing toilets or doing ANYTHING except sitting there, was FUCKING AWESOME.  It was simple, scary, and life-changing for personal and professional situations ever since.

You clean up your act.  Making first impressions several times a week makes you think about the first impression you make.  Yes, yoga pants are proof that God loves us (both wearing them and watching them, I hear), but looking like your hair dried in the car on the way to the restaurant and assaulting your companion’s ears with jabbering about your job, ex, cat, or whatever, is not a power move.  Be yourself, but be your best, most gracious, most articulate, most thoughtfully groomed and good-smelling self.  In fact, just do that every day.  It brings out the best in you and it is a beautiful way to honor the people who have to deal with you.

You balance compassion and boundaries.  One of my brilliant girlfriends says “Being people is hard.”  And it can be easy to forget that and start to think that being ME is hard.  Boo fucking hoo.  Nope.  Being ANYBODY is hard.  Like really hard.  And when you sit down with a stranger, whether you think they have romantic potential or can see immediately and obviously that they don’t, that hour you spend with them is a sacred one.  Treat that hour, and that person, with the honor, respect, and joy they deserve.  Let them show themselves to you, and do your part by softening your eyes and your heart and really seeing them and trying to understand them.  Don’t worry if they don’t do it back.  Do your part.

And at the same time:  Draw your lines and don’t absorb shit you don’t want.  Know where your ceiling is and plan to act to protect it.

Here’s what I do.  If I sit down with someone and there’s nothing there, I stay as long as the conversation is good.  If I don’t intend to see them again, I don’t agree to go to a second location (feel like bowling?  Pass.).   If the person happens to just be a jerk, see above.  Don’t waste a minute and move along.  Be kind when you do it.  And clear.

But more often than not – let’s say 70% of the time – people are just lonely and a little or a lot broken.  They start talking and you can see that they just need kindness.  You have to plan for this, because it isn’t your job to help them.  But it IS your job to be a good human.  So you have to decide what that is.  For me, if you are a nice, lonely person and you have some shit you clearly need to talk about, I will give you exactly 1 hour.  For that hour, I surrender to you and give you my full mind and heart.  And when the hour is up, I go home and never think of it again.  Because if I don’t have an hour for a human being, I shouldn’t have made the date.  Invest that hour as best you can, but don’t give more than is right for you.

Online dating requires you to market yourself, and being forced to market yourself for love requires you to dive into self-evaluation about what you look like to others (literally and metaphorically) and what love and fulfillment look like to you.

Honest, kind self-evaluation is empowering. You get to decide who you want to be.  And if you aren’t the person you want to be right at this instant, you can choose to fake it until you become it (mouseover the previous, ineffectively-styled phrase for a link to a great TED Talk by Amy Cuddy).  This is important because online dating (for EVERYONE) involves rejection.  If you are clear that you are who you want to be – or are doing your best to become it, then you don’t have reason to waste time thinking that rejection is a commentary on your inadequacies.  It isn’t.  Not everyone is for you.  Get cool with that.

Honest, kind self-evaluation is humbling.  Choosing to lovingly view your own shortcomings softens your eyes to other people and opens your heart to their imperfections and struggles.  This:

• makes you mucho grande more attractive to others,
• is the beginning of intimacy,
• and guarantees a richer, more interesting interaction.

Let your mind get blown by this jewel:  When you are evaluating/interviewing/judging a person against your idea of the perfection you are looking for in a mate, you are being an asshole and hanging out with you is a chore.  True story.  So skip it.

Getting clear on what love and fulfillment are to you make it easier to do the things that support that and find others who do.  When you embody the kinds of things that align with the love and fulfillment you can clearly see for your life, you become easier to find for the people who share those values.  Like attracts like – and you become super sparkly attractive to the kinds of people who can give you what you want and appreciate what you have to offer them in return.

BONUS!!  Having clarity on what love and fulfilling intimacy and companionship look like to you is a

foolproof way to recognize when it ISN’T happening.  Knowing what quality looks like makes it fast and easy to not take shit off of people who aren’t playing the same game you are.  If you’ve done the work in advance, you don’t have to waste a minute deciding if that person is an ass hat.  You can smell their ass-hat-ery from a mile away.  Gross.

Online dating gives you access to lots and lots of people.  That means both exposure and practice.

And given all that clarity and humble self-awareness you got from diligently acting on my previous points, and assuming you don’t have a serious latex allergy, you have all the eggs you need to learn to make the BEST OMELET EVER.  Because how do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Practice practice practice.

So let’s get crackin.  (See what I did there?  Eggs?  Get it?)

Go-do’s.

Here’s how to act on all this genius advice in 7 easy steps:

1. Change your mind. Stop trying to jump ahead to the outcome of finding your soulmate and get in it for the process.  If you don’t, you will get freaky and disillusioned, make yourself less attractive to people who might otherwise like to get naked and/or pray to the lord (depending on your flavor) with you, and you’ll miss all the fun.
2. Be yourself, but a little better. Use recent, accurate pictures, but choose the best ones.  Be a little kinder than you might want to be, make stronger decisions faster, and present yourself as who you want to be, not who you think you are after you just ate a whole bag of Bugles and are stuck in your head.  Nobody cares and it’s bullshit anyway.  Just be awesome.
3. When you get tired, stop. When your heart and mind aren’t open and curious, when people don’t bring you joy, inspiration, or at least entertainment, you are tired and it is time to stop.  Go back to yourself and the things close to you and wait to feel refreshed again.  It is your job to bring your best self to each interaction.
4. If you aren’t feeling confident and can’t fake it today, don’t go. Things won’t go well.  That said, this is not an excuse for being flaky or a coward.  Man up and do your best.  But if you really are in the dumper, call in sick.  It has an added bonus of showing you how that person deals with things not going to plan.
5. Celebrate rejection. If you are an interesting, real person, some people will think you are pure magic (because interesting, real people are rare and delightful), but some people will still land between “meh” and “no fucking thank you” when it comes to you.  When it happens, it means you showed up and had the courage to be yourself – and you got some great information about where not to invest.  Celebrate this.  It is very difficult and very, very right.
6. Relax and give things space. People are like flowers.  Let them bloom for you.  Don’t interview them.  Don’t judge them.  Don’t educate them.  And don’t expect them to do what you think is right and when you would do it.  People have a lot of shit going on, almost all of which doesn’t involve you.  Just chill out and let it be.  If you don’t like how it is going, move along.

7. 

   Be sincere, but not too honest. People you just meet do not need to see your baggage, your insecurities, your history, or any of that old mess.  And that stuff doesn’t define you anyway.  Save it for when it matters and is important or useful – or when building that type of intimacy is mutual and positive.  If you can’t figure out anything else to talk about, watch a few TED Talks before the date.  Or football, or politics, or flower arranging, or whatever you are into.  Plan to be a good conversationalist.

Love and fulfillment are natural to us.  We are pre-wired to find these delicious goodies and sometimes we are lucky enough to have a sweet patootie to explore and build them with.  But when we don’t, we have to continue to nurture our ability to grow love and fulfillment all around us, and resist the temptation to shift focus unproductively to finding partnership and expecting our partner to fill up our world, rather than making a life that attracts the partnership we crave.

Conveniently, the very best place to find your number one playmate is also the very best place to hone the skills you need to attract them – and be happy, delightful, and fucking awesome while you are waiting.  Be brave!!  <3 <3 <3 Kathryn