They say if you want to meet someone then you should stop looking, don’t they?

I have to hold my hands up and admit that I thought that was a vicious rumour put about by people who get sick of listening to their single friends bemoaning their relationship lot (or lack of, as the case may be). And who could blame them? Being single but wanting to be in a relationship can be a miserable existence .. I should know, I was that soldier. You can picture marrieds everywhere emptying wine glasses, rubbing their eyes and stifling sighs as their single friends lament the passing of their latest crush-fest, over and over and over …

Of course it’s not socially advisable to go public about your longing to be one half of a pair and so I donned a cheery facade and battled on. But there can be no doubt that I bent more than a few ears of friends with the in-depth analyses and second-guessing that goes hand-in-hand with newly-established dating patterns.

Being single is far from the worst condition you can find yourself in, but there is only so many nights in front of Greys Anatomy painting your toenails you can take before said toes start a-tapping in restless acknowledgement that you’re .. well, a bit lonely.

Now I have made no secret of dabbling in the dark world of online dating. To me it was the dating equivalent of an unpleasant medical procedure .. you had to go through with it to get over to the other side .. the side that was a lasting relationship with someone special. I failed miserably. I went through the unpleasant procedure many times and the result was always inconclusive. So I decided to administer treatment myself by deleting my profile and retreating back to base.

And in the middle of all this I joined Twitter which some may know as the social networking site on which people discuss their sandwiches all day; in reality it’s a global forum that gives you immediate access to like-minded individuals and to unlimited information on any topic you could think of. And for me it laid the path very quickly that led to J.

I remember the very first time I saw his profile photograph (or as we in “the know” call it, his avatar). In fact his photograph was and is very obscured offering up no visual clues to help you pick him out in a crowd, but something registered. I was interested. He was unassuming, lovely and charming. He was all the things you can’t ascertain from an online blueprint.

Now I’d like to say I knew we would end up dating but I didn’t. I do suppose however that my interest, which developed into intrigue kept me focussed on maintaining a steady progress in the direction of that first coffee date.

If that counts as scheming then I’m guilty as charged, and quite happy to take the rap I might add.

And so the point to my rather rambling account this evening is this .. if J and I had been profiles floating aimlessly on 2beekum1.com then I think it’s fair to say we wouldn’t have met, and that’s because we almost certainly wouldn’t have matched each other’s blueprints. So .. before you could have uttered “I’ll have a skinny latte please” the concept that was the first coffee date would have evaporated into thin air. We would have eliminated each other from the running.

And at the depression of the delete key I would have missed out on the feeling of excitement I get at the prospect of seeing him each week, of the instant smile that creeps across my face when he messages me and that lovely warm glow inside because life feels a lot better these days.

OK .. I know all this is a tad on the schmaltzy side compared to my earlier posts on this blog but I needed to make a point today having read the appalling account of how a dating site has expelled 5,000 of it’s members for putting weight on since they created and posted their profiles.

Seriously .. would you be interested in dating anyone who even hinted they were concerned that you weren’t quite as physically perfect as they’d hoped?

Lots of people are making pots of money by implying they can connect single people on these sites using logic and calculating means.

And I know for one it doesn’t work like that.

There’s nothing logical about finding happiness, which makes it even more prized.

I really have no idea where time goes … it seems only two days ago I was discussing with a friend how I felt I needed to leave this blog alone for a while due to the fact that I believed it was getting a tad repetitive and that I thought I was starting to sound like I had as much luck with men as the village spinster (although arguably my memoirs might make for better reading). In fact it has been over a month since I last posted.

So in effect I have done just that. I kicked off my heels, cracked open the gin and took a blogging holiday. And that has to all intents and purposes been fine, except for the fact that I’ve felt the urge to blog about a couple of incidents but couldn’t for two rather pertinent facts. The first is that I must now have one of the most public personal lives that doesn’t belong to a celebrity (of my own making, granted) and the second being that a friend informed me recently that my candid approach to recording my take on the opposite sex could have a detrimental effect on my search for a meaningful relationship.

And that, ladies and gentleman, has been the sum total of my month away from these blogging shores. I now know what I’m looking for.

A meaningful relationship. A relationship that means something. Not marriage. Not co-habitation even. It just needs to “mean” something.

People oft think I’m a bit of a flibbertigibbet on the one hand and a ruthless user of men on the other. I never worked out how those two married up  but apparently it is possible; after three or four Babychams laughing at ridiculous jokes I can turn into the female Don Corleone of the dating world. I take no prisoners you see. All wrongdoers are exposed with a mere tap-tap-tap on my rather slinky Mac keyboard.

And so they should be! I’m not entirely sure that I’ve been specific about the criteria by which I judge my dating experiences in terms of suitability for “outing” them Debsy-style, but it’s really quite simple. Men that act like arses will have their arses exposed, and to clarify, “act like arses” means at some point they have treated me (and probably many like me) pretty shoddily.

I never use real names, but if they were to read the post, they would know to whom I’m referring. Job done.

My friend (of the candid approach comment) informed me that a man would need to have “balls of steel” to get into a relationship with me, knowing about this blog and my tendency to whip out an exposé quicker than you could say “second date”. For my part I found that a bit harsh ….. but then we always do see onlooker’s views through sterile binoculars don’t we? In essence I found his “balls of steel” comment quite funny … or was I merely pleased with the fact that I was starting to appear formidable in the dating arena? In retrospect I’m not sure either interpretation is desirable.

The unfortunate fact is that recording my experiences in this blog have become my way of laying them to rest. Every time someone has told me how funny they thought a particular entry about a disastrous date was, I’ve jumped up and down on the grave of the memory of said incident, knocked back an imaginary martini, thrown the glass at the wall and screamed “next!”

We all need to review, investigate, understand and conclude. My conclusions just happen to involve sharing my findings with about seven thousand others on Twitter and Facebook. What the heck’s formidable about that?

So. Meaningful. That’s the sum of it. And by meaningful, I mean just that.

Welcome back friend.

I was joking about the Babychams by the way.

A friend asked me briefly yesterday for my thoughts on a particular dating site; he stated that he thought it was less of a “cattle market” than the others he had seen. I agreed that it was but went on to add in my usual negative fashion that I reserve for this topic that said site had been a dead loss for me.

I make no bones about it; internet dating and I are not a match made in heaven. I suspect it’s in no small part due to the fact that I like quick results, so after half a dozen dismal attempts at finding the man who will emotionally complete me via my broadband connection I’ve “logged off” the whole idea. But my conversation with my friend did cause me to realise that my impatience is possibly due to my previous career in sales on the battlefield that is the city of London …

This was a job where strategies were not given an infinite amount of “time to work”. If there was no sign that you were making significant progress after deploying all your heavy artillery then you either a) completely re-thought your strategy or b) scrawled it off your prospect list and started hunting elsewhere.

I really was that girl. I was the one in the Armani suit stood on Waterloo concourse huffing and puffing because the train was ten minutes late. I was the girl sat in the American Bar at the Savoy sipping champagne with my girlfriends on a Wednesday evening just because we could.

I was also the girl that brought in £3.5 million worth of new business for my employer eighteen months before they decided to dispense with my services when I tried to return from maternity leave. So you see, it’s not always glitz and glamour … at least not once you’ve had a child.

The taste for all things designer and bubbly soon left me. Having a baby tends to do that to a woman. Priorities not only move, they get completely re-written. But the one thing I’ve never lost is the understanding that to get someones interest, be it in your product, your ideas or even you, you have to whet their appetite first.

To this end I would suggest anyone writing a profile for a dating website look at it in the same way as writing a sales proposal.

What you’re selling is you of course, but what you want to do is stir enough interest in your audience to motivate them to contact you. Don’t worry that you might be contacted by people you’re not interested in, of course you will, but you need options when it comes to internet dating and plenty of them.

The first thing anyone needs to decide is what type of match are you looking for. In the interests of keeping this post sensibly concise let’s suppose it’s someone like me; someone looking for a relationship but not to be engaged by Christmas and married in the spring. Here are a few pointers you might like to consider …

Photograph- Make sure you include one; not posting one looks suspicious (I’ve already talked about that). And make sure you’re smiling on it; in the main it’s only professionally-taken shots that don’t make unsmiling people look like convicts. Another vital point is make sure you’re properly dressed … a man naked from the waist up spells out P-L-A-Y-E-R only. You may be proud of your gym attendance record but keep it in your back pocket for now.

Written profile- Keep it relatively brief, two paragraphs only. Remember this exercise is only about getting people interested in you, they don’t need to know every last detail at this point. Mention any avid and passionate interests you have (that aren’t related to sex) and never, ever, ever mention your ex. Ever. Make sure your spelling and punctuation are correct … trust me, a thinking woman’s crumpet does not start off “well where i start im new to this my mates say i look great for my age i luv a good laff and im looking for that special laydee ….” You get the picture I’m sure.

Follow-up- When people contact you either initiate conversation with them or politely tell them “no thanks”. Don’t ever ignore them. The world is too small these days to risk gaining a reputation for being ignorant for the sake of not typing a quick message.

So, I’m sure there are those of you out there who are thinking “so if she’s so red hot at this, how come she’s single?”

The answer is this … you don’t always have to believe in the product to be able to sell it. You just have to get the buyer salivating at the thought of it.

Job done.