The 15 Minute Dating Blog

by Sara Hodon.

Online dating is not for the faint of heart. It’s good if you post a profile but don’t have the highest expectations in the world, because more often than not, you’ll be disappointed. But if you’re considering trying it—congratulations! You’re far braver than about 80% of the single population out there.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m no stranger to the world of online dating. Though I haven’t met a bona fide, “Okay-I-must-be-leaving-now-because-you’re-too-weird-for-words” wacko, I’ve definitely had my share of bad experiences. The hard part is just getting through the date itself. This can be tricky, particularly if you seemed to hit it off so well when you first started talking. Sadly, my friends, a person can post as many pictures as they want, but until you experience the real thing, you can truly only take a picture at face value.

So the real question remains—how do you make it past those awkward moments on a first date?

Unfortunately, I really don’t recommend jumping out of the bathroom window—that is, unless you absolutely have no other choice. As a wise man once said, sometimes you just have to suck it up. It is possible to meet The One online (I know plenty of people who have), but it’s a lot like shopping for bargains—the trick is to sort through the rejects until you get to the one worth keeping.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

by Vicky Zhou.

Creating an online dating profile can be challenging, particularly if you’ve never done it before. There are some definitely things you do and do not want to do when you create your profile in order to have the best success with your endeavour.

Here are the things you should definitely leave out.

1. Past Relationship Experiences

While it’s okay to mention what you’ve learned from past relationships, don’t ever go on and on about the way your ex treated you or anything of that resemblance. The more positive you are in your profile, the more positive people will think you are in real life - and everyone wants to date someone positive, right?

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Popularity: 7% [?]

by Wais Hassan.

There have been numerous articles written recently about online dating and courtship but I have not seen many from the Muslim perspective. Actually, there are a number of Muslim dating sites that have popped up during the past few years and some of them are pretty well designed and have thousands of registered users. I, an Afghan American 1st generation graduate student, have joined a couple of these sites during the past few years.

It is so difficult to meet and become friends with Muslim women in my everyday life because there are so many expectations the culture places on both men and women. Women do not want to be perceived as being loose or immoral and many who date will never admit to actually be dating anyone. All Muslim parents I know frown on casual dating and most of my relatives agreed to arranged marriages when they decided they were ready to settle down.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

A study was done recently by economists and psychologists from Columbia University trying to answering the age-old dating question: “What, exactly, makes someone desirable?”. During the two year study, speed dating experiments were conducted to collect response by more than 400 daters.

Among the result of the study some “not-so-surprising” findings from the experiment typically include things such as:

- Male based their decision heavily on the physical appearance of their dates, while women based their decisions on the intelligence of their dates.
- Women who are more ambitious than their dates are considered less desirable.

These conclusions are fairly well known and intuitive. However, one of the most surprising results from the experiments indicates that women prefer their own race, while men just don’t care.

Also among the findings, it is found that “…East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women’s neutrality, not the men’s pronounced preference….”

Here’s the link to the full article.

An Economist Goes to a bar … and solves the mysteries of dating.

Althought some of the results seems interesting; I think the problem with this study is the experiment smaple size seems too small. The study deals with grad students from an east coast school, which might not be a good representative sample of the general female/male population across the country.

Popularity: 15% [?]

by Janet Trakin.

I’m a self-defined lesbian, but what lesbian isn’t tempted by a cute guy? I recently posted my profile and picture on My Space.com, that intergenerational melting pot of cyberbabies and misfits. Where most people wrote, Angelina Jolie, Dalai Lama, Hillary Clinton and other assorted luminaries under the question, “Whom would you most like to meet?”, I wrote, “A woman who understands me on all levels.” Amazingly so, my inbox was then inundated by a barrage of e-mails from male geeks from all around the world.

Among the photo of a tribal chief from Ghana, an e-mail of a faceless British artist, and a hate-filled, homophobic abusive e-mail from a Yugoslavian 16-year old punk, appeared the picture of Tom Smith. He had dark hair just messy enough not to be neat, dark brooding eyes and a sweet smile. He appeared to have a melancholy spirit underneath the smile, and his broad shoulders hinted of strength and masculinity–the perfect combination of the hopeless romantic and macho man…the poet and football player…Jung’s anima and animas. His e-mail contained life-weary original musings on love, a desire to settle down, and a propensity to do “anything for love.” I checked him out.

Tom’s profile appeared to be hastily put together just so that he could answer ads. Whereas many people on My Space go to great lengths to create an elaborate, impressive web site, Tom’s remained blank, and only “United States” appeared under his name and age. But the photo—ooh the photo. With no hesitation, I returned his e-mail.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

by Charles Pixley.

Life continues ever faster. Obviously we aren’t the same people we were in high school, when we had everything to learn, wide-eyed, and our life was in front of us. At this chronological phase, we come prepackaged, we are in the middle of a journey, and have a great story, which includes family, wisdom, and a keen intuition, a list of preferences and what we don’t want.

Perhaps, it should go without saying; our youth lives inside us. We still feel, 16 or 23, on the inside, I do. Perhaps, we live with someone and are blessed to have the ideal relationship or we thought it would be for life and something changed the outcome. We watch our partner change ever so gradually, didn’t really notice the changes, as we changed too, and we observed change in ways we found to be intolerable.

Rachel Carson warned us, but our generation endures being nuked, fluoridated, infused with toxic agents, whether emissions or elimination of the rain forest to pollute or limit the air we breathe, pour an ocean of chemicals over our food crop soil and leeching into our aquifers, our vegetarian cattle force fed into cannibals. The ocean is over fished or wantonly poisoned and we suffer the selection of political or scientific leaders who blindly lie on behalf of their benefactors “there’s no evidence linking diseases caused by the aforementioned.”

We were conscripted, strafed blown to bits, napalmed, defoliated, agent oranged, wounded, rejected and forgotten. We are tried and true, battle worn. Endure intentional political falsity of fear intentionally imposed upon us as war psychosis. We stood up, spoke up, protested, resisted, shackled, imprisoned, and some murdered.

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Popularity: 3% [?]