You know your IQ, but what about EQ, MQ and BQ?

I happened upon this article and it got me thinking about the importance of intelligence in the world of online dating. To me, this makes perfect sense and I do actually agree with the author on so many points. Basically, what he says is that in order to be successful in life, you don’t need to have a high IQ – you need to have the whole package of EQ, MQ and BQ (that is emotional intelligence, moral intelligence and body intelligence). Even though the author of the article speaks of these three different dimensions of intelligence in accordance to how successful you could be in business and professional life, I think that it is even more relevant when it comes down to dating and finding that right person. The latter three types of intelligence might be much important than IQ ever could be!

Now, we all know what IQ stands for and how it is measured.  We also know that people with a high IQ might be interesting to talk to and have an abundant source of knowledge and information but they might not necessarily be the most pleasant or fun people to spend your time with. And sometimes people like that aren’t even that successful in their professional lives. It shows you that all the wisdom and intelligence in the world cannot be replaced by what’s inside your heart and how other people feel themselves when they’re around you.  And that is where the other sides of your intelligence come to play a crucial role. What’s even more important – while we can only do so much about our IQ levels, we can develop and tune the other bits of our intelligence to make them work in perfect harmony and to balance our personalities out to how we’d like to be.

So what is it that we’re talking about in terms of EQ, MQ and BQ?

First, emotional intelligence is probably the most well known of these three types. It deals with sentiments, feelings and empathy – knowing what you’re feelings are like and trying to understand and perceive the emotions of other people around you. It deals with managing these feelings, keeping them under control  as well as letting them show in appropriate situations.  It’s got a lot to do with how you perceive the world around you – it’s about recognising the emotions from facial expressions, tones of voice, photos, works of art etc. It’s also about rational thinking and not letting things get out of your control by keeping your emotions or mood changes under control.

Emotions aren’t static, neatly outlined experiences – they’re alive and evolving elaborate clusters of feelings and they can bring about extremely complicated relationships or situations. A person with a high EQ is able to fine tune their perception to recognise the differences between emotions that might initially appear quite similar. He or she can keep tabs on the emotions of themselves as well as other people in order to achieve a clear and rational result. They are socially aware as well as self aware and they don’t let their feelings get a hold over them. They are great at problem solving and conflict management and highly reliable. Therefore, even when we are talking about emotions, it also has everything to do with rational thinking and common sense.

Moral intelligence is perhaps an expression that we haven’t heard so much in everyday life yet it is probably something that most people inherently know better or use more than emotional intelligence. After all, it is hard to control your emotions and even harder to perceive and manage other people’s feelings but moral decisions are something that come naturally to us. We all have lived and during that life we have already developed some kind of values that we hold dear and that we would like to apply to either to ourselves or those close to us.

And that is what moral intelligence is all about.  It’s about knowing right from wrong – as simple as that. It’s not just about the way we behave but also about the way we treat other people – those strangers to us as well as those close to us. It’s about the things we say, and how we say them. Note here – this doesn’t have to be attached closely to emotional intelligence. Of course, it helps to have a high EQ as well as MQ, but high MQ can be achieved without having a very high EQ – you just have to know what values are considered to be “right” among the people around you.

Even though that sounds a bit manipulative, MQ is actually all about the things that are in your heart – conscience, tolerance, kindness, respect, self-control, empathy and fairness. It’s about sympathy, about your abilities to forgive. People who are considered to be “bitter” usually have some kind of an issue with their moral intelligence rather than emotional – they feel detached. Their emotions might all be perceived rightly and kept under control, but they cannot find a way to find acceptance and forgiveness. When it comes to relationships, I think it is probably the most important part of your intelligence package. Yes, managing your emotions is crucial, but it’s the way your values place them into context rather than the way you grade them or perceive them that matters.

And lastly, body intelligence. That is something that is becoming increasingly more important in the world and in my opinion online dating plays an important role here. Body intelligence deals with the way we value our bodies and take care of them.  It’s about all the health issues as well as exercise and proper nutrition. It’s about how well we listen to what our body wants and needs. There are two sides to this story – obviously in the western world where nearly half of the population is overweight, there seems to be a serious issue with listening to your body. At the same time, it is your body that one needs to listen to, not what the media or advertising is trying to tell us about body image.

You might wonder why this has been separated from IQ – after all, intelligent people know that junk food makes  us fat and that proper exercise and good sleep are vital to us – but it’s not all about knowing, but also about the way it makes us feel. Body intelligence has an impact on your self-confidence as well as your love for yourself.  Therefore it’s an important part of us, of the “true self” inside us.

That’s the three types of intelligence there are in addition to IQ. I think it doesn’t hurt to pay attention to these in the context of online dating as well as in the whole self-development context.

Women – if lines like “I’m currently involved in cleaning up toxic waste” make you want to rewind to the eighties immediately then press play and enjoy some dating gold

The recent news about Cheryl Cole wanting to try online dating shows that we may be on the brink of a new era of internet dating. If you’re in your thirties or older you’re bound to know – and might have experienced for yourself – the stages of online dating evolving from an absolute freak novelty thing to something slightly shameful for those incapable of finding love in real life to something as ordinary and mundane as checking your emails or Facebook wall. And now we are at a place where celebrities see the internet as a viable place to look for love. It’s taking a turn towards glamour and therefore I think online dating is perhaps looking at its most glorious times yet.

It’s fascinating to think of the opportunities this turn can present. From the VIP-only dating sites to whirlwind romance stories between someone famous and someone ordinary… Well, just imagine the media frenzy! If just Cheryl Cole’s announcement has been met with public applause, it shows there’s a hole in the market. After all, famous people do get dumped, cheated on, left heartbroken. Why shouldn’t they get their very own niche of online dating – whether it’s amongst us, mere mortals or somewhere where they can only mingle with the likes of their own.

Come to think of it, which existing site would you recommend for Cheryl? Is she more of a Match.com girl who likes to take her pick from a huge pool or more of an eHarmony chica who’d be better off matched with someone compatible by the system (seeing that she seems to pick the wrong kind of fella herself)? Or perhaps she would thrive on MySingleFriend where her pals could look after her and set her up with someone good for a change? Perhaps we should send Cheryl a link to our dating site reviews so she could make an educated pick!

In any case, it’s an interesting thought to play with.

Several months ago I stumbled across an article about the importance of values on a blog about dating and relationships. It was refreshingly well written and full of useful and practical advice. So I read another about boundaries, another about self-esteem and before I knew it I’d forgotten what I was supposed to be doing and was in several articles deep.

That blog turned out to be Baggage Reclaim and the writer, founder and owner of the site is Natalie Lue. The site is aimed primarily for women but there’s lots of good advice that could equally apply to men and basically anyone looking for help in making better decisions in both their personal lives and relationships.

Reclaimed Baggage maps out many of the well travelled routes that lead to unhealthy relationships while presenting clearly marked paths to healthier destinations. There’s no BS or skirting around difficult issues, just honest observations and lessons learned through personal experience. Unless you’re immune to dating/relationship difficulties then you’ll be hard pressed to find a site as useful and inspiring as Reclaim Baggage to make better relationship choices in your life.

Mr Unavailable & the Fallback Girl

Happy to see that Natalie has published a book on the subject of emotionally unavailable men Mr Unavailable & the Fallback Girl which is already garnering its fair share of 5 star reviews on Amazon.

We haven’t read it yet so can’t give our own review but the contents sound like they expand on many of the topics covered in the blog so it should be a valuable resource.

Here’s a trailer for the book that should give you a better idea of what to expect…

It’s not easy to find thoughtful and heartfelt advice on relationships and dating online so it’s encouraging to find exactly that on Reclaim Baggage. Natalie’s observations and relationship advice deserve a wider audience for the great work she’s doing in empowering each of us to take control of lives and stop repeating the same dating mistakes over and over again.

Nice to see a new advert from Match.com that starts of on the small island of Tiree and ends up in our home town of Edinburgh. The opening line states that 1 in 5 relationships in the UK now start off online (based on a YouGov survey of 20,000 adults from December 2011). That’s quite an amazing statistic for something that was barely part of the landscape a mere ten years ago!

Anyway, hope you like the ad and if you want to read our personal opinion of Match.com then check out our Match.com UK Review

Soon after that dating sites started popping up like mushrooms after a rainfall. Fast forward ten years and we are in a situation where there are literally thousands of dating sites out there and the users are not only faced with one difficult choice: who to date, but also another: which site to use.

Of course, partly that’s why we are here. We have created this site to make it easier for you to orientate between all the best and biggest websites out there so that users would know what they’re paying for and what they can expect to get on those sites. But obviously we cannot review them all! But if you just wander around a bit in the online world of dating sites you can come across the most inventive and original websites that clearly show how the human mind has no boundaries when it comes to coming up with clever ideas…

Shared Tables Society

Take Shared Tables Society, for example. It’s a relatively small site and when you visit their site you can see why. It works on the basis of invitation only! Yes, it means there are not hundreds of thousands of users but it also means there are no scammers, no timewasters. Everyone there is there for a reason. What Shared Tables does is unique: it matches you up for dinner dates. So what, you ask, there are a few dating sites that do that already. Yes, but STS matches you up with seven (sic!) dinner dates. Four guys and four girls will sign up for dinner, the site books a table for them in a restaurant, they show up, they have a good time, hopefully make friends, maybe even click with someone and… the rest is history. It certainly does save you from all these awkward first date moments and possible dating horror stories that we wrote about last week.

cheek’d

Or take Cheek’d – a new website that advertises itself as ‘online dating in reverse’. Each new user fills in their profile and gets an order of business cards with funny/weird/puzzling sayings on them. All the cards also have a short ID code printed on them with Cheek’d website address. If you meet someone you like, all you have to do is to give them the card and wait for them to pick up the bate. Hopefully they’re intrigued enough to check out the website and if they do, they get to a page where they have to enter the ID code on the card. Once they’ve done that they’ll be taken through to your personal profile page and move on from there.

Coffee Meets Bagel

Then there’s Coffee Meets Bagel, another site with a new approach. On this site everyone signs in through their Facebook page – which, again, makes the scammers scarce. Then they are matched every day at noon with a friend of a friend through their social network. Users have 24 hours to decide whether they want to take it further.

That’s just three completely new and fresh outlooks to an online dating website out there but I think you get the picture: online dating is getting more an more popular by the minute. With the opportunities out there the chances of you actually finding love online are huge! You just need to find the right place to look for it.

Why is a dating review site linking to a story about online dating horror stories?

Well searching for a partner online doesn’t leave you immune to the normal pitfalls and trials of offline dating. Sometimes people just don’t match up.

That attractive and perfectly sounding potential match might turn out to be totally incompatible in real life.

The following collection of dating horror stories comes from The Awl, an Australian site who surveyed its readers on The Most Horrific Things Encountered While Online Dating some starters…

My online date was eight-and-a-half months pregnant. She never mentioned that prior to our meeting. True, I swear. My first words on our date were: ‘Pardon me, but are you pregnant?’ A gay friend of hers, it turns out, had inseminated her with a turkey baster, or so she said. When I asked what she was doing on a blind date when she was going to give birth in two weeks she said: ‘The baby has me; I want someone.’

Thankfully most of the stories are pretty light hearted and funny – there’s oddballs, strange habits and Definitely Not The Right Person For Me. There’s a few stories toward the end though that are definitely not funny, so be aware of some frank writing and experiences.

I came across this interesting site by Online University and find it so thought provoking that I immediately wanted to share it with our readers.

This site claims that these days it’s easier to find love on an online gaming site than it is on an online dating site! And if you look at the numbers, it does look like these guys have a point – World of Warcraft has 12 million members compared to eHarmony’s 1 million. Also, while online daters spend on an average 1,4 hours on their sites every month, online gamers spend a staggering 34,6 hours on their sites every month!

There’s more facts and figures on the site, check it out and see what you think. Personally I would argue that not all online gamers are necessarily dating material – they might not be single or looking or… well, to be blunt not that much of a relationship material. But that’s just my personal opinion.

Have a good online dating week, everyone!

Created by: OnlineUniversity.net

This promotion lasts for the whole bank holiday weekend so you can reap the benefits of some free communication right up until midnight on Monday night. These promotions only happen two or three times a year so make the most of it while you can, sign up for free and get a feel for whether eHarmony’s the right dating site for you without having to reach into your pocket.

If you like what you see and decide that you’d like to become a full member then check out the eHarmony 2012 membership prices in our recent blog post.

Sign up for your completey free communication weekend at eHarmony here.

For our recent review of eHarmony UK see our eHarmony UK Review.

New research by American psychology professors claim that online dating cannot substitute real ‘live’ dating because no matter how informative and thorough one’s online dating profile might be it can’t guarantee natural chemistry and attraction between two people.

That, of course is true. However, we here at online dating help HQ feel that online dating is not supposed to replace or substitute real-life dating – it’s just a means to an end. A method to help daters meet each other, to make it possible for two people to get together behind a bar counter or dinner table and make their decisions then whether they in fact want to continue to see each other.

However, there are some very interesting points made by the scientists in this research. They claim that the longer and the more thorough your profile is, the less chances there are for it to actually attract someone compatible. They claim – and from our own experience we can say there’s some truth in it – that long and thorough profiles in huge numbers tend to overload people.

If you think about it, wouldn’t you agree? There are some online dating sites that give you an opportunity to write loads about yourself and put together a very extensive profile – Match, eHarmony and Parship, to name the most popular ones. While this is a great feature in itself to give users the opportunity to really express themselves in their own words, it can also be a rather tedious task to wade through lots of profiles like that every day. You can’t help but feel a little overwhelmed by all that information available. Also, that might keep you in an endless loop looking for someone ‘ideal’ that matches all your criteria. Therefore we agree that while a profile should be intriguing, inviting and – above all – create a truthful image of you, it is actually better to leave some things to be discovered in the real world. A little mystery won’t hurt anyone but it could create enough curiosity for you to stand out and spark that special interest in someone. Whether it’s going to work between you or not is up to what happens in real life.

What about sites like eHarmony that actually match you with compatible daters themselves? The American scientists claim that while these matching algorithms reduce the number of potential dates from many to a few, that too can’t guarantee real compatibility. They go even further and claim these algorithms don’t really work.

Do they or don’t they? What can we say – dating isn’t science. Nothing ever works one hundred per cent. Even if the algorithms do work and match you with someone very compatible, it cannot guarantee mutual attraction. Don’t we online daters know it! These things happen.

Dating – online or offline – isn’t risk free. But what sites like eHarmony offer us, is an excellent opportunity to create contact with someone who you might never have come across otherwise. It only broadens our horizons and that in itself is a step closer to finding love rather than a step away from it.