When you are dating online -when do you know when it is time to take the next step? For me, especially being a woman, was one of my main concerns that I have always had when online dating. Now that I have been on over a dozen dates with people that I met on the internet, I feel pretty confident when meeting up with someone for the first time.
First things first, there is nothing wrong with being paranoid, me personally, I have learned to trust my gut instinct and can usually tell right off the bat if someone is real or not, or is a creep for that matter. One rule that I have used is that I have to talk to the person at least a couple of times before meeting up in person. I have even went as far as video chatting before actually going out on a real date. Some sites may offer this, others won’t, but there is always Skype for this, which is a free service where you can chat with friends, and in my opinion is a great tool for online dating.
I would recommend taking it slow when you are chatting with someone online though before taking it to the next step. The shortest amount of time that I have waited before actually meeting up with a guy in person, was 5 days. Given we were exchanging emails for a couple of days, then we did a couple hour long instant messaging conversations – followed by a couple of texts and phone calls until we met up that Friday. I felt real comfortable around him and he actually turned out to be a great guy and a great date.
If you have ever read a disclaimer anywhere on a dating site – you will usually see that they don’t recommend meeting up in private place for the first date. Some examples of this may include a hiking trip, going out on a private boat, meeting up at that persons house, etc.
You want to be somewhere in public, where people are around. This is generally a lot more safe than being alone together in a secluded place. Once the two of you get to know each other on a real life basis – then you can start doing the fun and adventurous stuff, just the two of you.
One tip that a friend of mine used to do, who was much more paranoid than I was, was to friend them on facebook before going out with them in real life. This won’t always work, as everyone doesn’t have a facebook account, but seriously, almost everybody does.
This way you can get a glimpse of the kind of person they are, who they are friends with, and most of all if they have a filled out facebook profile full of pictures, it also helps to validate the person a little better. Like I said, that is something that my friend used to do, call it paranoid or cautious, you really never can be too careful.