If you are new to this scene, you might be a little hesitant, or even scared to register to an online dating website because of the fear of the “unknown”. Don’t worry, online dating doesn’t bite. There are a lot of benefits that this new dating tool boasts, advantages that make dating easier instead of frustrating.

Online dating makes the traditional meet-someone-through-friends or go-to-a-singles-bar approach passé. It takes away the first date jitters, the “I don’t know what to say next” and “Do I order salad or steak?” awkward moments because you already know the person you’ll be having dinner with somehow, if it reaches that point where you’ve already set up a first meeting after long (or short) hours of talking to each other online.

Here are some more benefits of online dating:

• There are hundreds of thousands of members in one online dating website, giving you the spice of variety.

• You don’t need to come up with an excruciating “how do I go about this?” pick up line as there are “flirting functions” in some websites, like sending a “wink”, “poke” or “heart” to initiate contact and express how you feel about the person you meet or see online.

• You get to talk to the person first online and if you find out that you are compatible, you can then find out if the chemistry sticks, even if you haven’t met the person yet, by continuing your relationship on the net.

• You can meet all different sorts of people, even those geographically unreachable, if you’re interested in a long distance relationship, or if you’re not up to meeting the person yet and just settling for an online fling.

• You only need a PC (or a mobile phone) and an internet connection. No need to dress (or undress for that matter) to impress, or spend hundreds of dollars for a date that will go nowhere.

• Some websites give you quality results – profile matches that are very detailed in nature based on personality tests and even psychological.

• There are no social classes or race or ethnicity prejudice in cyberspace. Everyone’s playing the same game in the same playing field.

• You can set your expectations already within the website you are signing up to, or the chat room that you’ll be entering, or state what you are looking for in a relationship right off the bat! Serious relationships only, on the rebound, looking for Mr. Right or Mr. Right now, or “just playing around”… no need to enter in a relationship where you’d have to find out that you’ve been fooled by a player, or you’ve hurt someone who was serious from the very beginning. And no need to explain yourself!

• And most of all, rejection isn’t as embarrassing as having to reject someone or be rejected face-to-face. Rejection through chat or e-mail, or even by simply ignoring the person who isn’t very interesting, or being ignored by someone you expressed interest in makes it cut and dry.

You can still choose to be old-fashioned and go for the old school ways of dating. But once you dive into the scene of online dating, you will reap its benefits. And you’ll be surprised on how easy and convenient it is to find that one true love (or one night stand, depending on what you’re looking for) online.

Couples who have been together for a long time, or know each other well enough and have built their trust with each other strongly enough, might find it easy to sustain a long distance relationship. As long as there is a plan in the future to eventually be with each other in one place, then there is hope that helps the relationship endure the fact of being apart.

Taking the time to talk to each other on the phone or through the Internet and finding out what is going on with the other person and sharing emotions, even nonsense conversations, just as if the person is just right beside you, will surely help. Making sure that you see each other as much as you can and taking turns in doing so, if financially and geographically possible, will also make the relationship hot enough to hold onto. The thought of seeing your loved-one again in the next couple of weeks will surely ignite excitement and add spice to the relationship. It could sometimes even be better than having your partner around you so much because routine can lead to boredom, and we all know what boredom can do.

It could be harder if it is an online relationship and you haven’t met the person face-to-face. If the relationship is already serious and you have plans to take the relationship to the next level, I suggest you take time to meet the person face-to-face and spend time with him/her as much as you can, and take it from there. It’s hard to be away from someone you love, let alone be away from someone you haven’t built your trust with yet. It takes a lot of work and a lot of thinking to make a long distance relationship happen, and more work and more planning on top of that if you don’t really know that person well enough to trust him/her yet.

Long distance relationships can work – if you’re willing to put in the effort. You’d have to take the time and make the effort to make it work, though, and it could lead to tough times and many, many sleepless nights. But as they say, love conquers all. If you decide to love that person, whether he/she is a million miles away, it’s just takes a phone call or an e-mail. A simple note that says “I love you and I can’t wait to be with you again” or a phone call to say “I miss you” can erase those long winding roads, or even the depths of the oceans that keep you apart. And ending your day with his/her voice in your ear or a conversation through a video call can surely make your relationship last… until the day you are together at last.

According to some popular dating websites, it is indeed possible to find your so-called soul mate online. Testimonials prove that signing up to these online dating websites, free or not, can aid you in helping your perfect match, and live happily ever after. Internet chat is also a proven way to meet your possible mate. Couples meet, hook up, then get married and have 3 kids after meeting online with SingleGuy128 and LonelyGirl80 as their nicknames – it happens. One click on that nickname and it was happily ever after.

You’d have to be open to the vast possibilities if you consider finding that one love online. Just like the “real world”, you can still get hurt, stare at the ceiling during sleepless nights over someone who hasn’t called for days (in this case sent an e-mail or instant message), or you can enjoy 6 months of solid, blissful, smile-filled days with a person you’d want to spend your life with and on the 182nd day of dating that gorgeous man, you find out that he’s gay.

On top of real world realities, the Internet is also known for anonymity. Anyone can wear a mask and never be discovered online. You can pretend to be a guy, talk like one online, and yet be a totally straight girl without even fantasies of girl-on-girl action. The person you are talking to might say that she is 5 feet 10 inches tall with a 36-24-36 figure, a supermodel by day and your chat buddy at night, but really she’s a he and he grinds cement for a living.

On the contrary, if you find a person true enough to his words and you are genuine as well, and you find yourself enjoying the time talking to him and he enjoys your chats as well, chances are you’ll set up a meeting to see if your relationship can go outside of the four corners of your computer screen. It is in that meeting you’ll find out if you have met your one true love.

Be ready for the best and the worst if you want to try to find love on the Internet. The Internet is just another way, another venue for you to meet people. You can be successful, but sometimes you fail as well. Love is taking chances; it’s a game, so think of the Internet as the playing field. Finding true love online is indeed possible… and as they say, if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.

You can use your Yahoo! Messenger to chat with other singles either in your area or even singles from other countries. Just click on Yahoo! Chat from your YM and from there you can choose from different chat rooms from different parts of the world or about different interests. Search for singles and you’ll be presented with different singles chat rooms to choose from. Once you enter a chat room, you’ll see others who are logged in to that chat room as well. Turn your web cam on so that others can see you do your thing (whatever that is), and view others’ web cams, too. See them strut their stuff through their web cams, chat with other single men or women like you, and who knows, you might meet your match there.

You can also download Internet relay chat clients (or IRC clients) like mIRC, which is a stand alone program which is used solely for chatting. After downloading and installing the client, you will be asked for a preferred user name or nickname. Just leave everything as is if you’re not yet familiar with the other settings. After logging in, you’ll be able to see the channels available on the screen.

There are certain commands that you have to learn in order to navigate the program, but there is always the help command just in case you get lost along the way. Look for that singles chat room and enter and you’ll see others who are in that chat room as well. You can talk on the main channel or the main chat room where you’ll see everyone’s messages posted on the main room as well, or you can click on a nickname to talk to that person in private. Another screen will appear for your private conversation with the nickname you clicked.

There are also websites that have chat clients embedded in them. You can search for these sites on Google and most of them have user-friendly commands for you to navigate the website.

The one downside of using Internet chat to meet people is anonymity. If you are looking to find out more about a certain person online, you’d have to ask the questions and they would have to volunteer the information you are looking for, which sometimes may not be the truth. One thing the Internet promises is that you can be whomever and wherever you choose to be without being judged for it.

So if you’re looking to find someone for keeps, or even someone to spend the night with, there are risks involved in using singles chat. But then again, risks are always involved in life, right? So why not risk it? Take the plunge and try singles chat… you might find what you’re looking for there… all for free

This will work if the girl is honest enough to answers these questions and if she is frank enough to tell you what she likes and doesn’t like, and especially if she tells you if she’s looking for something serious, or if she’s just dating around or looking for fun. Don’t be afraid to surprise her though with something totally different but aligned with her apparent interests.

Once you’ve found out what your date is into, then you can start to mull over some ideas.

If she’s into movies:

• Surprise her with movie premiere tickets. Make sure that the movie you are going to watch is something she’d be excited to watch. Never bring a girl to watch a scary movie if she’s afraid of Casper and don’t take her to a typical guy action flick.

• Ask her if she’d be willing to do a movie marathon at your place or even her place. If she agrees to watch movies at your place, invite a friend to stay with you for at least the beginning of the date, or until she’s comfortable for you to be alone with her.

If she’s into music:

• Invite her to a sold out concert of her favorite band. Schedule your date on a concert night, she’ll surely enjoy it and will want to go out with you again.

• Bring her to a club that plays songs of the genre she’s into. She’ll dance the night away and she might even let you kiss her goodnight.

If she’s into kid stuff or she’s a kid at heart:

• Bring her to an amusement park. It’ll bring out the kid in her and she’ll never forget your date because you thought about what she really likes.

• Chuck E. Cheese! All kids want to go to Chuck E. Cheese, right? If there are no Chuck E. Cheese’s in your area, find one like it. Sounds corny, but they can be a lot of fun for adults as well.

It all boils down to finding what you dates interests are and what would be fun for you both. The first date will go well if you both have some hobbies in common and you do something related to your interests. You will both find it exciting and it’ll bring out the best in both of you. Anyway, a second date will surely happen if there are sparks between the two of you – it doesn’t matter where you are or what you do, if you’re compatible, nothing will go wrong on your first date.

The free websites, though, give ample information for you to gauge your interest. Pictures, geographic location, sexual preference, type of relationship they are looking for, interests and hobbies. You also get to send or receive a message or use the “flirting functions” provided, if any. Flirting functions, for example, would be sending a wink, a poke, a heart, a gift of some sort, to express how you feel for that person without having to initiate a conversation at first. If the person replies to your “flirt”, then it’s a go to communicate more.

You don’t have to sign up to any specific dating website to enjoy online dating. You can actually make it free by signing up to a personals website or through internet chat or messaging, though these methods are more general when it comes to relationships. Signing up to personals doesn’t mean you’re interested in dating, so you’d have to do some work and input more information on your personals site to state that you are looking for someone for romantic purposes. And the people that you find when you search may not be particularly looking for a mate, they might even be married, single but not available, or even have 6 kids and a granddaughter (not that it’s bad, but go for it if you’re into that…). Meeting people through Internet relay chat may be a little risky because all you’re talking to is a nickname. The person on the other end of the line would have to volunteer the information you are asking and you’d have to be familiar with chat lingo if you prefer meeting people this way.

It’s up to you to choose whether you’d like to pay monthly for an online dating site or go for gratis and do your own search and development. For some of the busy folks out there, they’d rather pay a monthly premium so that they don’t have to do a lot of work in finding profile matches. They want to let the website do that for them. They just want to login to the site, see if there are new matches, choose to message those people or not, or see if the person they’ve set their eyes on have replied, or if they got new messages and prospects. For folks who have nothing better to do, enjoy the benefits of online dating for free. Register to free websites, upload your picture and tell the whole world that you’re lonely and you want to find Mr. or Ms. (or Mrs.) Right or Right Now. Go to a chat room and talk to Lonely_Boy_1948 or CutesyGirl98 and find out if he or she may be the one. Or upload photos of you and your dog to Friendster or Facebook and play poker on Zynga.com – who knows – you might find your perfect match without having to spend a dime. As always though, you get what you pay for, and sometimes the cost of free is paid in time instead.

Even if you meet your possible date through a friend or through the Internet, it is very important to know at least some basic information about the person. Not second hand information from friends or other people, but directly from the person. You can either talk online or over the phone before you schedule your first date. Here are a couple of major questions that will help set the tone of your date and will help you decide whether the date is worth pushing through or not:

• What are you looking for?

It is important to know if the person is looking for a serious relationship, to date a lot of people or to meet people just for fun. You’d both have to know if you are on the same page, or not. This will set the expectation for your first date. It might be that it is not a given that the person is looking for a romantic relationship, so you should also find that out.

• What are your hobbies? What do you do for fun?

You have to know if you have something in common with this person. This will also help you plan what you are going to do during the date. It will also help you get to know what kind of personality the person has with how he/she spends his/her free time.

These questions will be the start of a great conversation and will also help generate a spark between the two of you. If the other person answers you honestly and frankly, you will be able to gauge the personality of that person. You would also have to open yourself up about these topics so that person would feel your sincerity in trying to make the first date worth it. If the person doesn’t sound interested at all, you’d immediately know to call the date off. It will be time well spent to talk to this person, before you both waste time on meeting for lunch, dinner or coffee and ending the date awkwardly. If the person is indeed interested, you will hear it in tone of his/her voice if it’s on the phone or the tone or mood of his/her responses online. Spend time talking to the person you want to go out on a date with. Asking questions before meeting someone for a date will surely save you time, even money. You could find out that the date isn’t even worth going for or with what you’re going to find out you can already plan for a date that you will both enjoy… rather than spending time in a crowded Mexican restaurant just to find out that your date is allergic to salsa.

Before you dress up and put on that perfume that will make him go gaga over you, here are a few reminders to make sure that your first meeting with your online boyfriend (guys, these are good tips for you, too) is safe and trouble-free.

1. Pick a place to meet him instead of having him pick you up at home. Unless you already know this peron, you shouldn’t give your home address yet. Make sure you pick a public place to meet, like a crowded restaurant or bar, or even go for a double date. There’s safety in numbers.

2. Make sure you offer to pay for half of the check so that your date doesn’t expect anything in return for a free meal. Don’t get me wrong, this is your first time meeting this person so who knows what he’s thinking, right?

3. Don’t drink alcohol on this first date. Alcohol impairs judgment and again, meeting someone for the first time, but having talked about your deepest, darkest emotions online might make you more vulnerable and you might become easy prey.

4. Bring your own car or have someone bring you to your meeting place and pick a time to have someone pick you up. It’s better to use your own mode of transportation for this first date because you wouldn’t want your date to think you’re an easy catch. And, if you ask him to take you home, he’ll know where you live which is another dangerous thing. Just arrange a second date after you have proven that this man is safe.

5. In that light, never assume the company of that person is safe. Always use your judgment and if your gut tells you that something is wrong, follow your gut. Instincts are usually right, according to some, but it won’t hurt to follow them even if you’re wrong. It’s up to your date to prove that he means no harm.

6. Always let your friends or family know where you’re going and who you’ll be with. Better yet, have some friends come with you to the place you’ll be meeting your date and have them sit at another table. I’m sure you’re date won’t mind the company if he’s harmless.

7. Never give your home phone number. Just give him your cell phone number so that you can easily change the number if he turns out to be a creep.

8. Always have your cell phone with you at all times during the date. You have to remain keen and alert and you have to have your cell phone handy just in case something doesn’t turn out right.

Even if you feel really drawn to this person, it is a fact that you’re just meeting him for the first time. It’s a bad world out there and not everyone can be trusted. You have all the time to get to know this person before you volunteer more information about yourself. And even before you meet, don’t volunteer to give your home address and phone number, your work information or really private details about yourself even if you feel that this is a person you could trust. It’s always about your safety. Safety above love – there’s no harm in staying safe while dating online.

First, let’s delve into the magic of online dating websites. There are a lot of online dating websites out there, but in general, they all work the same way. First, you register. There’s usually a big “register here” banner or button on the front page of the website, so, take a deep breath, and click that. You’d have to enter your name, age, gender, geographic location, a preferred user name and password for logging into the website, and of course your sexual preference. You can opt to include a picture of yourself (or a supermodel) for your profile. Adding a picture actually makes your profile more search-friendly.

After signing up, you’re ready to search the website’s database for people you might find interesting (or not). Some websites would ask you a ton of questions about your hobbies, your likes and pet peeves; even ask personality questions, to assist in finding your profile matches. After answering these mind-boggling questions, the site will give you profile matches, some with even a percentage rating on how compatible you are to that person. Some would just let you search for profiles on your own. Once you find someone interesting enough, you have the ability to send a message to that person and then wait for a reply.

If that person does reply, then you’re on your own – you can either choose to continue messaging back and forth, or set up a meeting, however way you’d like to pursue your new found interest.

Then, there are the personals websites like Friendster, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and the list goes on. You also have to register to these websites, but this time you get your own page and you can say something about yourself, even get into the exciting (or boring) details of your life, include videos and songs that reflect your sentiments for the day, write blogs about your feelings and thoughts (sexually explicit as they may seem), add pictures of yourself, your friends, your family, your dog or any picture you find relevant to your profile. These websites aren’t particularly for dating only, as you can add friends, co-workers to a network that you can interact with, view their profiles and their blogs, and so many other things. After signing up, you can now search for people, either friends or for your potential soul mate. You’ll have the ability to send them messages as well.

Internet singles chat is available in some websites or messaging systems like Yahoo! Messenger and also through Internet relay chat or IRC. You can download IRC clients or log in to the messaging system and then join a chat room of your choice. There are some systems where you’d have to sign up as well. You login using a username of your choice, be it a pseudonym, or your own name, if you prefer. After entering a chat room, a list of “chatters” will be seen.

You can then click on a specific nickname to talk to them in private, or you can send messages to the main chat room. You would have to be familiar with chat lingo so you can understand the chatters better and also communicate better. Learn, and then go forth (and multiply?).

Traditional dating is still fun, though, but it’s great to have options, right? Especially for the busy single people out there, it’s hard to find the right person to spend your warm or cold nights with, or if you choose, spend the rest of your life with. Online dating gives you freedom to meet people at the comfort of your home or office, during your free time, or even during sleepless nights. It’s worth a try, who knows, you just might find your better half online.