The 15 Minute Dating Blog

by Ed Attanasio

There are three basic categories within the genre known as the pick-up line. Anyone who has ever tried their hand at this art form knows that certain lines can be more effective than others, depending on the location, atmosphere and attitude of the recipient.

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by Meg Stivison

Those pessimistic stereotypes about online dating are over now! Today, you’re more likely to find someone who’s simply been too busy with their career and their other interests to follow traditional dating patterns. And let’s be honest, do you really want to build a relationship with a pickup in the bar? ‘Net dating allows you to screen for someone really special, not just someone who happens to be single. With a little honesty and a little creativity, you’ll be meeting better matches and making better connections in no time.
　　
With thousands and thousands of potential loves out there, your personal description needs to attract your Mr. or Ms. Right. Everyone likes listening to music, watching movies and spending time with friends, but that’s exactly the kind of information you should leave out. When you read a lot of profiles, as I did as a matchmaker for a local agency, “I like listening to music,” starts to mean “I’m not creative,” or even “I’m boring.” That’s not what you want a possible date to think!

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Popularity: 1% [?]

by Thomas Riddell

When I pulled my first computer out of the box in February of 1998, I had no idea how that machine, consisting of plastic, glass, wires and electronics, would change my life. It literally opened up a whole new world for me - who knew at the time that it would bring me “chicks”?

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Popularity: 1% [?]

by Carly Schuna

You’ve flirted, chatted, seen pictures of each other, and (hopefully) talked on the phone. You’re reasonably sure your target of affection is neither an axe murderer nor a megalomaniac. You’re standing at the crossroads all online daters anticipate, dread, covet, and fear: the point at which Internet dating becomes real dating.

At this stage, preparation is key. You want your date to end your meeting by thinking, “Damn… not only is s/he way hotter in person, but s/he is also way funnier, way smarter, and waaaay more desirable!” How is this accomplished? Read on.

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by Andrea

A few years back, I was living in a blue-collar city where the social scene centered around the bars, and I kept meeting That Guy – fratty, with all the vapid things he screamed in my ear reeking of stale beer. Out of sheer desperation to have one conversation with the opposite sex about… well, anything aside from how much he could bench press, I signed up for an online dating service.

Of course, the site was populated with a lot of the same guys. The upside was, I got to screen them over e-mail – can’t string two sentences together? Can’t name the vice president? Off the list. Finally, I came upon a guy who got the pun in my bio. Worked in finance, cracked a couple jokes, knew a good restaurant to meet up at for a drink. We clicked online, exchanging e-mail messages about vacations and college lit courses. It seemed like a safe bet.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

by Tony G. Rocco

Do you want to know what it’s like to be a single 51 year-old in the modernday dating world? It’s a lot like sticking your eyeball in a bunson burner or jamming your left arm into a tree shredder. It ain’t pretty. Let me formulate a definition of Dating as it is practiced by most men and women today. For that, I cite pearls of wisdom offered by a therapist cum dating coach to whom I turned, in a moment of weakness, for advice and succor.

Dating, I was informed during our one-hour session together, is the process by which two (and only two) people determine whether they want to be life partners, mates, spouses, and such or just despise each other from a comfortable distance. It is a series of hoops and hurdles either successfully negotiated by both parties, resulting in a blissful romantic union, or not, resulting in dejection and disappointment.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

by Tony G. Rocco

The Main Event: Dating

When we’ve made a choice (and been chosen) through whatever matchmaking methodology we’ve employed, we are ready to venture out on the extended test drive called Dating. This is when we take a long look at the merchandise, evaluate the handling, the responsiveness to our needs, the reliability, and, of course, the ease of maintenance. Is this model the right one for my active lifestyle? Will it enhance my image in the eyes of others? Is it suitable for everyday use or just weekend drives in the country? All these concerns and more are vetted during the Dating process.

Sometimes the Dating process ends very quickly. Our evaluative radar is on high alert. Is there “chemistry?” Are there any obvious flaws or faults, deal breakers or intolerable annoyances? Signs of ideological or religious incompatibility? Our antennae quiver alertly, our fingers hover over the relationship ejection button.

Many people have a hair-trigger inclination to dismiss a date out of hand with nothing more than a vague hunch or intuition as the basis for judgment. After all, who wants to get involved in the messy activity of building a relationship when you don’t like some… je ne sais qua?

If neither of you disqualify the other on the first encounter or two, you embark on the extended process of formal Dating. You are so damn lucky.

When two parties come together for the purpose of Dating, each side approaches with an expectation of the romantic happiness to which they feel they are entitled. Thus, a modern-day romantic relationship is essentially an exercise in entitlement: you must satisfy my needs or I will shop around for someone who will. “I want my needs met” is the war cry of relationship shoppers everywhere.

A Failure to Negotiate

I trace my own failures in the relationship marketplace to various instances when I would not or could not meet the needs of the other partner. Maybe I should have hired a relationship “attorney,” otherwise known as a Marriage and Family Counselor, to help with negotiations. Their function is to help broker a deal between feuding partners struggling to get their needs met. In the modern-day relationship world, they do a bristling business.

For your consideration, I offer a slice of my own relationship life, an egregious failure to fulfill someone’s needs. As fate would have it, I met a cute red-head at a speed-dating event and we seemed to click, so we started Dating.

Some background first: this woman had been involved in a long relationship with a partner who did not like having sex, and she had been traumatized by the experience of being sexually neglected. So she made up her mind that the next time around she was going to get all the sex she could and she was going to get it her way. It was a non-negotiable need that constituted a deal-breaker should it not be adequately met.

To be clear, I had my own non-negotiable needs that I wanted met, which primarily had to do with getting some emotional intimacy. Sex was fine, of course, but I wanted my emotional needs satisfied more than anything. Yes, your dear author is not above the give-to-get logic that so organizes the world of romantic relationships.

For this woman, being in a relationship in which she was not getting sex the way she wanted as much as she wanted whenever she wanted felt like being right back in that old, painful relationship. So she refused to sleep with me if we weren’t going to have sex, meaning that we couldn’t sleep together most nights because she had to get up too early for work to spend the night screwing. Message: if I can’t get what I want (sex), then you can’t have what you want (emotional intimacy). Give-to-get logic is brutally simple.

And those times we did have sex, she was not satisfied with how I did it. She once screamed at me on a public street in the rain about my “inability” to satisfy her sexually, and accused me of being disinterested in women. Not getting one’s needs met can bring out the worst in people.

She finally determined that she was not going to get the non-stop sex she wanted the way she wanted it as much as she wanted it, and she went into dreaded “let’s be friends” mode. After all her self-centered and insulting behavior, I was hardly interested in having a friendship. Deal broken, relationship over.

A Radical Redefinition of Relationship

The relationship-as-commodity model, based on the same logic on which we conduct our economic lives, is a failure in the world of love and romance. Even when both parties agree that the other adequately satisfies their needs, the relationship is nothing more than a dehumanizing transaction, an alienated arrangement that can be revoked, terminated, and abandoned at the whim of either party. The give-to-get equation, with it’s cold calculus and focus on selfgratification, is antithetical to a humane relationship, let alone one that produces romantic bliss.

The only way out of the state in which we find ourselves relationally speaking is to radically redefine what it means to engage in the activity of relationship. A relationship is not a transaction in which emotional goods are exchanged, as the relationship attorneys would have us believe. Rather, it is something built by the parties involved, an object of love that gets created, not exchanged.

I am not giving to satisfy your needs, and you are not giving to satisfy mine, but we are both giving to the relationship, which transcends yet includes both of us. Rather than giving in order to get, and obsessing over our needs, we both give in order to give, and marvel at the wonderful object of our creation, our Relationship.

Perhaps, in the forgotten words of John Lennon, I am a dreamer, but I hope I’m not the only one. I have no self-help plan, no glib Dr. Phil advice on how to achieve sure-fire relationship success. I am not even saying it would be easy. Giving for the sake of giving, for the sake of creating something with another person rather than getting something for oneself, is not an effort that lends itself to simple, paint-by-number steps. It requires a qualitatively different kind of activity, the kind of activity a mother engages in with her child, an artist with his work, a priest with his flock. There is almost a spiritual quality to it.

Can we imagine a way of dating that isn’t organized like a serial job interview? Where objectification and evaluation are not the main activities? Where we could do other things, like create a relationship not based on idealized expectations but on the reality of who two people actually are? Perhaps, like imagining a world without divisive politics or religion, it seems hopelessly idealistic and naive.

If we could imagine it, we might also imagine having more than a single, eggs-one-basket relationship that must bear up under the stress and struggle of two people trying to get all their emotional needs met. Perhaps we wouldn’t have to idealize and, some say, fetishize the couple. One can only imagine what that might free us to create with each other.

But a new way of relating is not easily conceived of or acted upon in this age of self-gratification. With the next relationship commodity just around the corner, why bother trying? I just want to get my needs met.

Popularity: unranked [?]

by Tamara Warta

I’ll never forget Janie, a high school classmate who fluctuated between being my best friend and my biggest nemesis. Janie was heavy set with mousy brown hair and a crude vocabulary talent that could humble the most vulgar of sailors. From sharing secrets late at night to getting into a fistfight at the Winter Formal senior year, Janie was always a part of my high school experience in one way or another.

I mention Janie for one reason – she was never able to land a boyfriend for more than a few months at a time. Bouncing from one guy to the next, she was a torrent of rage and tears, punching lockers on a continual basis. This cycle continued until the last month of the 12th grade when Janie was convinced she had met the man of her dreams.

I should clarify that she hadn’t exactly met the man of her dreams, but rather she was to go on a date with him that Saturday night. She was being set up on the traditional blind date so popular in the late 1990s, only there was one catch. Janie was to sit in a neighborhood taqueria by herself near the window. Then Mr. Dreamboat would cruise on by and, if he liked what he saw, he would come in and greet Janie. If he was unimpressed, Janie would be left there to wonder what had happened – jilted on what she was hoping would be one of the greatest nights of her life.

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In ancient Chinese traditions, it is believed that Ba-Zi(Ba-Zhi) and Feng Shui can control one’s destiny. Feng Shui, while involves re-arranging your physical living environments such as furnitures and house, is controllable. On the other hand, Ba-Zi is fixed and it is determined once you’re born.

What exactly is Ba-Zi?

Ba-Zi (or eight characters) is an ancient astrology measure translated from the exact time of your birth. Basically Ba-Zi consist of eight elements such has year, hour, season, and other things. It is believed that these eight elements set one’s destiny in life. So this pretty much means that there’s not much you can do about it if you’re born with a bad Ba-Zi. It is also believed that you should make the best life decisions based on your own Ba-Zi in regards to career, travel, relationship and living. For all you techies out there, here’s a link to a sourceforge site that has a software that you can use calculate your ownBa-Zi!

The most interesting thing is that Ba-Zi is also used in traditional Chinese matchmaking. For example, when two people are about to get married or get setup with a pre-arranged date, both can have their Ba-Zi analyzed to see if they are compatible. It is believed that a campatible Ba-Zi between two peoples in a relationship will result in a marriage with more happieness and better fortune. The idea is actually pretty similiar to western astrological signs.

Have you and your loved one analyzed your Ba-Zi yet?

Popularity: 1% [?]

by Rick Fulks

Dating really sucks sometimes. Boy meets girl. Boy takes girl out to dinner. Awkward silences ensue. Hopefully the meal was good even if the conversation wasn’t. Afterwards you say goodnight and all you have left to look forward to is another date– just like this one–with a new person. I bet you can’t wait.

Maybe the cure for the dating doldrums is to spice things up a little bit. Do something different, something maybe even a little bit crazy. You’ll certainly have some stories to tell afterward, hopefully with your friends rather than with the police and media.

Do you think you and your date are up for some adventure? Good…here are some ideas to get you started.

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by Arlie MacGregor

Online dating is a great way to meet people and open the door to finding that special someone. Instead of being limited to the gene pool in your neighborhood, you’ve got the whole world at your fingertips, increasing your chances of ‘love ever after’. There’s an element of danger too though, because of the phonies who aren’t what they seem and use the anonymity of the Internet to prey on unsuspecting victims. Here are a few tips on how to surf for romance safely.

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I created this blog because I always thought it would interesting for people to share their stories of personal experiences with online dating or just dating in general.  It includes various funny, humorous and horror stories collected from different people. 

 I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I do!

Cindy

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