LadyTechie's Book Musings

Funny, forthright, and hopeful, Kissing Strangers is a survival-based how-to guide about looking for love online ... and how to separate the men from the frogs.

Out Now! – Kissing Strangers: How to Online Date Like a Boss by Alethea Spiridon.

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Title: Kissing Strangers: How to Online Date Like a Boss

Author: Alethea Spiridon

Genre: Dating

Release Date: January 30, 2018

Length: 40,000 words

Blurb:
So many frogs. So few princes.

Every single (and soon-to-be-single) woman knows the Dating Horror Stories. The guy who charms your panties off before he bolts. The funeral planner with a foot fetish. The Early Ejaculator. Or that filmmaker looking for a soul mate—provided you don't mind he lied about his height, his weight, his wife, and... oh look, a micro-penis. How nice.

The bad news is that these guys exist. The good news? There are ways to find them, avoid them, and concentrate your energies on non-fuckwits. Who, as it turns out, also exist. Hurrah!

From deciphering Man Speak to the sexy perks of 30-year-old men, Catfishing 101, navigating hookup culture, and the safety precautions every woman should take, author Alethea Spiridon taps into her own hilarious—and occasionally heart-crushing—experiences in the dating world. Funny, forthright, and hopeful, Kissing Strangers is a survival-based how-to guide about looking for love online ... and how to separate the men from the frogs.

Find out more at: Goodreads | Amazon

Praise for Kissing Strangers:
“I absolutely loved reading this book! Funny and engaging, this is a great guide for women who are getting their toes wet into the online dating pool. It’s funny, informative, compelling. I wish I had read this when I was online dating. It would have helped me a lot. I made a lot of those mistakes!” Bestselling author, Carmen Falcone

Excerpt One:
Dating today isn’t really dating!

It’s hooking up, hanging out, Netflix and chill.

I asked one of the guys I matched with on Bumble about this idea that nobody dates anymore. Sean, 36, said this: “Well, I think at our age we know what we want and when we find it we move quicker than before.”

You can probably guess that Sean moved on faster than I could ask a follow-up question.

Most men look for sex and find love. Truth.

I’m a romance editor and a die-hard romantic through and through, so this cold, loveless world of dating where most people are in it to sleep with you on the first “date” is soul crushing. Yes, mindless sex is fantastic, but when that is all most guys want…

What the fuck happened to romance?

Do not expect to be courted or dated. Expect to be jerked around, lied to, avoided, ghosted, stood up, breadcrumbed, cancelled on… There are, of course, good men out there, but it will take some digging and meeting, and time and patience.

That’s where this book comes in. You want sex? I’ll show you how to find it. You want something more? Well, keep reading…

Go in knowing a few things.

Tinder. Bumble. POF. OkCupid.

Ghosting. Breadcrumbing

Netflix and chill.

“Nobody dates anymore!”

“Romance is dead!”

You thought dating would be fun, easy, and you’d walk around in your cute little outfits like the women do on television. Bah! Not so much, girls. It can be fun. It is fun at times. But it’s also work and involves a lot of man decoding and navigating a landscape filled with unknowns, rejection, confusion…not much has changed since your mom dated, really. It’s just packaged differently is all.

Dating comes in new forms now. Well, the ways that we get to men. One in three people meet online today, so you have to be where the men are—on a dating site and dating apps. Swiping and sore digits will be your new norm.

But that’s just how you initially connect. Nothing matches real-life experience, so you must meet and talk to men, and a lot of men (probably) until you find the one you click with and want to settle with, whatever settling means for you.

Or maybe you’ll meet him on guy number three.

And if it’s hookups you want, you’ll get tips on how to make them work for you. Nothing wrong with casual sex!

This guide will give you that heads-up so you don’t get ambushed like I did. You’ll know what the booby traps are and how to charge ahead regardless. Consider this your counterattack in your plan to survive.

A decisive victory can be yours, but you need to know the rules if you want to beat them (men) at their game.

Excerpt Two:

To Find a Prince You Have to

Kiss Some Toads

Back on the Block

I was curious and the solution was easy. Here were tons of potential suitors online. Just pick one, right?

Nope.

It means diving in and wading through thousands of men to hopefully come out with a few you won’t mind giving up a few hours for.

I joined Match.com for eighty dollars and three months, set up a picture (albeit an older one; yeah, I did that my first time), and wrote a brilliantly edgy, smart ass, and to the point profile. The messages and winks started rolling in.

Finding a decent man is hard work.

I sent my brother a text one night: Are men as awful as I remember?

His response blew me away: Oh sure. Good men are hard to find. That is very accurate. That’s why I have few friends. We know that too and avoid those guys.

Ha! Well, there you have it. A good man is hard to find. If I intend to find one (and I do), I can’t give up.

Three hundred days to a wakeup

I decided to go in hard for a year and see what was out there, how it worked, how men worked. What this dating thing was really all about and like. This is part of my story and what I’ve discovered along the way. Learn from it. Laugh at it.

Girlfriend to girlfriend, this is what I know and wish someone had told me.

You’ve Decided to Try Online Dating …Great!

Once you’ve decided to try online dating, you need to figure out which sites to go on. Each site has a different vibe and feel to it, and the only way you can effectively gauge that is by going on and figuring out what you like…and don’t.

My first bit of insight for you is this: Dating is a numbers game.

It’s as simple as that. Dramatic? Not in the least! Come back after you read this in full, and after you online date a bit, and see if you don’t agree. I want you to have fun kissing strangers, but I want you to go in with a realistic vision too. I want you to know how to online date like a boss.

Date by the numbers. That’s how men do it! And on this battlefield, there are fewer men for every woman. Like three women for every man. Ugh. Seriously. We’re literally duking it out on the battlefield. But let’s not! Please. We can share (and some of you love doing that, legitimately). That being said, the sad truth is that the odds are not in our favour, it seems. But they can be if…

We date like a man! You might get rejected, but you’ll be rejected from the guys you want a chance with. If you simply wait for guys to reach out to you, you might only hear from the guys you already know you don’t want.

So… get on the sites I list below and get on them all even. Rotate between three and four. Play by those damn numbers, because that’s how men do it and that’s how you’ll increase your chances of getting the guy.

About Alethea Spiridon:
Alethea is a writer and editor (lots of romance books, so many) out of Ontario, Canada. When her marriage fell apart she realized she had to get back out there and figure out how to date again or accept a life of eating from the Dinner For One menu option permanently. The book in your hands (or on your screen) is the result of that research. If it saves one woman (you!) from the landmines out there in the DatingVerse, then she’s done her job. For more bits of dating advice and man mysteries solved, visit her website at www.littleblackhook.com.