How To Manage (And Make) Time For Online Dating

Want to meet someone, but struggling to find the time?

The culture of the Internet has conditioned our brains to expect fast results with minimal effort (i.e. Google search). But timeless principles aren’t subject to the arbitrary rules of the world wide web, and one of those principles is that finding a good relationship takes time. That starts with the very process of connecting with someone online.

But time isn’t something laying around like loose change, easy to be found. That’s true for everyone and it's especially true for single parents. So how do you find the time to get the most out of an online dating site like CatholicMatch?

Let's look at a few user-friendly steps.

The first step is to remember the things that will make you an attractive Catholic spouse to begin with. Make sure that online dating doesn’t take time away from prayer and meditation. If you say the rosary in the morning, that’s more important than jumping online to browse profiles. Keeping your spiritual life healthy will give the Holy Spirit room to move and create time in ways none of us can imagine. 

But of course there are a few helpful tips that we can imagine, and planning comes next. Carve out time in your schedule for when you’ll go online to browse profiles, send messages and respond to them. Maybe that’s thirty minutes to an hour right before you go to bed. Maybe it’s on your lunch break. Maybe it’s not even something you can do every day—but make sure that at least some time is structured and built into your schedule. 

As you begin to interact with people online, it’s imperative that you cultivate the virtue of patience. If you send someone a message, there’s no need to check your inbox every hour on the hour for a reply. Each time you log in and there’s no response, it feels interiorly like a rejection even though it isn’t. And for the sake of transparency, let me admit that I write that rule knowing that I violated it with impunity during my online dating days. To the detriment of my mental health. 

You might also consider not responding right away to every message you get.

I’m not suggesting that you play games—the purpose is not to manipulate the person you’re corresponding with or worry if they’ll know that you’re interested in them. We’re not in high school. The purpose is to allow yourself to collect your thoughts, consider what they wrote and then write a thoughtful reply. 

You’ll also be setting boundaries for yourself. You’re not obligated to respond to someone instantly, and if those boundaries can’t be set in the relatively benign world of online dating, it’s certainly not going to get easier in a real-life relationship. 

Although, one caveat to this point—if your schedule for online dating usage means you won’t be responding for more than a day, it’s reasonable to drop a quick note saying something to the effect of  “Great to hear from you, will be away from my computer until such and such a day. Will get back to you then.” This allows you to have your boundaries without going over the line and leaving someone hanging. 

Don't let it stay virtual for too long!

Finally, a sure way to make good use of your time is to make things real as quickly as you’re reasonably comfortable with. If the person you communicate with lives within driving distance, just arrange to meet them in person. See if they want to jump on a video conference. Spending a lot of time in correspondence with someone that you won’t have in-person chemistry with is not only a downer emotionally, but it’s a big time suck. 

Everyone has different lives and the way this challenge presents itself is unique for each person. For me, I’ve always worked online, and repetitively checking messages and sending quick replies was often something to do to give myself a break. I would have been better off getting up from my workstation and taking a walk. Other people, in different situations, find it difficult to sit down at a computer at all.

Whatever your situation is, you’ll likely mess up on your schedule more often than not, either on the side of checking in too frequently or not enough. I know I did. The good news is this—I still found my special someone. The Holy Trinity is more than capable of working through our falls or miscalculations. Your romantic future is not going to be measured by how well you manage your online dating time. But your short-term peace of mind might be. And that’s reason enough to get it right.