For example, when you live in a town the size of my hometown (population 50,000), the best you can hope for - to meet new people - is to have a friend looking out for you, or to go to a bar. If you are like me, the bar scene is not something many of us look forward to doing. The bar scene was fine - when I was in my twenties - twenty years ago.

As someone who is much older, going to a bar might feel like going to a preschool to pick up a date. On the flip side, if you are able to find a bar where people your own age go, if you found them in a bar, they might be the crying in their beer type. Who wants to bring a drunk home, eh?

Where does one go outside the bar scene to find your future love? You ask your friends and they say you should start attending a specific church - as someone at that church might be on the lookout for his or her love interest also.

You can also look at the people you work with, but that is not recommended in today's hypersensitive sexual harassment environment.

I remember when I was younger, someone told me that I should go to the laundromat to pick up women. The strategy seemed realistic in that most consumers at the laundromat are women, and I am a guy.

I knew a guy one time that always went to the grocery store when he wanted to meet new women.

My thought is that if I go to the laundromat or the grocery store, I am going to potentially offend dozens of married women, before I get to the single women in the place. From my viewpoint, that is just a little too heartbreaking - to find a woman you are attracted to and then to learn you could never date her because she is already married.

Of course, many guys could care less if she is married, but I am not one of those guys.

With the online dating websites, I have the chance to shop for a woman to date, in a way that is a bit more than chance. If she is a woman who likes riding motorcycles and she wants a biker dude for a boyfriend, then I know that I will never own a motorcycle and maybe she is not the woman for me. If I met her in a bar, I might not know that for three or four dates. That would be such a waste to date someone several times, only to learn that we would be incompatible as a couple.

I remember dating a girl in college, who appeared smart and attractive. After we had gone out eight or nine times, she pulled out a joint and started puffing away. I do not roll with druggies, so I broke off the relationship. Granted, not everyone is going to tell the truth on the adult dating website, but believe it or not, more people confess a drug habit in their profile than you would ever imagine.

A few years ago, I ran into a woman at someone's house and she knew me, but I had no idea who she was. She was a bit rude to me, so I asked a friend who that woman was. Imagine my shock when I found out that this woman was the girl I had dated ten years before, who smoked pot in front of me, ending our relationship.

I did not recognize her at all. Although I knew she was three years my junior, she now looked ten years my senior. She was a walking advertisement for why you should never do drugs. Good thing I got out of that when I did. Ten years later, she had been to jail twice for fraud and once for selling drugs. Her life was a waste, and she never got the chance to pull me down with her.

No matter how you cut it, dating is a game of chance. You will pick winners and you will pick losers. But once the losers have been identified, you get the chance to move on to someone better. Dating online is not much different than dating offline, except in my experience, I have found that I can weed out more of the losers in less time than what I would have spent in my search offline.