Last week I complained about the challenging time I was having on my latest foray into online dating. A little while later, Susannah IM’d to say: “You need to change your profile. And I am going to do it for you.” Oh, hooray! To be honest, I had been considering having someone I trust rewrite my profile for me, since I wasn’t sure if I was doing a great job of “selling” myself. Susannah was the first to volunteer, and, as she is rather blunt, I knew she wouldn’t pussyfoot around doing it right. After the jump, read my original online dating profile and then check out Susannah’s version. Stay tuned to see whether my luck with the fellas improves after being Susannified.

Allow me to be neurotic for a few hundred words.

I’ve been back on the online dating circuit for a grand total of 4.5 days and I already hate it. The whole process, frankly, kind of hurts my self-esteem. It makes me feel like the last kid picked in dodgeball. The site that I’m using affords you the opportunity to know who’s been looking at your profile. On one hand, it’s a great way of weeding through the hundreds of “matches” in my area, so I can focus on the men who found my thumbnail photo cute enough to deem worthy of further review. On the other hand, those same men, upon clicking deeper into my profile, did not have their interest piqued enough to send me a message, add me to their “like” list, or grant me a “wink.”

This weekend, I joined an online dating site for the third time in a year. Every time I meet someone new and start dating him, I end up deleting my account. Maybe this is the kiss of death, actually. Maybe the next time I meet someone, I should keep my online dating profile active, as a signal to the universe that I am not about to be fooled into thinking I found someone long-term.

I’ve only been on the site (again) for a few days, so I have no dates to report on, but I have noticed a new trend among my matches. Apparently, online dating is now a great way to meet and ask out people you already know.

Are you guys still obsessed with Chat Roulette? Yeah, me too. But now I’ve got two other sites sure to absorb copious amounts of your free time. If you like online dating, but are sick of winks and unbearably lame profiles, check out HowAboutWe.com. It lets you skip the profile thing altogether and get right to the fun—the dates. You sign up and rate a series of date ideas—hot air balloon ride, romantic dinner, gondola, etc. Then you get to list your own ideas for dates. The site sends you people who match your interests. At least if you don’t like them, you’re bound to have a good time doing what you want.

I like to think I discovered using the internet to make phone calls long before anyone else did. The year was 2000, and I was backpacking through Asia and had stopped in Calcutta, India to visit with my friend’s extended family. My friend’s cousin and I had gone out nightclubbing and when we returned to his apartment at two o’clock in the morning, he offered for us to call my friend back in San Francisco, for free. Calling from Asia was pricey enough for me to stick to email throughout most of my travels, and I envisioned us breaking Indian law when I watched him put on some headphones and sit down at his computer to make our phone call. The next thing I knew, I sat like a customer service representative with my headphones and talked to my friend while she shopped through Chinatown. After a quick laugh and a shock to her system to hear from her cousin and me, we noted that the connection wasn’t half-bad and marveled that we could chat for nothing while halfway across the world.

I was hooked.

Good news! The online dating website eHarmony will finally become more inclusive to gays and lesbians. After duking it out over a class-action lawsuit in California for two and a half years, eHarmony has agreed to be more “welcoming” to homosexuals on their site.

The other day I caught up with a guy friend over instant messenger. We hadn’t talked in a while, so he had to be filled in on my wonderful boyfriend of nine months. “I just wish I had met him when I was younger, like 18,” I enthused. “It seems like such a waste of time that I didn’t meet him until I was 25.”

“Aww, so you would have had more time together? That’s so romantic,” my friend said.

“Well, yes ... but that’s not exactly what I meant. I wish I hadn’t bothered dating other guys,” I explained. “Really, what was the point?”

According to Scientific American magazine, more than 90 percent of people lie in their online dating profiles. Women in their 20s and 30s slyly deduct anywhere from five to 20 lbs. from their weight, while men tend to lie about income, education level and, yes, relationship status. Yikes.

Here, we count the ways regular folks get creative while creating sexier versions of themselves online.

One of the reasons I love OKCupid—not that I’m online dating anymore—is that they do all these studies on their users’ tastes and habits and release the results, which are often fascinating. The service recently studied profile photos—the different types of photos users post and how possible paramours react to them based on the rate at which these users were contacted. Some interesting findings, after the jump ...

I’m currently single, but have been active on a couple of online dating sites for a couple of years. I’m not looking for random hookups, but an actual meaningful relationship. Clearly, I’ve yet to find that, although I have met/e-mailed with some extremely decent guys. Last winter I was e-mailing with this guy I was very interested in — we never talked on the phone, but we exchanged long emails, and I really felt like we connected, that we shared a lot of interests and the same sense of humor. We were talking about meeting up for drinks, but it was hard because we were both visiting family over the holidays. Then he met someone else and sent me an e-mail explaining why he hadn’t responded, telling me he wanted to keep in touch and apologizing for potentially being a d-bag. We never did meet up, but through some internet stalking I found out he ended up in a relationship with that someone else, but I think he may be single again. I know, I sound like Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” right now, but if it means anything, I never spent more than a few minutes looking him up. My question is this: would it be overly creepy/internet stalker of me to e-mail him now, a year after we stopped talking? He keeps coming up in my e-mail matches, and I was so excited to meet up with him before he met someone else. Also, I’m starting to get really tired of looking for decent men online, especially knowing he and I probably have a high chance of hitting it off in person. Should I shoot him a quick message or just leave it in the past? — Still Interested

BeautifulPeople.com is an ultra PC online dating site where only the mega-hot are allowed to post profiles. In order to get listed, members go through a rigorous rating period whereby site managers inspect their pictures and determine whether they’re gorg enough to join the club. But after the holiday season, as members posted new photos of themselves, site managers noticed a HORRIFYING thing—some of their members had (gaaaaasp) put on a few pounds. So, the site kindly kicked out 5,000 members, encouraging them to reapply “when they’re looking their best” and go through the rating process again. The founder of the site explained this move saying, “As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld. Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.’’

While this whole thing smacks of a publicity stunt—just like I don’t believe Warren Beatty slept with 13,000 women, I don’t believe that this rinky dink dating site has 5,000 members who so obviously gained weight over the holidays—but if it’s true, pretty horrifying. [Telegraph]

I stood outside a Greenwich Village coffee shop at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday night, staring at the front door. I was meeting a very handsome architect inside, but for some reason, I wanted to bolt. Honestly, I had come close to picking up the phone and canceling our date earlier in the day. Three times to be precise. I just wasn’t excited about this guy.

I’m not a lesbian. But, I do have lots of lezzie friends who have complained about the lack of gay online dating options. Now, Velvetpark Media has launched a lesbian dating website called Velvetpark Mate. Writes site editor Grace Moon: “[We are] the first lesbo dating site ... because we are NOT an affiliate program, or an ‘out of the box’ 3rd party package with a lesbian label slapped on it, NOR are we an afterthought of a male dominated media company, or the unwanted stepchild of a straight date site.”

Online dating website OKCupid has posted an entry on its blog that takes a close look at its users’ email response patterns according to race. The results might not be surprising, but they’re nevertheless significant—a sender’s race plays a large role in whether he/she will get a response. By comparing the write-back rate of Asian, black, white, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander, Indian, and Native American men and women, the website finds that correspondence is noticeably less or more than what the write-back rate “should” be. In a nutshell, OKCupid breaks down the research, which analyzed about a million users. White men get the most responses. Black women respond the most yet receive far fewer replies. White, Asian, and Hispanic women largely prefer white men. OKCupid calls this racism:

“[We] are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well.

Do you think it’s racist to have race preferences in the man or woman you date? Are you a racist if you’re not attracted to a certain race? [Blog.OkCupid.com]

Are you a dude on an online dating site? Are you having trouble getting women to actually go out with you? Not sure why? The problem may be you! From corny pickup lines to photo no-nos to profile mistakes, The Frisky gives you the lowdown on the top five mistakes men make when dating online—from the female perspective. Get it right and we might let you take us out on a date!

When a friend of mine who’s dipping her toe back into the world of online dating recently asked for three quick rules to remember when emailing potential matches, it occurred to me that if she needed a bit of a refresher course, some of you probably do too. After all, as convenient as it is, email is rife with opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot and hurt your shot at making a real connection. So after the jump, eight dos and don’ts to remember when emailing a potential online dating match.

Anyone who lives in a big city can tell you that finding a mate is difficult. Sure, there are a lot of fish swimming about, but they’re not willing to settle with one particular mate yet so they keep their options open. Crazy Blind Date has set out to change the big city dating dilemma by making it quick and easy for women to meet men in their area and go out on extremely short notice. So there’s no reading and rereading of profiles and messaging back and forth to see if you and the guy are compatible. You simply give a few specs, the site matches with a guy that fits your requirements, and you go on a date to see if you like each other. You might not find your soul mate in the first few dates or ever, but at least you won’t be sitting at home watching “What Not to Wear” on a Friday night. [Crazy Blind Date]