The world is moving online with every passing second. In an isolated world, the internet has become our place to find friends and even love. But is it the same as it has always been?
When done perfectly, you can expect to find love or a stable relationship within two months of online dating. However, the do’s and don’ts of online dating are still not as well known, and most people take much longer to find a relationship online if they are new to the game.
Whether you are new or are well-versed in getting the right person’s attention online, the following factors can help you reach your milestone of finding a relationship online faster.
Factors Which Decrease The Time To Find A Relationship When Dating Online
1. Finding the Right App
To find a relationship faster, you must be on the right platform and looking for the right people. It may sound tricky, but with a little homework, it’s easy to hit the jackpot.
Get on apps that are known to have people seeking the kind of relationship you want.
Avoid apps that mainly offer casual conversations, make friends, or are known for hook-ups to find a serious, long-term relationship.
A great way to find out is to check out forums and discussions and read people’s experience stories with each platform before testing it out.
2. Becoming Self-Aware
Know what you want before you run out to seek it. Once you’re self-aware, you can conveniently and quickly skim through people who are and are not of your interest.
You spend less time exploring yourself and your desires and more time trying to engage with the right person actively.
Before jumping into online dating, spend some time thinking over the why’s and what’s of dating for you. Why do you want a relationship? What kind of relationship are you looking for?
How important is this for you? The more clarity you have, the faster it is.
3. Starting on The Right Foot
First impressions matter – especially online. The first sentence you send is a deal breaker, and your first conversation decides whether you end up blocked or on top of their list.
It just saves you a lot of time that people spend trying to woo the other person when you start on the right foot. You can instead spend that time working on the actual relationship.
On top of it all, you want to minimize rejections. You don’t want to lose the one just because you were too lousy with your first three texts.
Putting a little thought into your first conversations is an understated deal breaker.
4. Using Ice Breakers
It isn’t easy to make a person trust you through a screen. First conversations can easily get awkward and tense, while small talk is too generic and boring. But fun ice-breakers can rescue you.
They allow a person to open up, feel comfortable, and talk freely from the get-go. An ice-breaker isn’t just relevant to your first conversation. At every stage, you level up a bit.
You first make them laugh and get them a little comfortable. You then assure them of your intentions, allow them to trust you, and prove that you are worthy.
To melt the ice completely, show your vulnerabilities as you expect it from them. Treat every stage as a new beginning that requires an ice-breaker.
5. Focussing on Building Trust
Better focus always speeds up any process. If you want to convert online dating to serious relationships, you must focus on establishing your connection and building trust early on.
When dating online, avoiding games, casual hangouts, or running away from opening up will help you remain on track with your wants.
The people you end up talking to, focussing on building trust since day one and working towards a relationship, will help you gain quick momentum instead.
6. Being Upfront and Honest
The one thing where a lot of people fall short is in their ability to be upfront and honest about what you want when you first start talking to someone.
You may feel you’ll lose potential partners and scare them away if you tell them what you’re looking for because they don’t want the same thing. However, this strikes back at you later on anyway.
Avoid expressing your desires aggressively or expecting anything in return. Be open about what you think and believe in.
7. Limiting Your Time Online
You may want to spend as much time with your newly-found online date as possible, but it brings more bad than good.
You do not want to revolve your life around each, be completely consumed by your phone, and become delusional and deviated from the real world.
Avoid letting a date turn into an obsession. Limiting your time online with them gives you more interesting things to talk about.
It makes you more attractive, gives you the right headspace, and helps you build a healthy connection online that can last long enough rather than being stuck in a vicious cycle.
8. Putting In the Right Effort
The kind of effort and the amount of effort: both play a major role in determining how quickly you can find a relationship online or even if you find one in the first place.
Putting in too much effort can make it seem like you don’t have a life of your own. A person who might like you would also end up doubting it if you ping them every 10 mins.
On the flip side, not putting in any effort will make people lose interest in you. When you take twenty days to reply, they’re more likely to find someone who cares about catching up.
9. Meeting Up in Real Life
At the end of the day, we can’t rely on texting, phone calls, or video calls for something as essential as a romantic relationship.
You might also commit to your feelings for each other online, but it won’t truly strengthen the bond unless you meet up.
Making an effort to meet up will also make you stand out. Even if circumstances prevent you from meeting up often, take the time and money to meet them once or when you can.
The sooner you meet up, the better. But beware of catfishes and ensure your security before acting on them.
10. Practicing
It may sound weird, but like dating in real life, dating online is also a skill. It’s true that focusing on quality will help you hit the right mark.
But if you’re new to online dating, you might want to catch up on the experience of dating online in ways that bring you success.
It’s going to take a little bit of trial and error to see what works and what doesn’t. The more experience you have, the more likely you are to jump into a relationship.
You learn how to make people take you more seriously.
Factors Which Increase The Time To Find A Relationship When Dating Online
1. Taking It Too Fast
One key factor that leads to online dating failures is rushing the process.
Falling in love, even in person, takes time. It only gets trickier with online dating since you have fewer cues to judge a person and their intentions.
You might also want to observe the pace of the person in front of you. Suppose they are uncomfortable sharing certain information or actions.
In that case, you might come off as too weird and kill your chances when trying to jump into a relationship instantly, as it can scare a person.
Before investing your time and energy, you might also want to assess the person’s intentions and not directly assume that they are looking for a relationship.
2. Looking In the Wrong Places
The digital world has become increasingly complex, and so have our social norms. As a result, social media sites and dating apps have become diverse to cater to the needs of each section of society.
Getting to the right place to look for a relationship is essential to finding a relationship.
If you are looking for a queer relationship on an app full of straight people or looking for a serious relationship on a platform that is popularly used for hookups – your chances of finding a relationship get significantly low.
Research an application’s background and usage well before signing up, and if you don’t find what you’re looking for, look somewhere else.
3. Lacking Information on Your Profile
Online dating is scary – it leaves room for lying, fraudulent activities, catfishing, and so much more.
Establishing trust is difficult in today’s age, and if you continue to hide too much or pretend too hard, you are more likely to be ignored.
Allow the person to know who you truly are and provide adequate and accurate information regarding your age, gender identity, preferences, likes or dislikes, etc., while at the same time keeping your safety and privacy standards in mind.
Keep it crisp, but keep it meaningful.
4. Shallow Conversations
Attraction is built upon actions and conversations. You may lack displaying action on the internet, but you can surely make meaningful conversations.
Having too much short talk or shallow conversations with people that you or the other person doesn’t care about can make them quickly lose interest in you.
While you shouldn’t immediately jump to deep, personal questions, you should still attempt to take it one step forward with each question and try to get to know the person more deeply with time to be successful in finding the right relationship online.
5. Mindless Search and Swipe
Quantity may seem like it would get you a relationship quicker, but it can also be counter-productive.
You end up investing your time and energy chit-chatting with people that you weren’t even compatible with in the first place.
Mindlessly accepting anyone who comes your way will only decrease your odds of finding a relationship.
Rather, you should check out a profile, see if you guys match or have the scope of taking it forward, and then give it a shot.
Quantity may be great for practicing and helping your self-esteem in building conversations, but the quality will help you find the one for you.
6. Getting Involved with Several People
Focussing on texting and talking to too many people simultaneously to increase your chances will actually fire back on you.
You might have “the one” among those people, yet you would fail to recognize them or give them the time and attention they deserve just because you were involved with many other individuals.
Getting a relationship and making it work, especially online, is hard. You should try and talk to a couple of people to see where you connect, but only indulge in with people you can afford to give attention to.
Focus is a key factor in determining whether online dates convert into relationships.
7. Not Asking Enough Questions Early On
Asking questions and showing interest are important elements of making a date successful. But when it comes to online dating, it becomes crucial.
You cannot judge a person by their body language, their tone, or their actions anymore – all you have left are words.
When you don’t ask enough questions, you lose the chance to test your compatibility in the early stages.
This means that you know what you want out of your conversations and remain focused on them rather than being distracted by mundane conversations. The kind of questions you ask also matter.
If you don’t ask whether the other person wants the same thing out of dating as you, you will find yourself looking in different directions much later in the process.
8. Becoming Too Needy
Needy and desperate people are always a no-no, and there are plenty of those online. Acting too clingy can be annoying, especially as someone a person has only recently known.
Since there are plenty of needy out there on the internet, acting needy in the initial stages will immediately get you ignored and cut off without anyone bothering to understand the cause.
The internet has a reputation for such strange people, and humans can’t do much about their natural avoidant responses.
9. Building on Unrealistic Possibilities
When you are really looking for a relationship, you tend to build on ideas that aren’t true. It becomes easier to pretend and hide the truth from your own self when everything happens on a screen.
A lot of online dating fails because of an unrealistic understanding and expectations of it. The truth is – you cannot run an entire relationship online.
You can’t expect to be forever the way you are, that there will be disappointments when you meet up, and that life is very different outside of your screen.
Using online dating as an escape from the real world will not help you get a stable, long-term relationship.
10. Getting Too Close or Dependent
There is only so much you can find out about someone online. Building your connection is practical to only a certain extent, and getting too emotionally bound or close can be a red flag.
If you or the other person has gotten way too attached over text and calls or is dependent on your constant presence, it often comes from a place of desperation and a strong desire to get love.
When one person gets too attached, it starts feeling like a burden on the other person. That makes plenty of potential partners run away, seeing it as a major red flag.
Conclusion
Finding a relationship online may be trickier. You might have to be more careful and spend a little more time, but you can still find the one online.
Online dating will come with its own set of troubles. Not being careful of catfishes, desperate people, or liars, can slow down the process and even bring you trouble.
However, with time and practice, you learn to dodge all these troubles and land where you want. At the end of the day, the trouble just might be worth it.