Let’s lead off with some great news—the search for singles used to be a lot harder than it is today. Because of things like online dating, singles events, and more openness to talk about these things, finding the single men or single women you’re looking for has gotten a whole heck of a lot easier.
But that doesn’t mean you just snap your fingers and they appear. While we wish it were, that easy, it’s not the case. Just because you join a great online dating site doesn’t automatically mean you’re in the clear.
Too often, we hear stories of people who join sites to find love and just can’t seem to find anyone they are interested in. After asking them a few questions, it becomes evident that the problem is not the site or the people on it, but that our hero doesn’t know how to use the search functions properly to find what they’re looking for.
To help you out, we’ve included a few tips below to help you go from a searching beginner to a searching ninja. It’s easy to make mistakes dating online, but thankfully, they’re easy to fix and increase your results.
Step 1 – Join a Quality Dating Site
None of these singles searching tips are going to be of any help if you’re not at a quality dating site with quality options to look through.
Step 2 – Learn to Use the Search Features
If you’ve played around on an online dating app before, you’ve probably toyed with the search function. But what you may not have done is looked into the advanced search features that are available.
On almost every dating site, there is a button towards the bottom of the search page that will expand a list of advanced search features. For some reason, people miss this a lot and think that all you can search for is the gender and location of a person.
This is a big mistake. The advanced feature will let you look for singles by hobbies, specific preferences, physical traits, and so much more. If the site you’re on does not have this, you might want to click on our list of top sites below and get with the times 🙂
Usually, this is a small plus sign or a little down arrow that you click, and it opens up a bunch of options for you. Take a second and look for it on the site you are using. If you happen to be on a site with no search function, these tips also go for the preferences area of the site. You can update a ton more than you might think at first glance.
Step 3 – Understand City Settings vs. Zip Codes
We can’t think of a single online dating site that doesn’t allow you to sort your matches by location and proximity. One thing that you may want to do if you aren’t seeing what you’re looking for is to expand the number of miles out you’re willing to date. If you’re not willing to go a few extra miles to find someone special, that could be something to seriously reconsider
If proximity is not an option, you’re probably able to search by city or zip code. The tip here is to make sure you’re using the most appropriate of the two when it’s an option. For example, you may always say that you live in a certain big city, but that big city may be made up of a lot of smaller cities. Take a city like Las Vegas…Within the area that people call Las Vegas you have Henderson, Enterprise, North Las Vegas, etc. These may register as different locations on your dating app!
Step 4 – Search Regularly
The absolute best tip that we can give you, though, is to search regularly. If you search all of the matches today, will you see the people that join tomorrow? Nope. With thousands of people joining online dating sites every single day, the search results will constantly be growing and constantly be changing.
Does this mean that you need to search every single day or maybe even hourly to make sure you see everyone? No! All you have to do is periodically check back through the matches if you haven’t found anyone yet that peaks your interest.
One Last Thought…
The last thing we want to say is be careful with your newfound searching skills that you don’t turn into a quantity-chaser. Remember, it only takes one special person to change the rest of your life. You don’t need thousands of people; you only need one of the right people. Heck, some of us struggle to keep up with one person anyways 🙂 We wish you the best of luck and hope these tips help you in your journey of finding Mr. Right or Ms. Right.
