HeartBrakeHotel

1. Trust your instincts. As humans, we have all been blessed with a com­plex psy­cho­log­i­cal tool we col­lo­qui­ally refer to as our ‘gut feel­ing’. This tool uses a com­bi­na­tion of con­scious and sub-conscious obser­va­tions and prompts to let us know when to get out of a given sit­u­a­tion. Never ignore your instincts. Refer to your ‘lit­tle inner voice’ every time you read a pro­file, a response to an email, have a phone con­ver­sa­tion or meet in person.

2. Take your time. In the ini­tial stages of online dat­ing, it is best to keep your per­sonal infor­ma­tion pri­vate. This includes your name, sur­name, home tele­phone num­ber and home address. It may seem prud­ish to with­hold this infor­ma­tion but there are some scary things you should be aware of, namely:

· With your home phone num­ber, any per­son could find out where you live, what your income is and even the value of your home.

· Your full name can allow peo­ple to ‘Google’ your name and per­form an inter­net search that may result in them know­ing where you work, what you do and even what your phone num­ber is.

· With both your home num­ber and your full name they can find out basi­cally everything.

3. Use anony­mous com­mu­ni­ca­tion meth­ods. Set up a free email account with Yahoo, Gmail or Hot­mail to facil­i­tate your email com­mu­ni­ca­tion and use a pre­paid cell phone account or Skype for tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions. This will allow you more time to get to know the per­son in ques­tion bet­ter before divulging any per­sonal details.

4. Use a rep­utable online dat­ing ser­vice. There is a say­ing that goes ‘you get what you pay for’ and this is true for online dat­ing as well. Free dat­ing ser­vices are all good and well, but take into account that ‘free’ means that peo­ple who use the site are com­pletely uniden­ti­fied since they don’t need to pro­vide any credit card infor­ma­tion. This pro­vides a greater oppor­tu­nity for poten­tially dan­ger­ous indi­vid­u­als to mis­use the platform.

5. Be on the look­out for odd char­ac­ter­is­tics. Once you start com­mu­ni­cat­ing with a poten­tial mate via email or tele­phone you should be wary of any odd char­ac­ter­is­tics you may notice. Are they eas­ily affronted, do they seem con­trol­ling, etc.? If you notice any­thing that is not above board, that should be your cue to tuck tail and run.

I knew a girl who was on Match​.com. She would talk to a guy for a week online, and then go on a date with him. It wasn’t that she did that. What was worse is that she would give her real home address, jump in his car, and have drinks with him. There were so many times that I try to tell her how dan­ger­ous that was, but she didn’t lis­ten. It’s def­i­nitely some­thing that is a big “No No” when doing online dating..