So today's entry has let you wait a bit, sometimes life just takes over. My mum has been in the hospital and she is quite ill so I needed to look after her. Today's is a bit longer as the previous to compensate. Also I am taking questions. If there is anything you would like to know concerning online dating you can leave your question as a comment to this entry or you can leave it as a comment on Instagram. Let's get on with the post!

With your profile all set up you are ready to get active on the dating site.

All the dating site will offer you a way to search for possible candidates. Usually free websites have got a regular search engine in which you can search persons complying certain preferences such as age and gender, as well as the distance to where you are living.

Whereas to paying sites, they offer a more sophisticated way to search. Usually they will offer you "candidate proposals". Based on the personally quiz you took when you signed up at the website as well as your preferences, they will reveal a certain number of candidates to you each week.
They might also have a function in which they present certain candidates who might be interesting for you, however they do not meet all of your preferences. For instance they might live further away or may not fit you age preference. It is interesting to check these out, since it might give you more options. However keep in mind the blog from last week, your "essentials" shouldn't change. Maybe a year older than you prefer isn't that bad, but if he got cats while you're allergic to them, that's simply not going work.

While you are going through the profiles that are presented to you, keep in mind to look further than the picture on the profile. I know I said last week that you will get judged on your profile picture, however it’s important to see beyond that. It’s like they say you can’t judge a book by its cover, the inside of a person is as important, if not even more important as the outside.

So when you find a profile, I would suggest that you read the profile entirely. See whether the person has taken time to fill up his/her profile, see whether you like what he or she has put on his profile and whether it is consistent with the list you put together of what you are looking for.

If he/she is, you can engage in conversation. When it comes to the free sites, you are able to send a message directly to the person. The paying sites usually have some sort of trajectory you have to follow. You can send a message directly however they advice against it. They offer a few steps in order to get to know each other before you engage in a conversation.

The first step that the site I used to be on offer was to smile at someone, which you could do when you really like their profile. This could also be used to gain someone's attention, because maybe that person didn't get you in their partner proposals.
The next step was to like or comment the profile of the other person, for instance if you like their hobbies or whether you want to comment you also practice the same sport.
Then, you could send over five questions. These are multiple choice question you could pick out of a list of predesigned question. The nice part about these question is that you already get to know a little bit more about the person. The thing I also really like about this is that there were three fixed answers and one open question. So if the person you are sending these questions to, doesn't find himself/herself in the answers he/she could fill in something entirely different or a combination of the fixed answers.
The next of the trajectory was to send each other preferences, I never used this, so I don't really recall what this was exactly.
I used to skip from the questions to the final step which is messaging. If you really like the answers you got to your questions, you can send the person a message or you can wait a few days to see whether he/she will send you a message. However don't wait too long, there are many persons active online, so someone might just steal your prince charming away from underneath your nose!