The 3 Biggest Mistakes Lesbians Make In Online Dating

Online dating is an important tool for finding love, if you’re a queer woman.

Online dating is an amazing resource for lesbians to find love.

But many women are using the apps wrong, which leads to way more frustration and confusion and rejection and wasted time/energy than necessary.

That’s why this is so important.

The 3 biggest mistakes lesbians make on dating apps are:

1. Having the wrong attitude,
2. Using the wrong strategy
3. Putting the wrong stuff in your profile…

And I’m going to go through each of these one by one.

The first big mistake lesbians make with online dating is having the wrong attitude…

The wrong attitude to have is a negative attitude. It’s common to feel frustrated about having to go through the dating process.

The reason we feel frustrated is because dating is a form of seeking.

Seeking makes us unhappy because it implies that we don’t already have the thing we’re seeking.

When we’re seeking we’re focusing on what’s missing, which makes us miss it more and more, which makes us resentful. But resentment leads to bitterness and bitterness is a major turnoff to other women.

Another major turnoff for women is pessimism. Yet pessimism is pervasive.

Pessimism is pervasive…

There is a pervasive belief in the lesbian community that finding love is harder for us because there are fewer queer females on earth than straight ones. And if you’re a straight woman swiping for men, you’ll have exponentially more options to swipe through than queer women do.

But that doesn’t mean straight women have it better!

Because there are exponentially more straight women competing for those same men. So the numbers cancel out.

I’ve never seen any actual proof that straight women have more or better relationships than queer women do. So the pessimism is simply not grounded in fact.

The truth is that no matter where you are, you have more reason for optimism than for pessimism.

Because this world is overflowing with amazing queer women who you’d be super attracted to, who would be just as attracted to you, if you were to meet. The chances of you spending your entire life without ever running into one of these women is virtually nonexistent.

The only question is whether you’ll have your eyes open enough to see her when she’s right in front of you.

Because the truth is, pessimism acts as a nasty filter that blocks us from seeing the opportunities that come to us in life – whereas optimism does the opposite – when we are optimistic and open we see and attract far more opportunities for everything good that we want.

One of the biggest obstacles to staying optimistic in dating is rejection.

Rejection…

Unfortunately rejection is an inevitable part of dating for everyone, even if you’re a famous movie star.

But when it comes to the dating apps, most rejections aren’t even really rejections…

I was at lunch with a friend recently, who is going through a rough time with her wife, and they are considering divorce. My friend was telling me that after a bad fight, she downloaded Bumble, set up a profile, matched with a few women, but then deleted the app. She did it because she wanted to prove to herself that she could survive the divorce and that there are plenty of other women out there to meet.

So many of the people you match with on the apps will disappear on you for reasons like this, even though they won’t ever tell you so. It can feel like ghosting and rejection, but it’s not because they were never available in the first place.

The fact that you matched at all means that she thought you were cute, and if she were single or available, she probably would have wanted to connect.

“They shouldn’t be allowed to use the apps”?

Oftentimes when I bring this story up (to stop people from feeling rejected in these kinds of situations), the response I get is that "it’s wrong for those people to pollute the apps with their profiles, since they’re not looking for serious love".

But that’s not true.

The truth is that it’s good that other people can use online dating to find what they’re looking for, and it’s good that you can use online dating to find what you’re looking for.

These other humans might be crowding the space, but they’re not keeping you from finding what you want.

The apps are kind of like train stations in that way - even though everyone is going different places, all have equal right to be there.

The key is to not take it personally… Taking it personally is the wrong attitude. And so is pessimism and bitterness. Don’t make that mistake.

Be patient, optimistic and open-minded instead, and you’ll have far more success with online dating…

The second biggest mistake that women make with online dating is having the wrong strategy.

Before becoming a dating coach I was a litigator. Litigation is all about strategy. And the best litigators I saw were the ones who knew the court procedure rules the best, and used the rules to their advantage. They didn’t complain that the rules were annoying or unfair – they accepted the rules as they were, and worked with them to win their case.

There are certain facts of life in online dating that we have to accept and work with strategically to have success with the apps.

One of the first rules you have to accept is that you’re probably not going to meet your perfect person right away. And that’s not just because we’re queer. Even straight women know that they gotta “kiss a lot of frogs before they find their prince.”

As a rule, online dating requires you encounter five different types of women.

1. Ones you want, who don’t want you back
2. Ones who want you, but you don’t want them back
3. Ones who you’re not attracted to, but they’re not attracted to you either
4. Ones you click with, but only as friends, and
5. Ones who are just as attracted to you as you are to them

But as a rule, even when there’s mutual attraction:

• Some women will match but never reach out (even if you say hello first)…
• Some women will never commit to meet in person (even if they reply to your messages and seem normal)…
• Some women will lie about things that are a big deal to you – whether it’s their age or height or weight or their job or their city of residence or their marital status or whether or not they have kids or pets…
• Some women will seem like a great match and super into you– but when it’s time to make plans, she will tell you she just wants you to join her for a threesome with her man…
• Some women will seem into you, but then they’ll disappear without explanation…
• And some of the women who you are pursuing now (and ones you had a crush on in the past) will get together and hook up with each other (without inviting you along, obviously)…

And we have to assume that it’s a rule that all of these things are eventually going to happen. And when they do, the right strategy is to accept it and move on as fast as possible.

Don’t take it personally.

None of that is personal, it’s just part of adult dating life.

The key is to not make yourself feel bad about this (because it’s NOT personal and everyone else is in the same boat).

Another bad strategy is wasting time, chasing the wrong women.

Anyone who doesn’t want you and doesn’t put in the effort is the wrong woman. Period.

It’s a waste of time to chase women who aren’t excited about you because attraction is not a choice. If a woman meets you and she’s not into you, there’s no amount of trying that’s ever going to change how she feels. She couldn’t make herself want you even if she wished she could.

But the world is full of women who will want you just as much as you want them.

It will be really easy to tell when someone likes you. She’ll make you feel like she wants to be there, in the conversation with you (whether it’s in person or over the phone or via text.) You’ll know that when you send her a text, she’ll write you back and be sweet. You know that when you call, she’ll answer the phone.

If you want to be smart and strategic about dating, those are the women you should be paying attention to.

And as soon as you find someone like this on the apps, immediately ask for her real phone number so you can connect with her directly.

I have one last strategy suggestion, but it doesn’t count as a mistake if you don’t do it – because you can have a perfect experience with online dating without doing this – but for anyone who can afford it, paying to unlock advanced features on the dating apps is worthwhile to try. Depending on the app, they might let you increase the number of matches you can see in a day or let you see who already swiped yes on your profile (and seeing who already liked your profile means it’s automatically a match with anyone you select from there, so that’s a cool feature.) Different apps have different kinds of advanced features for users who pay to upgrade. But the free version is still amazing.

The third mistake women make in online dating is having the wrong stuff in your profile.

The purpose of a dating profile is to cast a wide net. Your dating profile is there to widen your options, not narrow them.

The best strategy is to share just enough so you get the attention of everyone who would be attracted to someone like you, without including extra things that could inadvertently cause the right people to get the wrong idea and lose interest before you get to meet them...

The great thing about online dating is that you get to connect with women who have already chosen you…

If you try talking to someone out in public, you don’t know if they’re going to give you a chance. The women on the apps have already said they want to give you a chance. They pre-selected you based on your profile.

But if the profile isn’t accurate, then you lose the benefit of having been pre-selected by them. You have no idea whether they’re going to be ok with the parts you were dishonest about, plus you’re going to have to explain why you weren’t fully truthful.

That’s why miscommunication on a dating profile is such a big deal.

Miscommunication on your dating profile…

The first major way people miscommunicate on a dating profile is posting photos that don’t show how you really look.

Sometimes we go through phases where we hate the way we look. And since we assume others will hate how we currently look too, it can be tempting to use pictures from the past, when we were a few years younger or a few pounds lighter or had different hair…

But you are perfect exactly as you are, and today’s you is the only you that exists in the real world, and accurate photos are an amazing tool for finding and attracting the entire pool of women who want you and accept you exactly as you are.

That’s why you should have at least one photo that shows your full body in its current form and at least one that shows a clear (and current) shot of what your face looks like when you dress up for a night out.

Inaccurate personal details…

Another way women miscommunicate on their dating profile is by giving inaccurate personal details.

Oftentimes people who lie about their personal details say they have to, because otherwise the filters won’t ever show their profile to the kinds of people they’re attracted to. Filters on the apps can be great, because they save time and make it easier for people to match. Different dating apps have different “filters” that allow you to customize what height range you’re looking for, what minimum education level you’re comfortable with, how far away from your home you’re willing to date someone, whether it’s ok if they’re a smoker, whether it’s ok if they’ve been divorced, or whether it’s ok if they have kids or pets…

I used to think that there was never a good reason to lie about these things. - But over the years people have confided in me that when they’re honest, they never get matched with anyone, and they say lying is the only way to get around the filters.

So if you ever find yourself in that situation, I recommend at least writing the accurate details somewhere else within the profile. So that way you get around the filters, but women still know the truth when they’re swiping.

Because dating apps are a tool for finding and attracting the women who want you and accept you exactly as you are.

We don’t want our dates to be disappointed that we aren’t what they expected, when they meet us in real life.

Oversharing…

The other way that women miscommunicate on their dating profiles is by oversharing unnecessarily.

We want to cast a wide net and only share what matters most in terms of attraction and compatibility.

Being too specific about insignificant personal traits and preferences risks giving people the false impression that you’re too different from each other and therefore not compatible.

Dating profiles are not meant to be a place of self-expression. It’s totally different than social media.

I once coached a client who refused to give a woman a chance because it said on her profile that she enjoys wine tastings. My client thought it sounded pretentious to write that on a dating profile, and she assumed they’d have nothing in common. – And while this has nothing to do with wine tastings, it really shows how easy it is to be misunderstood.  Sharing unnecessary details can get taken out of context and give a false impression of who you are.

It’s not necessary to list all your favorite things and biggest pet peeves or whatever else, because those things don’t truly matter for deeper compatibility. Less is more.

And definitely don’t list your dealbreakers.

It’s really common for people to say things like “No men, no couples, no cheaters, no rebounds, no random hookups, nobody who voted for Trump, no bad vibes, nobody who doesn’t actually read my profile…”  

Now let me be clear - I think it’s amazing for women to know what you want and to have high standards and to never settle.

But you can do that without defensiveness or negativity. Since dating profiles should be short and only include what matters most, it’s a good idea to keep it in the positive, instead of being defensive and calling out all the things you don’t want.

So those are the biggest mistakes women make in online dating.

Take advantage of the dating apps.

This world is full of queer women who want to share the same kind of connection that you do, and online dating allows you to show up in any city, anyplace in the world and have your profile shown to all the other available queer women in the area to see who is available and attracted to you. That means finding love is entirely within your hands.

That’s an absolute miracle compared to how dating used to be… Online dating has made it exponentially easier for women like us to find each other.

If you’re currently single and using dating apps to try to find love, the good news is that you’re doing the right thing. Keep going.

And until next time keep remembering that that hot lesbians are everywhere, that love is real, and that the woman of your dreams is on her way into your life in perfect timing.

With softness,

Jordana Michelle

P.S.

If you want lesbian dating advice from me more often, follow me on Instagram @jordana.michelle.

If you enjoyed this blog, then be sure to check out my other popular video: The Games Women Play In Lesbian Dating.