You are all excited about the fact that you have accepted your boyfriend’s recent marriage proposal.
However, it appears that your family isn’t so thrilled at all about your marriage. What do you do?

The key to working through problems is good communication – which often means listening at least as
much as you talk, and making sure that all involved have a chance to air their grievances. It also means that you must truly understand what people are saying to you before you can respond.

First, you need to find out why your family is against your marriage. It’s hard to listen to what they have to say objectively, but it’s really important to keep your emotions in check while your family relays their concerns. Obviously, this can be very difficult to do!

After they offer you their reasons for concern, you need to make a genuine effort to evaluate their opinions to see if there is any validity in them. For example, if they say to you “I just don’t like him,” you may just chalk it up to the fact that they are upset about you moving on with your life. If on the other hand, you get a response like, “I know that he has been married twice before and that he has a long criminal record”, you just might want to seriously consider the issues that your family is raising.

Sometimes, it is also helpful to ask the advice of a close friend in this situation. How does your friend honestly feel about your soon to be husband? When she offers her feelings, also ask her to give examples of why she feels that way. It is important again to listen respectfully and not take the answers personally. You might also want to ask your fiance to read this article on winning over your partner’s friends.

At this point, you might realize that your friends and your family have valid reasons for not liking your husband to be. On the other hand, you might decide that your family and/or friends are upset about something else and directing their frustration at your fiance. Or perhaps they just don’t want you to get married.

If your family continues to be unhappy as you pursue the marriage and you want to continue on in a relationship with them, it might be good to seek counseling. As time goes by, it’s only going to get harder to deal with a family that doesn’t like your fiance – not to mention a fiance that feels threatened by your family. A good counselor can help you find ways to reduce the tension with your family and can also help them to create a relationship with your spouse to be.

When it comes down to it, your choice for a mate is just that – your choice. Your family can voice their opinions, and while you should listen to them objectively and consider them carefully, you are the master of your destiny. The choice is still yours to make after those opinions have been offered.

If your family doesn’t come around to the idea of your marriage, hopefully they are mature enough to accept the fact that people can agree to disagree and still love each other. That love will hopefully be strong enough to also accept your choice and to be happy for you and your future husband.
Good luck!

Author Jason Lancaster works with GayDatingSites.com, a website that offers gay dating tips and advice.

Ready to be Jazzed? Check out the brand new online dating, which definitely brings something new into the dating game.

Jazzed is somewhat different from most dating sites, as it makes it a lot easier to create a personal dating profile.

When you complete your profile, you’ll enter all the usual stuff that dating sites ask, like the color of your hair. You’ll also rate how important that stuff is to you. Then, you’ll choose and answer some more creative questions like, “Do you believe a sixth sense exists?” and “What does it mean to be powerful?” All help you find singles that you are more likely to connect with.

Instead of the usual “describe yourself in your own words”-approach, Jazzed asks some questions you’ve picked from a list. For instance: “What are the three tings you can’t live without?” or “Which person have influenced you the most?” and answering these might very well lead to interesting and more personal profiles.

Jazzed also have features like “Conversation starter”, which is, not surprisingly, a help to start conversations – this works absolutely great.

Right now Jazzed offers a free 90-day trial – go grab that offer NOW! – After all – what have you got to loose?

Real Profiles, Real People, Real Connections. Take control of your social life. Match is out, get in with Jazzed early and be one of the first members to receive a FREE 90-day trial.

Speed-dating has become enormously popular around the world over the last few years, and it’s not hard to understand why. It’s the distillation of dating to a simple snap judgment. Everyone who sits down at one of those tables are trying to answer a very simple question: Do I want to see this person again? And to answer that, we don’t need an entire evening. We really need only a few minutes.

Velma, for instance, said that she picked none of the men and that she made up her mind about each of them right away. “They lost me at hello,” she said, rolling her eyes. Ron, who worked as a financial analyst at an investment bank, picked two of the women, one of whom he settled on after about a minute and a half of conversation and one of whom, Lillian at table two, he decided on the instant he sat down across from her. “Her tongue was pierced,” he said, admiringly. “You come to a place like this and you expect a bunch of lawyers. But she was a whole different story.” Lillian liked Ron, too. “You know why?” she asked. “He’s from Louisiana. I loved the accent. And I dropped my pen, just to see what he would do, and he picked it up right away.”

As it turned out, lots of the women there liked Ron the instant they met him, and lots of the men liked Lillian the instant they met her. Both of them had a kind of contagious, winning spark. “You know, girls are really smart,” Jon, a medical student in a blue suit, said at the end of the evening. “They know in the first minute, Do I like this guy, can I take him home to my parents, or is he just a wham-bam kind of jerk?” Jon is quite right, except it isn’t just girls who are smart. When it comes to quick assessment of potential dates, pretty much everyone is smart.

The funny thing though, is that when we are asked what we look for in a potential partner our actions does not match our initial list.

Two professors (Fisman and Iyengar) made a speed-dating experiment at the back of the West End Bar on Broadway, across the street from the Columbia campus. They are identical to standard New York speed-dating evenings, with one exception. Their participants don’t just date and then check the yes or no box. On four occasions—before the speed-dating starts, after the evening ends, a month later, and then six months after the speed-dating evening—they have to fill out a short questionnaire that asks them to rate what they are looking for in a potential partner on a scale of 1 to 10. The categories are attractiveness, shared interests, funny/ sense of humor, sincerity, intelligence, and ambition. In addition, at the end of every “date,” they rate the person they’ve just met, based on the same categories. By the end of one of their evenings, then, the professors have an incredibly detailed picture of exactly what everyone says they were feeling during the dating process. And it’s when you look at that picture that the strangeness starts.

As one professor explains:

At the Columbia session, I paid particular attention to a young woman with pale skin and blond, curly hair and a tall, energetic man with green eyes and long brown hair. I don’t know their names, but let’s call them Mary and John. I watched them for the duration of their date, and it was immediately clear that Mary really liked John and John really liked Mary. John sat down at Mary’s table. Their eyes locked. She looked down shyly. She seemed a little nervous. She leaned forward in her chair. It seemed, from the outside, like a perfectly straightforward case of instant attraction. But let’s dig below the surface and ask a few simple questions. First of all, did Mary’s assessment of John’s personality match the personality that she said she wanted in a man before the evening started? In other words, how good is Mary at predicting what she likes in a man?

Fisman and Iyengar can answer that question really easily, and what they find when they compare what speed-daters say they want with what they are actually attracted to in the moment is that those two things don’t match. For example, if Mary said at the start of the evening that she wanted someone intelligent and sincere, that in no way means she’ll be attracted only to intelligent and sincere men. It’s just as likely that John, whom she likes more than anyone else, could turn out to be attractive and funny but not particularly sincere or smart atall. Second, if all the men Mary ends up liking during the speed-dating are more attractive and funny than they are smart and sincere, on the next day, when she’s asked to describe her perfect man, Mary will say that she likes attractive and funny men. But that’s just the next day. If you ask her again a month later, she’ll be back to saying that she wants intelligent and sincere.

You can be forgiven if you found the previous paragraph confusing. It is confusing: Mary says that she wants a certain kind of person. But then she is given a roomful of choices and she meets someone whom she really likes, and in that instant she completely changes her mind about what kind of person she wants. But then a month passes, and she goes back to what she originally said she wanted. So what does Mary really want in a man?

“I don’t know,” Iyengar said when I asked her that question. “Is the real me the one that I described beforehand?”

She paused, and Fisman spoke up: “No, the real me is the me revealed by my actions. That’s what an economist would say.”

Iyengar looked puzzled. “I don’t know that’s what a psychologist would say.”

They couldn’t agree. But then, that’s because there isn’t a right answer. Mary has an idea about what she wants in a man, and that idea isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete. The description that she starts with is her conscious ideal: what she believes she wants when she sits down and thinks about it. But what she cannot be as certain about are the criteria she uses to form her preferences in that first instant of meeting someone face-to- face. That information is behind the locked door in our unconscious mind.

The above discussion is exactly why I recommend not creating lists of your ideal partner and not creating lists of who you are, when writing an online dating profile. Instead write about what you actually do, what you like to do in your spare time, what you like about your job. And be specific. Instead of writing: “I like reading good books” write about the last book you read – good or bad. Don’t describe who you are – show it!

But what are your experiences on this matter? Are you constantly attracted to other types of persons than you say you are?

Dating words of wisdom: Before meeting someone for the first time, keep your text messages to a minimum. No matter how excited you are and no matter how addicted to your freakin’ phone you might be…put down the phone. Walk away from the text messaging machine.

A regular Dating Tales reader let us know about a recent text message debacle of her own. After just a few short months on Match.com, she met a real cutie. She shared her digits, and he was quick to send her a text saying he looked forward to meeting her. She responded saying the following week worked best. “Maybe dinner or would you rather do drinks?” she asked in a friendly text.

This is when things started to get weird. She says he wasn’t reading her texts and just kept repeating himself. Every day that week he texted to see if she could get together. She responded every second or third text with … “Like I said, I’m busy this week. Let’s get together next week.”

Guess how many times this eager lad text messaged our fellow Dating Tales reader?

1) 10 times

2) 17 times

3) 25 times

4) 39 times

In just four short days he text messaged her 25 times. And of those 25 texts, he asked to see her that night on 12 different occasions.

Unfortunately, our friend had to take her excitement over the cutie, crumple it up, and throw it out the online dating window. She finally said: “Look, you seem like a nice guy, but I can’t see you this week and probably not ever.”

This was his response: “Sorry, I know I get excited. I just want to meet you. What are you doing tonight?”

I’m not kidding. This guy has no limits. Learn from this eager man’s mistakes and don’t ruin your chances for a first date with text messages.

Can you imagine a time during a first date where it might make sense to admit you poop yourself?

Hmmm. Me neither.

A friend of mine recently returned from a date, somewhat horrified, because her date admitted to his bathroom problem. The conversation went something like this:

He says: Do you like to run?

She says: No, not really. I’m more of a walker.

He says: Oh, well I love to run. Only problem is the bathroom issue.

She says: The bathroom issue?

He says: Yeah, sometimes I have to throw my pants away after.

She says: Can’t you just duck behind a tree and take care of it?

He says (with a quizzical look on his face): Oh, not that kind.

Obviously, my friend was more than stunned. She was grossed out.

Following their awkward meal, they stood in line and waited in awkward silence to see a movie. When he did finally speak, he chose to make fun of an elderly couple ahead of them in line.

Later, as they sat in his car in front of her apartment, he went in for a kiss, but she turned away. He went in for another kiss and this time when she turned away she managed to hit her face on the glass and his lips ended up somewhere in her hair.

The date finally ended and her mind was more than made up. The next day she sent him an email saying she didn’t feel that “spark” with which he responded: “I should’ve known better than to drop a 50-spot on dinner.”

He must’ve forgotten that he made her pay for the movie tickets. And, why does that even matter? He ate too, right? Maybe if he kept his pooping problem to himself none of it would have mattered.

Creative Commons Image Credit: AnyJazz65

Creative Commons Image Credit: Striatic

Today, in dating news…

Online Dating Goes Old School With Phones

It won’t be the first time major online dating sites incorporate VoIP, but with the latest technology from the company Jajah, it might actually stick around this time.

According to Tech Crunch, Jajah is working with both eHarmony and Match to develop a system that allows online daters to call other users over the Internet. This means that if you meet someone you like, you don’t necessarily have to give out your phone number–all you have to do is connect via Internet (kind of like Skype, except more private).

Dating, Especially in New York, is Recession Proof

According to the New York Times, online dating has not fallen on hard times during this discouraging financial period. Good news for those of you looking to find love online. Looks like the numbers of available bachelors and bachelorettes are up and so are your chances.

Cougars, Cougars Everywhere

We like the cougar phenomenon, and apparently Hollywood likes them too. Read USA Today‘s article about all them cougar’s showing up in film, including the recently released movie, Cheri, with Kathy Bates and Michelle Pfeiffer.

CNN Reports: It’s not that there are more gay women now-a-days, it’ s just that more women are leaving straight relationships for lesbian relationships. Thank you Cynthia Nixon from Sex in the City! Read more …

A bunch of places: First she writes songs about it. Then she talks to Rolling Stone about it. Then MSNBC.com runs a story on it. And now I’m rehashing, for the third time, that Kelly Clarkson isn’t in a hurry to find love. Whoa. This iz big newz peeple.

Denver Post: A new adult game night with a dating twist is making its way to a city near you. The company, Play Date, has set up affiliate groups in close to 30 US cities. Basically, you sign up online. Show up at the bar or restaurant where the event is being held. Then mingle, flirt, and play board games with the other singles there.� Not a bad idea, eh?

Newsweek: Real love found on Second Life. It’s happening, don’t deny it. And, maybe you could give it a try yourself. Read more about how Rhonda and Paul fell in love over a custom-programmed, digitally enhanced waterfall without getting wet.

For more dating news from around the world and other helpful dating tid bits, sign up for the Dating Tales RSS fee.

“It’s JerryTime!” is a comical look at a guy named, Jerry, and his oh-so-typical life. Jerry is a generic, every day kind of guy who you root for, but yet you still cringe when he walks in the room.

Check out his ever-painful speed dating experience with special guest Kristen Schaal, who plays “Mel” on HBO’s hit series Flight of the Conchords.

A smoker friend of mine dumped a guy because he smoked too much.

Yeah, imagine that. A four to five cigarette a day smoker can’t date a chain smoker!

I guess it’s because there’s nothing sexy about stained yellow teeth, smoky breath, and stinky fingertips. However, can we all agree that there is something sexy about a man with a scotch in one hand and a cigar in the other?

I’m off track.

According to my friend, she really liked the guy she met on Yahoo!, but after she realized he was sneaking into the mens bathroom for a couple butts at a professional hockey game, she thought twice.

“Couldn’t he just just wait,” my friend said. “The game was almost over, but yet he just had to get away.”

My friend is pretty open minded and being a smoker herself she never would’ve imagined that it would bother her.

If only he had passed on those few butts he might’ve saved his date from total demise. Moral of the story – buy the gum and don’t neglect your date just for a smoke. Buy the gum.

I have friends who love speed dating (probably for the cocktails); they can’t get enough of it. Then I have other friends who want nothing to do with it.

Since the concept seems to be divided I dug into the issue a bit to see about the pros and cons of speed dating. What do you think?

Pros of Speed Dating

• It’s an efficient use of your time. You meet several� new people in just one night instead of over the course of weeks or months.
• Speed dating events are usually held in bars. A few drinks help take the edge off.
• You can go with your friends, which makes for a fun night out regardless of the people you meet.
• No one has to know you went unless you tell them.

Cons of Speed Dating

• It feels forced.
• Everyone around you can hear your conversations.
• Other than age and gender, the people on the other side of the table haven’t been matched to you at all.
• If you go with friends, you and your friend might end up liking the same person.

Still on the fence about whether or not to try speed dating? Check out our Online Dating Pros and Cons page that compares match making services to online dating.

You never know, you might find that speed dating really is right for you.