Dating Advice - One cannot take too much effort in preparing a profile. It is something that should be viewed in all seriousness. Please do not treat the subject lightly. Imagine that you are preparing for a job; wont you spend a lot of time getting your resume ready?

Well, most of us take up jobs for how long, four or five years? And how about a relationship, definitely we do not embark on a relationship with the expectation that it would last for just a couple of years.

We have to understand that a relationship is really worth much more than a job, because it is probably the most important decision in your life. So now let us discuss ways in which you can spruce up your profile.

You can of course get a professional to do the job for you since it saves you the effort. You may have to dish out a small amount of course, but it could be worth it. There are many people who have qualms about including a picture in the profile. Well, I dont want to press the issue. It certainly does look better to have a picture in your profile, but due to privacy issues you can refrain from including a picture.

The best thing you could do is once you are comfortable chatting with a person and are convinced that this person does not have any devious intentions, you could send your picture over as an attachment or a file. But this, too, is best done a mutual exchange basis. It would be unfair if you know what the other person looks like but the other person is kept in the dark and vice versa.

Dating Advice - The Face In The Mirror

Now, coming to the picture as such, if you are sending over a picture of yourself, for heavens sake, send over a decent picture. It should be a recent one and please do not make any compromises about the quality. Get a professional to do the job for you and with the digital techniques of today, they can do a very impressive job.

At the same time do work on your expression before the photograph is taken. Stand in front of your mirror and try out various expressions till you get something that you think is the best for you. And remember that it has to be a picture of you smiling. You should not have the classic hang dog expression, or the butter-will-not-melt-in-my-mouth expression. Smile, it costs you nothing and it really lights up a persons face.

Now, the first thing that you should do is take out a pencil and paper and write down the raw details about yourself. By raw details we are referring to things like you age, your height and your weight.

This is the skeleton of which we are going to work on. And when we have added enough flesh and blood to this back bone, why even you will be impressed by your profile! But first let us steer clear of certain pit falls into which most people fall.

Dating Advice - The Modesty Pitfall

Most of us have been trained to be very modest. When it comes to saying something good about our selves we feel very queasy about blowing our own trumpet. Right, no body is asking you to do any trumpet blowing but facts have to be stated as facts.

If you are a music lover and have a good voice too, I cant see why you cant put it down like that itself. Why cant you declare simply without sounding very proud that you have good voice? A pointer that you could bear in mind would be to add something like, My friends think that I sing rather well.

There now, you cant feel too bad about something as simple as that. It is as good as saying some people think that I sing well, but it is for you to decide whether I have a good voice or not. Similar statements that you can work on and even add are given below.

Lots of people appreciate my cooking.
I am no Rembrandt, but I enjoy painting.
I like decorating, and many of my friends think that my tastes are not too bad.

So go ahead, if you really have a talent, you might as well as let others know about it, after all a talented person would any way like to be appreciated by a partner.

While we are talking about modesty, there is one question that I want to address right now. It is something that all of us are familiar with. If you have chatted with a stranger with whom you are trying to build a rapport you must have been confronted with the question before. The question is what do you look like?

I have often wondered about the sense of this question. The best answers that I could come up with are I look like a cross between an orangutan and a Tasmanian devil or I have my mothers teeth, my fathers nose, my uncles eyes and my roommates shoes.

But of course we cannot give such answers which funny though they might sound, might just rub the person in the wrong way. What the person actually means is, are you good looking or not?

Dating Advice - A very tricky question indeed! How can you answer such a question with out sounding either super modest or extremely vain? The answer to that is not to tell them the answer directly. You can say something like:

I am as fresh as peppermint.
I look like a bunch of fresh lilies.
I have the appeal of a bowl of fresh fruit.

If the person still does not take the hint, then give them a detailed description of every inch and let he or she decide for himself or herself.