The 15 Minute Dating Blog

by Matt.

I just heard a funny story from a friend of mine that met a girl on a popular dating site. We’ll call it yardmatch.com. You’ll see why. My friend, we’ll call him Gerry, received a response to his ad on yardmatch from Cindy (not her real name). They arrange an early lunch at a romantic, yet casual little restaurant in Boston. Gerry tells me that there wasn’t any uncomfortable silence at lunch, which can sometimes happen on a first date when you find the person’s real life persona differs markedly from their online personal ad. Gerry did note, however, that Cindy kept bringing the conversation back around to yard work.

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by Veronica Bell.

Importance of Being Earnest… or at least the importance of using proper table manners as a way to get the date off to a good solid start.

I happened to be in Chicago this weekend for a writers workshop at Second City. While I was there I wanted to play around downtown. Shopping and running around the beach are not occasions where a play date is absolutely necessary but for dinner, I require company.

Its far too depressing to think I would have to eat alone, ordering room service while I am trying to enjoy a new city.

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by Rori Raye.

I was 12 years older than him, but we didn’t know it. It was a long time ago, and I’ll always think I almost married him - white picket fence and all.

I met him in a computer store, in the early days of computers, when I was an actress writing screenplays, and he made his living pulling the backs off computers and switching the parts around inside before he closed them back up.

On our first date, the chemistry was through the roof, but the conversation was stiff and almost weird, as though we were in two different Universes trying to discover a common language.

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by Anonymous Girl.

As a 28 year old living in Chicago, I admit that I absolutely use text messaging to communicate with friends, family, and co-workers. For me, texting is great for sending and receiving short messages to and from people I already know. It’s perfect for corresponding with basic questions: where are you, what time are you picking me up, who is this weirdo that is talking to me, how did I get home last night? It’s also ideal for sharing funny moments that aren’t worthy of a full conversation; such as, “You will not believe that hot tranny mess I just saw on Belmont and Halsted.” Believe me; I have been swept up in this texting whirlwind. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered how much texting has slithered its way into the dating world. It seems that out of nowhere, text messaging has somehow become a dating norm. It got me thinking: when did text messaging take over for a good old fashioned relationship?

I recently dated a guy who we’ll call “Mr. Text,” who used text messaging as his primary form of communication. Mr. Text truly lived up to his name: he was aloof, brief, and hard to understand at times.

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by Katy Franklin.

In my last article, “The Dealbreaker,” someone posted a comment suggesting my next one be about “DealMAKERS.” I thought that was a great idea. Instead of being so negative, and discussing how guys can turn us off, I wanted to show some ways in which guys can turn us ON. So now, I give you “Dealmakers,” otherwise known as 50 things guys can do to make us smile, make us sit up and pay attention, make us think twice about them, or even make us fall in love with them.

He has great teeth

He opens the car door for you (even if you’d rather get it yourself, you have to admit it’s a sweet, old-fashioned gesture.)

He asks your drink and then gets one for you

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by Jerry Whiting.

To say that internet dating has changed being single is an understatement. Heck, it’s even changed cheating. One searches the other’s email, text messages, voicemail, IM, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, whatever, and busts them.

Online dating harbors little of the stigma it once did. One is no longer labeled a loser for using the net to hunt/shop/forage. As craigslist has undermined newspaper classifieds and travel sites have dealt a blow to travel agents, online dating sites like match.com, nerve, eHarmony, et al. have unraveled traditional face-to-face dating. Are you ashamed to tell family and friends how you met your latest mate? Speaking of which, how honest are you online when you described yourself? How honest were they?

Ladies, if you’re going to use craigslist to shop for a man (or any other dating site for that matter), please take a moment to read my advice for women and craigslist. Being a free country, you’re free to ignore part or all of what I have to say. Otherwise you may find yourself guilty of these known craigslist sins. You may, just may, find that heeding some of my suggestions will aid in your search for Mr. Right (or Mr. Wrong if that’s your kink. See “samsara”.)

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by Zane Trae Kearney.

“It’s Okay to Look.” Only in certain contexts and situations could this slogan be construed as a truthful notion in the dating scene. In everyday conversations this phrase gets tossed around by men and women in relationships talking amongst their friends about the “hottie” they saw the other day in the parking lot. “Hey, it’s not cheating. It’s okay to look.”

There’s a fine line, however, between the hottie you saw by happenstance in the parking lot the other day and the hotties you’re looking at on the internet via dating websites. I’ll give you an example and we’ll see if you can distinguish the difference. To embody yourself into a setting, I was in a seemingly steady relationship for a year already. Ostensibly things were heading down the path of taking things to the never-ending “next level” and the sensation that I found “that one” was embedded in my thoughts.

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by Matt Titus.

There is one thing I try to convey to all of the women I work with: most men do not approach a woman because he thinks she is moral, funny or smart. His initial intention is to sleep with her. I know this sounds harsh and it may be shocking, but it’s true. I am a man and it has never been my intention to approach woman to make a new friend. I have enough friends and none of them wear make-up or smell pretty.

I try to teach women how to think like a man while never losing sight of her femininity. In most cases, a man’s actions are (unfortunately) driven by what pleases him visually, acting out of instinct and only thinking in the moment. My basic thesis is that if a woman can be taught to understand a man’s dating behavior, she can easily control, predict and successfully maneuver through all the confusing “MANerisms” during that date. In other words, I teach women how to speak “man.”

So here’s secret #1 of the Boy’s Club: when a man walks down a crowded street he involuntary classifies all women into two categories: “would sleep with” and “wouldn’t sleep with.”

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by Joshua Thompson.

Buddha said, “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.” Our thoughts honestly control what we do. There is plenty of material written on this. So I won’t get into it too much.

We are a product of what we think…but also what we feel. And I think our feelings aren’t focused on enough.

Honestly, we are mostly emotionally beings. We act based on thoughts, we react based on emotions. Our emotions can stimulate us to do things. They can also stimulate us to ignore reason.

This is the idea that women can really mess you up…because you don’t think logically. Your control is overrun by your emotional language.

But how does this apply to your dating?

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by Katy Franklin.

Every girl has her own little hang-ups about a guy that drive her crazy. Whether you’re out on a first date with someone, have been dating him casually for quite some time, or have been in a long-term relationship with a man, these little annoyances can become “Dealbreakers” or “DB’s,” as my friends and I so lovingly refer to them. Some are not so bad, while others can be totally devastating to a first date, or a committed relationship. So I thought long and hard and came up with a list of things I would consider “Dealbreakers” for myself. I also polled some girlfriends to get some second opinions and fresh ideas. The following are 50 serious Dealbreakers…guys, you may want to take notes…

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by Carly Zinderman.

You know that Drew Barrymore movie, Never Been Kissed? I totally relate to it, except for being a completely pathetic loser. Yet, in high school, no boy ever showed me the slightest bit of interest. I wasn’t worried about it though, my friends were never asked out either, despite the attempts my closest friend occasionally made on random guys that happened to catch her interest. Other than her over-aggressive pursuit of the male sex, my friends and I had next to no contact with boys during our four years of high school and for most of us, the male-free barrier continued on into our college years as well. But the dearth of dating didn’t bug me as much as you’d think. You don’t miss what you’ve never had and never having had a guy; I didn’t miss not having one. Besides, my friends and I had each other, and that was enough. We would sometimes joke about how we would be old cat ladies, which did bother me, because I’m a really a dog person.

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Are you watching old Seinfeld reruns for dates because you’re broke? Do you need help with saving money without being a cheap date? If you answered “yes” to either or both of these questions, consider this dating advice: Spice things up a bit with these 7 money-saving and fun dating ideas.

Here’s the link to the full article.

7 Dating Tips - Ideas for How to Save Money

Some of these ideas have potentials of being Romantic (e.g. Central Park), while others may be disasterous if you want a second date. It’s definitely worth a look though.

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by Brenda.

A few months ago I left a comment here on a post entitled “Are You Permanently Celibate” and have been asked to expand on my thoughts.

Basically the post was about a women who had her name on a dating site and in her profile stated that she was permanently celibate. The post itself didn’t compel me to leave a comment, it was everyone’s comments that got me a little hot and bothered. Most of them were about how this woman was a tease, had problems, didn’t like men, was lying to herself, etc. I disagreed completely. She seemed to understand herself well and was very upfront about what she wanted, which struck me as being very honest. Chances are she only got responses from men who felt much the same way she did about dating…more power to her I say.

Unlike this woman I haven’t made some declaration to be permanently celibate, but I do consider myself to be happily single. As I said in my comments to the original post, “There’s a myth out there that women or men who are happily single are not open enough, hate the opposite sex, need therapy or are just lying.” The reality is, being in a relationship or being married does not automatically mean that you’ll be happy. It also doesn’t mean you won’t be lonely. I was married for 10 years and have been single for 14, and during both times experienced feelings of loneliness, along with many other feelings, both positive and negative.

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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.

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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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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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by Katy Franklin.

You know how, in all those magazines on the stands today, there’s a whole bunch of celebrity worship and gossip, and they kind of make you feel like: a) you could never be a celebrity, and/or b) as a normal human being, you could never be cool enough to come close to dating one. That’s the vibe I get from those publications. But then, if you’ve ever paid enough attention (which, I unashamedly, admittedly have,) every once in awhile, you’ll find that someone really famous is dating someone really “normal.” Nicolas Cage dated and married his sushi waitress. Matt Damon married the girl who was his bartender at a club. Sure, it happens. But not very often. I was definitely skeptical about the reality of these situations until my sister, (we’re going to call her Annabelle) recently dated someone pretty famous (we’re going to call him Brad.)

Now please understand that I do not consider my sister “normal” by any means. She is 24 years old and drop-dead gorgeous. In physical appearance, she rivals any celebrity out there. She’s also extremely intelligent, easy to talk to, bubbly and fascinating, so it’s really no wonder somebody so well-known would have been interested in her. She works as an executive assistant to a very powerful entertainment agent in New York City so she meets a lot of famous people through her job.

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by Andy Cowan.

WHY does perpetuating the species seem to hinge on hooking up with a person who inevitably has at least one major character flaw? Maybe it’s because if you stumbled upon someone who was absolutely perfect, you’d die.

But what if you lived? Like a dog chasing a car, would you even know what to do at the end of the chase?

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by Erin Steiner.

The other night I was making dinner when, from the other room, I heard my boyfriend say “Welcome to Warsong Gulch.” I paused, halfway bent into the oven and thought to myself, “Why do I know that name?” I flipped through my mental rolodex of places that it might be but couldn’t find a visual to match. I knew I’d heard that name before and the words brought up a vaguely Chernobyl-ish picture, but I knew that had to be wrong. I must have stood there for a good fifteen minutes, driving myself crazy, trying to figure out where on the planet Warsong Gulch was located. After all, if the name was so familiar, there must be a reason. Finally, I went into the other room and asked my boyfriend “Where is Warsong Gulch?”

Turning around, and looking at me with what can only be described as an incredulous look on his face, he said “Um. It’s a place on my game?” His voice said “how the heck do you know about Warsong Gulch?”

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For the ladies out there, do you really know what mistakes you are making when you are using online dating sites? This is a great article about 14 common mistakes woman make using online dating. Tips such as “Stop sending winks”, “Keep your profile short and to the point” are supplied and explained.

14 Fatal Online Dating Errors

Also, for the guys out there, if you are dating someone who makes way more money than you, you might want to read this article:

Putting Money on the Table

This article examines the role reversal relationships in which the woman makes more money than the man. According to the article : “…For the first time, women in their 20s who work full time in several American cities — New York, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis — are earning higher wages than men in the same age range, according to a recent analysis of 2005 census data …”

“…Ms. Rosenmann, 28, who owns a company and earns up to $150,000, said dating considerably older men helps her avoid innuendos from younger men who feel threatened by her professional success. She said that when she has gone out at night with men her own age and has to turn in early to be fresh for work, they have commented, “Oh, Anna’s an adult, she has a real job.”…”

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