Whether you are a newbie to online dating, or an 'old hand', even in a new and deepening relationship, then this article could be useful to you. What happens when you and your partner both have Facebook pages, and you are in that early stage when you can't stop calling and emailing each other? Or, maybe you are settled in to a stable relationship, maybe you have moved in together, and you both have Facebook pages for yourselves. Have you thought about the potential problems this could create? Do you need two facebook pages - one for your regular friends and one for online dating?

Privacy Issues

Having your personal profile on Facebook can lead to a multitude of problems, not least being identity theft, which is one reason that I shied away from the application for a few years. Yes, there are privacy settings, but they don't always work properly, and recently the 'powers that be' at the company changed the default settings unilaterally. This led to fury in the Press. And Yes again, they did change reset them. But it just makes you nervous about having your whole life in a worldwide database, doesn't it? Nowadays there is software which can scan your profile and your Facebook friends and figure out a great deal about what makes you tick, even your sexual orientation.

Until very recently, I had no page on Facebook. My girlfriend has had one for years, and she is fanatical about her privacy online. She uses it mostly to keep in touch with her children.

So, I figured it would be a good idea for me as well, as I'm not really good at keeping in touch with family, and I know my daughters are really active. Fine. So…

What's this got to do with online dating?

Well, I went to set up an online profile in Facebook, and after the first couple of pages it asked me to find some friends online. You've probably done it already. Guess who I searched for? Yes, my girlfriend. Could I find her? No. Did I find her? Yes. I simply looked for one of her daughters and found her as a friend of her daughter. I then sent a request to her to be my Facebook friend.

After a couple of days I had received no reply. This got me thinking. Is she ignoring me? Did she get my request? Several other family members (including my own children, I'm glad to say) had accepted and become friends. Maybe there was another reason, something more concerning? So, I asked her if she was not responding. She said that she hadn't received my request. Fair enough, I believed that she hadn't received my request. She was surprised that I had been able to find her at all given her privacy settings (that's off the point of this article, though I did touch on it earlier).

This episode got me thinking. Maybe she had a whole list of people - exes maybe, who she did not want me to be able to see as her friends. Anyway, it was not an issue for me, but I also disappointed myself, that I should doubt her.

In conclusion then, this online profile issue can raise doubts and questions when it comes to online dating, especially when you are just meeting someone. You swap real email addresses first, then phone numbers, then maybe, just maybe, your Facebook pages.

What can you do about it?. One is to have a bland profile with a few, plus a real everyday profile. The other is to keep your profile clean of your dates and exes. Of course, if you are dating several people at the same time, or even using Facebook dating features, then you may need to be a lot more careful if you want to avoid lots of questions.