Keeping an Open Online Dating Account

A friend of mine was recently going to close her eHarmony.com account, and as she went to, she had a new message from a potential male suitor.

“I’ll give it one last shot,” she said.

She did, and it turned out to be just a little bit magical. What if she had closed it? Or what if she had the thought to close it a day before? Yes, the challenges of dating can be daunting, but if we hang in there, the rewards can be a little bit greater.

I’m happy to report that things with Mr. Almost-Closed-Account are going well, and though maybe the other fellas before that weren’t so perfect, as with many of these things, maybe they were just a trial run. But the question is, when do we know? When we’re dating, it’s frustrating, and we always want to throw in the towel. Of course, then we always hear those annoying stories of how someone found their special someone just as they were losing hope. It’s like when you’re looking for your keys and you finally find them in the freezer, under a carton of ice cream. “They’re always in the last place you look,” your annoying neighbor tells you. Of course they’re in the last place you look—it’s the last place you look. Why would you keep looking?

It’s sort of the same with dating. If you’re lucky, I guess. Just when you think there’s no hope, boom, there he is. I guess lucky, if you consider dating a bunch of slimy guys the prerequisite for finding that one spectacular man. But hey, at least then you know he’s good. You know what not too look for. Chalk it up to experience. I’m really just trying to make you feel better about all the yucky people you’ve dated. But we all have. Moving on…

That’s the point. Moving on. You never know what’s out there. It’s so easy to give up, and you have to ask yourself why you’re in it. Are you dating because you want to, or because you think you should be? Maybe you just feel like you’re at the point in your life where you should be dating, and that in itself can be damaging to both your dating mentality and to your date. It can also hurt your future dating life, because it takes a little bit of the enjoyment out of it. So it could be that what you need is in fact just a break. And if closing your account, even if just for a short time, and putting your love life on hold is what it takes, then go for it. It could make things better for the future.

So if you’re like my friend, and about to close your account, consider these things first. Are you closing it because you really want to, because you’ve really given up on dating, or because:

1) You just don’t want to pay the fee anymore. Understandable.

2) You can’t type. You’re a hunt-and-peck type of person. Back to conventional methods of dating for you!

3) You can’t decipher people’s e-language. Is that sarcasm, or are they just mean? Either way, you don’t like it.

4) You have so many messages, it crashed your computer.

5) You haven’t gotten any messages. Is this account activated???

6) You’re just exhausted by it all, which is also very common, and the whole method of Internet dating can be a bit draining.

Don’t feel bad if you click the “cancel account” button. It’s your choice, unless you signed up for a lifetime membership. If it didn’t work out, it didn’t work out. There are plenty of other means to dating, and you should be excited about exploring all of your options.

Also, just because you cancel one account, doesn’t mean you can’t open another. You know, that wind from one account closing, opens another. Right? The important thing to remember is that however you date and whoever you date, you should be happy. But just remember to keep an open mind and an open eye. You never know who could be out there. They aren’t all hiding under rocks, slithering away. Some of them are actually right in front of us—we just need to pick up our heads, or open our emails, once in a while.

Dating Triumphs and Tragedies is published every Sunday by Online Dating Magazine columnist Nicole Roberge. She can be reached at NicoleMRoberge@hotmail.com.

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