It's been an experience.

My brother met his beautiful bride on-line. Partly for that reason and partly because I'm not sure where to meet someone romantically anymore, I signed up. As have countless many others.

Here are a few lessons from my journey so far:

• As in real life, guys prefer to approach. Against the recommendation of an on-line-dating veteran, I reached out a few times when I first signed up. I got no response or the assumption that I just wanted to hook up. Yuck. Upon inquiry, a friend said that when women message him on-line, it seems "too aggressive."

• On-line dating is tedious. Even if you aren't on-line browsing profiles, you still get winks and messages and notifications that require review or response. Just the back-and-forth of messaging takes time you'd rather spend somewhere else.

• Women get a gazillion messages. Most messages say "Hi" or "How are you?" or "I like your pictures" or are canned paragraphs because men believe getting responses is a numbers game. This makes on-line dating even more tedious. Note to men: Reference something in her profile. If you take a little time, your odds will improve.

• Dating Web sites spoil people for choice. Studies of consumer behavior show that if you give someone too many choices, she often chooses nothing. Same goes with on-line dating. After a while spent on dating sites, people are stymied by the possibility that they may make the wrong choice or that better options are out there. So they never pick one.

• First dates with people met on-line are odd. Unlike almost every other initial encounter, you know a great deal about an on-line date before you meet. In fact, you may know more about your date than you know about many friends. Yet you're still strangers.

• People are terrible at self-selling. It's hard for even fun, charismatic people to write well about themselves. And photos are static. This makes on-line dating profiles terrible indicators of someone's attractiveness. (And people who are good at selling themselves may have been doing this a while.)

Have you done on-line dating? What’s your take?