Messaging help
Writing a message
Spend time on the site
Always be polite and respond to all messages

Meeting up
Advice for the date

Writing a message
Take a deep breath and dive straight in! Make a decision to contact someone in your first couple of weeks and you'll be surprised how easy it is.

Before sending a mail, look at the person you are contacting. Balance the mail with some information about yourself and comments about them based on their profile. Never send out a 'standard' email as people will see straight through it. Show interest in the person you are contacting and that interest will always be rewarded.

Contacting one person at a time is good practice as it allows you to focus on that person and you start to remember the important little details about them as the relationship develops. More than one and you'll make the classic mistake of mixing people up.

Humour is difficult to write at the best of times. It's usually best left till you know the other person a little better. Don't be fooled by the most widely used and least useful expressions in terms of dating profiles: GSOH. Your idea of what this means will often be very different to what someone else thinks.

Spend time on the site
They say that you never get something for nothing and the same is true of internet dating. The more time you spend on the site, and particularly the more time you spend on researching other members profiles, then the higher your chances will be of not just meeting someone but actually finding someone really special.

Rather than contact one person at a time, don't be worried about contacting a hanfull of people at once. This way you can exchange a couple of messages and see if there's any common ground. If there isn't then politely drop this person from your group of contacts and add someone else to it. Don't make the group too big otherwise you'll start getting confused between the different members that you're writing to.

Logging on every day will also keep your profile at the top of other members search queries.

Always be polite and respond to all messages
Always respond to messages even if it's a polite no as you may not be interested in that person. Everyone involved in internet dating know that saying no is quite acceptable as long as you're polite. Who knows, that person may not be right for you but he or she may have a friend on the site who is.

Advice for the date
Although we vet all profiles, we don't do background checks so even if you've been exchanging mails over the site or privately, always remember that you still don't really know the person you're about to meet. This means that you should use the same common sense judgement that you'd use whenever you meet someone new. Examples are:

Don't give out your private address and last name during email contact
Meet in a public place
Let a friend know the details of your date including expected return time
Have a friend call you during the date. This is an excellent excuse to leave if it's not going well
Try to keep a mental note on how much you're drinking as it's easy to get carried away
Try to finish your drink before leaving your date for the bathroom/mobile call
Make your own way to and from the date and keep an eye on the time in case you're relying on public transport