Posts Tagged Dating Advice
Another reason to chat on our community boards
By Juliet O
Using Zoosk’s Community boards is a great way to get noticed.
Of course, Zoosk’s mission is to introduce you to singles in your local area and hook you up with potential dates, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make friends or join our Community discussions while you’re at it. During moments of downtime during your maelstrom of flirting, check out our Community boards for relevant dating tips, fun conversation, and online dating success stories from our users.
The Community is also a fun way to get to know people from all over the world. If you’re not opposed to a long distance relationship, you can even meet people on the Community boards. We’ve had it happen before! All you have to do to go to a person’s profile from the Community pages is click on their photo. The right hand side of a Community post also shows if a Zoosker is currently online, how many posts they’ve made, and how long they’ve been on Zoosk. To message a person from the Community boards, all you need to do is click the little envelope icon below their photo. See below. 
Whenever you make a community post, it goes on your status feed as well, as Zoosk’s status feed that gets shown to Zooskers within your search criteria. Yet another way to get noticed — not a bad deal! We also host contests on our Community for coins and other prizes. Who doesn’t love prizes? I hope you’re convinced now that Community participation is fun! Of course, it’s totally up to you, but we’d like to to know that it’s an option, and a good one at that.
2 comments November 30, 2009
Having good testimonials might get you a date
Those who are wondering how they can can increase their profile views, receive more messages, and significantly raise their chances of landing a date on Zoosk should maybe consider requesting and publishing friend testimonials on their Date Card! Testimonials are awesome and really speak a lot about you, especially on an online dating site.
What’s a testimonial? A testimonial is a short blurb from a friend or acquaintance that says something positive about you. We publish third party testimonials on Zoosk because testimonials are a great way to give potential matches more information about you from people who know you. It gives someone who looks at your profile the chance to hear something nice about you from a third party. Because this information is coming from a source who knows personally, it gives credibility to the fact that those great things they say about you are true. It’s uncouth to brag openly about yourself, so why not have one of your friends brag about you on your behalf?
If you’re wondering about how the get testimonials for your Date Card, read on for step-by-step instructions! (more…)
6 comments November 24, 2009
Go on and have yourself a good cry
By Juliet O
The next time you find yourself heartsick and glum, please do yourself a favor and have a good cry. Your friends might tell you that he or she isn’t worth wasting tears over, but you’d probably yourself more harm to keep the tears in rather than just to let them out.
Crying may indicate, on the emotional level, that something is wrong. But did you know that the act of crying can actually be good for both your physical and emotional health? Conventional wisdom has stated for years that crying can be good for you, and recently, scientific research has also come to support that claim. (more…)
1 comment November 17, 2009
Like a moth to the flame
By Anne B
Anytime that we experience something painful in our lives our intuitive reaction is to avoid it. If a surface is hot, we instinctively remove our hand before we get burned. We might even avoid approaching a potential love interest because of the anxiety we feel about starting that initial ice breaker conversation. However psychologists are saying that some problems just “are” and trying to make them disappear might not be the answer. (more…)
1 comment November 16, 2009
Love, versus the “idea of being in love”
By Juliet O
Have you ever heard the phrase “I’m in love with the idea of being in love”? This phrase relates to a real phenomenon. Many of us, your author included, have at one time or another been in love with the idea of love.
It is actually quite easy to be seduced by a concept. And love is a seductive concept. Our literary and artistic culture is riddled with hyperbolic, overwrought, and unattainable descriptions of what love means. The way love is described in famous novels is so exaggerated, it becomes almost absurd. In Goethe’s famous novel, Sorrows of Young Werther, the main protagonist actually takes his own life because the woman he loves doesn’t love him back. When the novel was published in 1774, it inspired a wave of “Werther fever” as young men throughout Europe began dressing in the style of the main character as described in the book. This “Werther fever” even lead to many copycat suicides as readers actually took their own lives, like Werther did, when confronted with unrequited love. This example shows how susceptible we are to ideas of love, even when these ideas in no way resembles the real thing. (more…)
2 comments November 13, 2009
In love, remember to check your baggage at the door
By Juliet O
A widely accepted law of dating states that the longer you date, the more baggage you accumulate. Thinking back to your earliest relationships, don’t certain words come to mind, like naive, innocent, simple? Things were so uncomplicated way back when all you had to worry about regarding love was a curfew and what your parents were going to say. A first love is such a beautiful thing, because the first loves seem so innocent, unbridled, and pastoral. But the moment you get hurt for the first time, everything changes. After our first loves wane away, we develop shells and shields and build walls — we close ourselves up out of defense, and we don’t let anyone access those deep, vulnerable parts of ourselves quite that way ever ever again. And like a hermit crab that carries everything on its back, we start dragging our baggage along everywhere.
But baggage can also destroy relationships, especially when one tries to hoist their baggage on someone else. Say that your baggage is the memory of your ex. And you take that memory with you everywhere, including on dates with new people, and your ex becomes the ubiquitous elephant in the room? That can definitely damage your chances at a new relationship. Or what if your particular baggage is the jealousy that you developed as the result of getting hurt in the past? Hoisting that baggage on a new, unsuspecting partner cannot possibly be conducive to a future relationship. And when you act jealously toward people, and they leave you because they can’t take it anymore, you only become more jaded and more jealous. The danger of baggage is that it has a way of multiplying itself.
So how do we deal with this baggage issue? (more…)
2 comments November 9, 2009
Having a positive outlook will get you more dates
By Juliet O
No one likes to be around a negative person. This principle applies equally in the real world as in the world of online dating. Any hint of negativity on your Zoosk dating profile can really kill the mood with a prospective match. On your online dating profile, negativity (and its kin: sarcasm, pessimism, abrasiveness, misanthropy, and rancor) should be used cautiously and sparingly, or better yet not at all.
Why do we develop negative patterns of thinking? Many psychology experts believes that we become negative because negative thinking is easy — and it can easily become a habit. Bad thoughts perpetuate themselves. It’s the easy way out (and a total cop out) to be negative about our lives, because the alternative — positive thinking — requires a lot more effort. We have to choose to be happy and positive, and that choice has to be maintained over the course of our lives. Positive thinking takes constant work. In many ways, positive thinking is a choice. And positive thinking is absolutely essential for a relationship to succeed. (more…)
3 comments November 2, 2009
5 online dating fears and how to overcome them
Photo credit: Sabrina’s Stash
By Juliet O
All daters have fears. By dating, we make ourselves vulnerable to being hurt in many ways that are precluded by choosing to remain single. As daters, we tend to hold onto our fears, much to our own detriment. Fears hold us back and hinder us from opening ourselves up to love and fulfillment. Part of the battle of dating is in eliminating your fears — of intimacy, of vulnerability, of emotional honesty, of betrayal, of rejection, of ourselves — so that you can open yourself to the possibility of love. It’s not always easy.
Online dating presents a unique set of fears and challenges. While it may seem difficult, these fears need to be overcome if you want to date online successfully. We want to guide you through these online dating fears and give you tips on how to overcome them, because we want online dating to be a great experience for you. And why shouldn’t it be a positive experience? By online dating, you have an automatic dating pool of singles all using Zoosk for the same purpose: to hopefully find romance and connection. But how can you find romance or connection if you’re still holding onto all that fear and baggage? If you still hold onto fears or reservations regarding online dating, read this post for helpful tips on overcoming your trepidation, in order to engage with the online medium openly and fortuitously. (more…)
3 comments October 28, 2009
How to talk about relationships without talking about relationships
By Juliet O
You know in those beginning stages of getting to know someone (whether in real life or online) when you know you like this person but you’re trying to figure out if they like you? You don’t really know how they feel 100% (plus you’re shy) so you don’t really want to start talking about being “in a relationship”, plus you don’t know how to bring up the topic in the first place without being the weirdo who brings up the topic in the first place. Right? How existential and circular. I feel like I’m in a Charlie Kaufman screenplay. But seriously, how do you talk about relationships without talking about relationships? Specifically, how do you say things like “I want to be in a relationship with you but let’s talk about it” without sending out total creep or stalker or crazy person vibes?
Through my extensive first person research and years spent analyzing this very topic exactly, I know of some great methods for talking about relationships without talking about relationships. There are ways, as counterintuitive as it seems, to bring up the relationship chat without explicitly bringing it up. I suppose some people would view this as a failure of communication, but I think of it more as “communicating subtly” (i.e. self preservation). For the shy ones out there, here’s how you do it.
Add comment October 22, 2009
Vote Zoosk for Best Facebook App in Mashable’s 3rd Annual OpenWeb Awards
Mashable’s 3rd Annual OpenWeb Awards are open for user submitted nominations and votes. Last year, Zoosk won an OpenWeb Award for Best Dating and Romance site. This year, Dating and Romance is no longer a category, so Zoosk is up for overall Best Facebook Application! We’re excited for the opportunity to win this category, so help us out with your nominations and we will love you forever (and ever and ever).
How do you nominate Zoosk for Best Facebook Application? Simply go to the Best Facebook Application nomination landing page. Make sure you are logged into Mashable via your Facebook username and password (to vote, you must log in via Facebook Connect). Once you’re on the nominations landing page, type “Zoosk” into the field for “Best Facebook App”. Then hit “Submit”. You’re done. Beautiful.
Nominate us, and then tell your friends to nominate us. We love you dearly. Please love us back?
Add comment October 19, 2009
