The Best Time For Online Dating Is Right Now

Has a string of dateless holiday events left you lonely? Have you resolved not to spend another year waiting around for the perfect partner to walk into your life? Well you're apparently not alone, because data generated from Plenty of Fish (a popular dating site) suggests that January is the best time for online dating, so get out there ladies. Or, you know, stay in there! But on the computer.

The Plenty of Fish research team crunched numbers from the site's past usage (which has resulted in over 3 million relationships), and it's forecasting that January 4, 2015 at 5 p.m. EST will see more Plenty of Fish users online simultaneously than literally any time in the site's history. Since Plenty of Fish is over a decade old and holds the distinguished title of "world's largest free dating site," the "most users online ever" record is a pretty significant one to break.

While there's still time to sign up for a dating site before the alleged peak tonight, don't worry if you can't be online at that exact time — although most dating sites allow users to live chat, as a veteran of online dating I can tell you that live chatting with perfect strangers is often way more annoying than it is fruitful. You may do better to send messages via the dating platform for your prospective dates to read and respond to on their own time.

That being said, it does seem like Sundays are generally a good day for online dating across different sites, because even the busiest people tend to have some time on Sunday to whittle away on the computer in the hopes of scoring a date for the week ahead. Even if you're not chatting in real time, logging in sometime on Sundays is a good way to keep your profile in the recent activity other Sunday users are seeing, and to see for yourself a big bunch of people who are actively looking for love.

So, although it's a little too late to take full advantage of cuffing season, there's hope for your love life in 2015 yet, and the Internet can help. To avoid getting burned out, allow yourself a specific amount of time per week to browse sites, or send a particular number of messages per week, and then let the chips fall where they may. Though more hookup-oriented services like Tinder may be entertaining, you're not so likely to find a serious relationship there (indeed, the Tinder exceptions prove the rule). Consider paying for a dating site instead, which helps to screen out unserious daters.

While of course nothing in life or love is guaranteed, I'm happy to report that after a few years on and off of online dating (OkCupid in my case), I met my now-husband there (and yes, we first connected on a Sunday). Though New Year's resolution failure is normal, if you set your dating-related resolution intelligently, then 2015 might just be your most romantically-successful year yet.

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