What I learned from joining 17 online dating sites
What I learned from joining 17 online dating sites
It’s not always worth paying for, but dating sites teach you about your own hang-ups
Writer’s note: This post was originally published on Medium’s “We Need to Talk” on August 18, 2020.
Joining 17 online dating sites was not something on my Bingo card for 2020. I thought I was doing a bit much by joining three sites in 2018 — eharmony, Match and OkCupid. It’s been almost a decade since I was a dating/relationship columnist for now-defunct website Examiner. The jokes came in droves, specifically from my mother who asked me, “How are you going to be the Chicago Relationships Examiner when you’re not in a relationship in Chicago?” Gotta love mothers. They will never let your head get too big.
I know the online retailer may seem like an odd place to find a date, but I can legitimately say that I did end up dating an Amazon user a few years back.
But this time around in the summer of 2020, I was hired to write online dating content for a relationships website. Thanks to my serial online dating on the three platforms mentioned above, I wasn’t a stranger to the idea. This time though, it’s 100 percent professional and zero percent personal. I still don’t claim to be an expert. I know a few things from quietly observing my parents, who will be married for 40 years by the end of this month, though. And a few more lessons were learned two years ago during my own dating spree.