Are your swiping habits impacting your online dating experience? Mindless swiping often leads to superficial connections, focusing only on looks rather than compatibility. By swiping with intention, you can enhance your dating journey and increase your chances of finding a meaningful relationship.

Although there is a lot of flexibility when it comes to writing your dating profile and making it your own, there are also ways in which you can legitimately go wrong. One of those is making your dating profile about your matches rather than about you.

There’s a lot of misinformation out there about what a red flag actually is, which can lead to mistaking red flags for yellow flags and even green flags. When these flags get confused with one another, one of two things usually happens: 1) You screen people out prematurely, missing out on great potential connections, or 2) You rationalize away poor behavior and end up in annoying connections at best, and toxic relationships at worst.

Introverts love deep, meaningful connections with others. But the process of getting there? They would rather fast forward through the beginning and skip to the end. Unfortunately there is no way to skip the early stages of dating, but there ARE ways of tailoring the process to make it work for your introverted nature. And adapting the process is an absolute necessity in order to enjoy dating as an introvert.

Yes, it is possible to be too picky in online dating, but many women aren’t picky enough and compromise on important values that are necessary for making a relationship work.

The guiding compass for writing your online dating profile is your VALUES. Values are beliefs and principles that guide the ways in which we live our lives. They tend to be fairly stable over time, whereas interests and hobbies can change and shift more easily. It’s important in a relationship that either your core values align, or that you respect one another’s core values, even if you don’t hold the same ones. When you don’t, relationships become much more challenging.

Ghosting is particularly brutal for our human brains because they love certainty, and they hate ambiguity. When an ambiguous or uncertain situation arises, our brains will try to create certainty around the situation, even if there’s none to be found. This sometimes means that we come to false conclusions that we think will make us feel better, even though they ultimately make us feel much worse. Being ghosted sucks no matter what, but there are ways of dealing with it that can make it easier to process your feelings and move forward.

Somewhere along the way, we as women were taught that basic, healthy communication isn’t okay. We were taught that it’s not okay to ask questions. And yet asking questions is not only okay, it’s necessary to form strong, healthy connections, as well as to feel empowered and stay authentic to yourself in the dating process.

In online dating, associations have both benefits and detriments. On the positive side, they make swiping easier and faster, and they cut out a lot of extra thought and decision-making, saving us time and energy for the things that are important to us. If your online dating experience is going well, then that’s likely a sign that those associations are working well for you. On the negative side, these associations can go awry, leading us to rule out people prematurely.