There are really two goals when meeting people, and they're very different:

• Meeting a signicant other.
• Meeting a set of platonic friends.

Having a significant other doesn't solve all your social problems. It's not realistic to expect to get all your emotional and intellectual needs from one person, so it is good to invest the time to develop a network of friends in addition to your significant other.

I've gone through some really, really lonely periods in my life. One thing that happens if you don't get enough social contact is that your social skills atrophy and your head gets so full of bitter, angry thoughts that when you do get a chance to talk with someone, you totally blow it. It's important to make sure you're getting enough social contact that that doesn't happen.

I generally didn't have a lot of luck with dating websites, though some people have. One problem is that people are inundated with so much choice that they become perfectionists -- once they do start dating anyone, they dump them at the tiniest sign of incompatibility.

Pictures are everything. If you don't put a picture of yourself up, almost no one will date you. Put some effort into getting a good picture of yourself up. If you're a woman, get your hair done and put on make up for a good shot, and it might be a good idea to go to a professional photographer. Anybody should include full body photos -- if your body looks good, that will have a large impact on the amount of attention you get, if your body looks bad and you don't show that, you'll have a lot of first dates that don't turn into second dates.

There's a book "Data: A Love Story" by a woman who claims to have "hacked" online dating. It's not worth reading -- I disagreed with all her advice about what to say on your profile, and her advice on how a woman should have her picture taken is "Get your hair done, and show some cleavage". Like, duh, that's so obvious that you don't need to read a book to find it out. Her only advice to men is "Mention your occupation if it's a good one, don't be bald, and don't be in debt.".

There's another book, "Dataclysm", by someone who worked for a major dating site and did a lot of analysis of the data gathered by the website. Unfortunately, the book contains almost no dating advice whatsoever -- the author is just interested in talking about politics for the whole book, so it's not worth reading for dating insights.

There is a dating website specifically for mentally ill people, https://www.nolongerlonely.com. Unlike most dating websites, it asks people to disclose their height and weight, but most of the people on it don't have pictures up.

Dating anyone you work with is a terrible idea. If you're a male heterosexual, you are the one who is expected to make advances, and there really is no way to make an advance on anyone you work with without potentially having the object of your affection file a harrassment claim with HR. It's not worth it.

A lot of people make a lot of their friends through work, but if your job goes downhill, your work friends will tend to keep their distance. It's good to have work friends, but It's really desirable to have friends completely unrelated to your job.

I never got bars to work as a place to socialize. To begin with, they usually have very loud music playing so you can't have a decent conversation.

At one point I was going to a bar with my scuba diving buddies every week, and I'd dance with girls. At one point I asked a girl I had danced with many times to a concert, and once I got her in the car on the way to the concert, I couldn't get her to talk on the way there or back (it was 45 minutes each way). You really can't tell if you have anything in common with people if you can't talk with them.

In a lot of bars people talk about professional sports all the time, but I'm not interested in professional sports, so that's a non-starter with me.

In most heterosexual dancing bars, men greatly outnumber women. There are more women early in the evening, and the later it gets, the fewer and fewer women are left.

If you're a male heterosexual and you want to go to bars to dance, it helps a lot to have male friends with you, so that if you ask a woman to dance and she refuses, you can go back and talk to your male friends and be treated like a human being for a few minutes to recover your self-esteem enough to approach someone else. Guys try pretty hard to arrange it so they can ask women to dance in such a way that if the woman refuses them, the other women won't see it.

Women don't like standing alone because they feel like losers if they stand alone for a long time without being asked to dance. So they show up in groups. Men feel a woman is less likely to agree to dance with him in front of all her friends. If women are in a group and a guy asks one of them to dance and she refuses, he'll probably figure his chances of anyone else in her group agreeing to dance with him later are shot.

One shrink told me that if you socialize in bars, you're likely to meet alcoholics.

I found clubs to be the best way to make friends, both platonic and romantic, outside work.

If you join a club and go back repeatedly, then hopefully you'll develop friendships with some of the people.

Most clubs are based on some activity, and some activities are more competitive than others. If a club is about some competitive activity and you're not very good at it, the people in the club won't respect you very much.

The meetup.com website is for organizing clubs. The organizer pays a fee of about $15 per month to create a group, and members usually join the group for free. A city of a million people should have at least a dozen meetup groups in it, New York City has at least a thousand. The organizer will post an activity at a time, date, and place in the future, with a description of what will take place at the event, and people who want to come will RSVP. The members usually have pictures of themselves, so when you're deciding whether to come to an event, you can look at the list of the people who have RSVP'ed and decide if you want to go and meet those people.

There is no limit to how many meetup groups you can join -- I currently belong to 140 of them. Most of them I've never been to. The only problem with belonging to a lot of meetups is that you get a lot of email about upcoming events.

If you get involved with a club, it can be a good idea to volunteer to be part of the club's leadership. If you can handle the responsibilities of whatever role you take on, this gives you influence in the club. Generally, in volunteer organizations, the people who do the most work get to make all the rules.

Hikes are a great, non-competitive way to meet people. Usually you have at least a dozen people on a hike, and they can't all walk in one group so they walk along in groups of two or three people and you can get to know each other one-on-one. Usually you don't walk with the same person for the whole hike, but get to know several people.

There are meetup groups that do hikes, and other organizations include the Sierra Singles in many cities and the Appalation Mountain Club in the US northeast. Some hiking groups are very serious and require people to first go on introductory hikes for short distances to show that they can keep up before being allowed to sign up for more ambitious hikes. Some groups also require everybody to wear hiking boots.

For some reason, the vast majority of people who show up on hikes are female.

The further a hike goes, the more attractive and fit will be the people who show up.