The question is, is 2016 is the year for me to find love?

I know you have been dying to hear what’s going on in my dating life! Ha or maybe not!

You may have read about my time trying online dating last year – ’25 First Dates’! If not click here to read! After the experience I chose not to date! Why? Because it was an exhausting and at times disheartening experience. Also if I was to be totally honest I didn’t feel I was ready to meet someone. The nature of online dating managed to put me off big time!

I have been asked many times why I am single when I run a dating business. My answer has been that I have wanted to be. After being in a long term marriage of 21 years I have enjoyed being single and being the ‘boss of me’.  When I wanted to date, I would generally date unavailable men who I didn’t feel would trap me.

In the past year I have spent a lot of time working on my own baggage and I am now in a great place! I am just like many women and men in my age group who see-saw between loving single life and thinking that it would be good to find the person who fits them perfectly!

So in the past year I have been busy helping singles find love and move past their baggage. Being single helps me ‘get’ exactly what they are going through and feeling. From my clients who have found love through D2D I am inspired by how amazing true love is, how love makes people  happier, healthier and even wealthier!

So now it is time for you to get back out there and date. It is time for me to start to follow some of the advice I am offering singles and I plan to share with you my experience! Feel free to give your feedback and advice to me!

The question  is, is 2016 is the year for me to find love? Ha personally that statement still sounds a little scary to me (even after working through my baggage) so for me rephrasing it to ‘I am looking for someone to hang out with’ makes it much less daunting! After all, isn’t that what we are all looking for someone who is great to be around and who enhances our lives?

Ok so how do I plan to find love/someone to hang out with?

My plan is to get out and about meeting people in my day to day life and through a variety of methods like I mention in my Dating Experts Guide to Meeting Singles in Perth. I will also brave online dating again with a new way of thinking. Online dating is now one of the main ways singles over 40 meet. What is my new way of thinking regarding online dating? It is that I will be viewing it as a great way to meet people, I plan to bring back the fun to my dating experience without being so hung up on the outcome.

My biggest challenge with the meeting people face to face is I get caught up in telling them what I do with D2D and thinking how great they would be for my clients! I need to just work on meeting people for me and not talking about what I do. I will let you know how I get on with that! The other problem I experience is some men do not want to date a woman who runs a dating business.

For online dating I advise people to get a fresh online dating profile if they have tried it before. In line with taking my own advice I wrote myself a new profile – complete with a new user name, new tag line and new photos.

I put the profile up about six weeks ago and the good news was I was inundated with emails. It was a little overwhelming but nothing to complain about – it would be so much worse if no-one contacted me!

In my previous 2  online dating experiences when I was blogging about the experience I had decided to be non-judgmental in who I said yes to. I found this was a recipe for disaster – causing me to experience  dating burnout and feel like I would never meet a great guy. I know there is a fine line as you are basically judging on a 2 dimensional photo that rarely shows the people in the best light! But this time I am not saying yes to people I don’t find attractive in some way.

It is a time consuming process and it has given me so much information to blog about and give advice on.

My experience so far has been good and I have gone on 5 dates. One guy I met while out in Perth on a Friday night and the other 4 guys were from online dating.

This time around all have been great guys and I really enjoyed the time I spent with each. I will let you know how they went in my next blog.

Deb x