Online dating is a very efficient and convenient way to meet people. You can describe whom you’d like to date, cruise profiles, and screen potential dates by e-mail, online chat, text, and phone before actually meeting in person. You can also consider and develop criteria for your ideal partner. If you want to meet only people who live in your zip code, you can screen out everyone else. If it’s vitally important to be with someone who, like you, loves pugs, you can find that type of person too. And you can do all of this without even leaving your home!

A consequence of this process is spending an awful lot of “alone time” writing (and updating) your profile, selecting the best photo of yourself, and poring through everyone else’s profile. During this time, you’re vulnerable to two very unmindful phenomena: stewing in others’ opinions about you and concocting fantasies about others. In both situations, exercising your judgmental mind can make you easily fall prey to disastrous dating experiences.

Developing your dating profile requires you to articulate who you think you are. Typically, this conjures both positive and negative views of yourself. You might easily identify all of your good qualities, like being honest or having a healthy head of hair. Or you might feel bad about who you are, particularly relative to someone else or an idealized version of yourself. For example, “I’m too fat,” “I’m not successful,” and “I’m not as funny as my friend” are all variations on the “I’m not good enough” theme. Regardless of whether your self-assessment is negative, positive, or some combination, the bottom line is that you spend considerable time and energy being distracted by opinions of yourself.

Related to this issue, you spend a lot of time thinking about whom you want to date. Maybe you’re looking for a vegetarian chef or a fellow Christian. A quick search might identify plenty of suitable matches in your neighborhood. Having so many search options can actually lead you to select poorer matches as you become distracted by irrelevant details and less attentive to what you really want (Wu and Chiou 2009). In addition, it can create fantasies of how you expect or want someone else to be. Again, you’re distracted from the present moment—in this case, the actual experience of being with someone.

In both situations, as you consider yourself and others as dating material, these fantasies (and they are fantasies) get concretized in a way that leads to dissatisfaction and dating disasters. If you think you’re a loser, for example, you likely set your sights low, easily misperceive yourself as being rejected, and try to cover up your self-determined flaws. If you think that person with the cat photo is a freaky animal lover who can’t relate to people, you might shy away from (or be attracted to) him or her. And because you’re familiar with this mutually evaluative process, you make compensatory adjustments. Consequently, your profile reflects not who you truly are, but rather who you think you need to be to get who you think you want. So what do you do? You want to date, and you already paid money for the online matchmaking service. So you might as well use it—but mindfully. Here are a few questions to ponder:

1. As you imagine yourself dating, how do you feel? Excited, nervous, discouraged, triumphant?
2. Given these emotions, what do you notice yourself wanting to do? Edit your profile, conduct another search, shut down the computer, go out on another date?
3. In creating your profile, how did you describe yourself? What did you decide to share and why? Does it truly reflect your opinions of yourself? Does it include the opinions of your friends, family members, or previous partners?
4. As you read others’ profiles, be aware of what you notice. Do you focus on the picture, the person’s occupation? To what degree does your reaction reflect what’s actually written or shown versus the judgments you’ve made in your head about the person?
5. Without getting too analytical, consider for a moment where these judgments originated. With curiosity and openness to whatever arises, investigate what got your mind started down this path.
6. Finally, spend a few minutes breathing mindfully before taking yourself back to the task at hand. As you reengage with the present moment through your breathing, you develop your ability to see people—yourself and others—as they truly are. Afterward, you can return to whatever you were doing online, if it still seems appropriate. Increasing your awareness of your judgments and reactions can reaffirm your commitment to a particular action or change your course. You might decide to continue editing your profile, for instance, or to just let it be. Either way is okay.

excerpt from Urban Mindfulness: Cultivating Peace, Presence & Purpose in the Middle of it All by Jonathan S Kaplan, Ph D.