Desired traits in a possible spouse vary from person to person, but the basics remain true: all of us want someone to love.

But, let us also not forget: the internet playground can be a dangerous place to visit.

One night, after another bad match and a solo bottle of wine, Webb rejoined JDate—this time posing as a man, to check out her competition. Webb crafted 10 male profiles so perfect they had to be fake (sample code name: Jewish Doc1000) to gather data: what the site's most popular women looked like, which keywords they used, how they timed their messages.

(Duffon), one of three new books about online dating out this month, in which she ­recounts how she cracked the online dating code to meet her now husband.

By the time your date comes around, she’ll already have lost interest or have found someone more attentive.

If you really are going away, wait until you get back to ask her out.

And she did: On JDate, Match.com, and ­e Harmony, she met guys who were six inches shorter or 30 pounds heavier than advertised; who picked expensive restaurants and passed the check to her; and who told her, mid drink, that they were married.

According to Slater, it's one of the few business models in which clients' failures are the company's win—the longer we seek, the more money they make.

Aiming to short-circuit this cycle, "e-flirt expert" Laurie Davis' hyperprescriptive (Atria) instructs us in a level of detail that is by turns grating and illuminating on how we should be "marketing our singledom." Here, the authors' best advice on joining—and enjoying—the mixer:1.

The world of online dating can be a precarious field to venture into.

Non-age specific and available to anyone of any gender or sexual preference, in this day and age of technology, more and more people are turning to the internet to find their perfect match.