I am glad to be married. I have been married for almost 8 years and together with my wife for a total of 12 years. As you can see it has been a long time since I have been on a date and I couldn’t be more thankful. I found dating to be difficult back when I was doing it, now there are so many more dimensions to dating, it must be even more of a challenge.

On-line dating is becoming more and more popular and in theory it sounds like it makes the process easier. But, given the type of people you hear about in the news that commit some unheard of crimes, how can you be sure that the person you meet on-line is really that person?

While the dating websites such as, eHarmony.com, date.com, match.com, and many more bring a whole bunch of people to you for easy searching how can you be sure you are getting what you see?

Assuming you are able to weed through the weirdoes and find some real quality people then the service is an excellent idea. You get to pick the criteria you want in your mate. You get to see pictures of them along with their profile. You can contact them ahead of time via email, the safest way to screen potential dates. If the emailing step goes well you can then move to phone calls. Provided all these steps go well and you both feel some chemistry you can arrange a date with each other.

Taken even a bit further, eHarmony.com does a personality profile so they can match you up with what they feel is your ideal match. I have not known anyone that has used this service with eHarmony. I have known several people that have used match.com. They were able to find many dates so the system worked as designed. No marriages came out of the dates but I think it had more to do with my friends and their readiness to commit to someone.

There is no limit to what you can find if you are looking to meet someone. While researching this topic for my website I found so many different options. There are the simple websites mentioned already in this article, just people looking to meet others. There are websites dedicated to gay relationships, blacks looking to meet blacks, Asians looking to meet Asians, various religions looking to meet people of the same religion. Perhaps the most surprising and most disturbing that I came across was married people looking to meet someone to “hook up”. I have not placed any of these sites on my website for obvious reasons but there were dozens of them out there.

Given how the landscape of dating has changed in the last 12 years I can only imagine what dating will be like when my daughter starts dating, not that I even want to think of it.