My niece decided to sign me up for Jdate, an ethnic online dating service. If you have ethnic dating services available, and assuming you like, respect or gravitate toward your ethnicity go for it, otherwise you may meet many people with very little in common.

If you are fed up with your ethnicity, try a new one. You may meet some very interesting people or just realize you like your own kind. Remember life is a journey. Also remember that just because you are on a journey, it doesn't’t mean you aren't’t responsible for your actions and you may pay dearly for making stupid choices.

Being a neophyte, I picked another service before she told me about her actions on my behalf. I felt a need and a desire to explore cyber-relations that would hopefully lead to a connection that is most necessary after a traumatic loss. Betrayal is a trauma that requires a new interest, and if you think you can be satisfied with stamp collecting; do it. However if you need to feel desirable, sexual, and whole again, you need to get online.

I picked TrueLove.com. Don’t ask me why, I just think the model on their website really looked like she wanted me to join, and she was so hot. Yes, early on, right after a loss, you don’t think so rationally, thus your choices and decision-making skills may be compromised. As it turned out, I soon realized that she couldn’t actually see me as I typed away on my computer entering the information to join their dating service.

TrueLove.com – what a great domain name. There is something exciting, almost sexual about contacting potential lovers on line. I guess I’m not the only one to have this thought, as cyber sex is one of the most lucrative online businesses ever. I actually thought of inventing the penis port and the vagina soft drive to provide for an interactive kind of cyber sex. They don’t have these things yet, but give them time.

First I had to learn how to navigate the dating site. Being fairly tech savvy, it still required time to learn, and time was the one commodity that I had so little to offer that my wife left me. It’s not that hard to get the hang of it, and as I found out, there are some rather inept dullards lurking on the web. If they figured out how to do this kind of thing, so can you.

Pretty soon, a decision must be made as to joining these various dating services for a fee or just using their free service. How can anyone resist free? Actually, I learned rather soon that you have to pay-to-play unless you plan on merely looking at pictures of potential mates and getting letters from them that you can neither read nor respond to unless you pay to join.

These services are really not that expensive and you will pay if you want to get anything out of it. There is no free lunch. Well, there is if you get a guy to take you to lunch and he isn’t so cheap as to ask you to split the bill – yes there are many cheapskates out there so the phrase probably still works – no free lunch.

It does make sense to test the waters before you pay to join any particular dating service. You go for the free trial since this test gives you the opportunity to make sure that the potential mates on the website don’t live in far away places. In one service I tested, the only people contacting me were hillbillies living in states far away. You won’t have much opportunity to meet a nice selection of dates nearby if the dating service is too new and without tons of members. Once you find a service that offers a nice selection of members, pay your dues.

There are some truly free Internet dating services out there. One is plentyofish.com. I think that's the name. If not, at least you'll probably find a good fish sandwich. For some reason, when I tried this site, I didn't get many contacts. There are lots of people on this site, yet they seem to be relatively complacent. Maybe that comes from being free. If you pay for being on the dating site, you probably want your monies worth so you use it. That makes sense.

There are so many sites with so many varieties that it is ridiculous. Sort of like how we have hundreds of television channels to choose from. While variety might be nice, it makes life that much more confusing. Remember the days when there were three television channels? Yes, life was easy back then. We all watched the same things and had a common Americana kind of feeling to our existence. We were one. Now you can join dating sites to meet specific ethnic groups, married women who cheat, baby boomers, midgets, people with intractable diseases who can be together without worrying about catching something that they already have. The list is endless.