It’s official (in my world) that LinkedIn is now being used by men (and maybe women too) as a dating site.

Who could blame them? It’s a social network and it’s free. Why pay for membership when you can prowl up to your third degree connections? Send a request to connect and you’re in. You can now send messages – again, for free.

Being in the digital space and always growing my network, I normally don’t refuse any requests on LinkedIn. Hey, it’s a professional site, right? But, I’ve been getting trickles of “unexpected” messages in the last few months. An effect of being searchable on LinkedIn. You get all types but I didn’t think it would attract “lonely” men.

Here is a couple of them. Obviously, to protect their identity, I had to omit their personal details.

An engineer who surfs the web while on the job. Maybe he can’t access Facebook or dating sites on board? LinkedIn might have been the only network they allow. I don’t know. I might be wrong.

I feel for this guy. I know being in a ship for months can get a bit lonely. With him traveling all the time, it is rough to have a stable relationship. I can give him credit for not being creepy. I would say it is indeed a nice introduction. The thing is he has sent me the exact message 4 times in the last few days. He is persistent, isn’t he? If you’re curious, I haven’t responded and don’t have any plans of doing so. It’s just not the right social network to start anything of this nature.

Here is another one.

He had a typical professional profile. I was open to adding him to my network when he requested. He was a 2nd degree connection and the only way to connect was via email or get someone on your first level to be introduced to him and vice versa.

As shown on the screenshot, everything was fine until I received his response. Sweetheart?! Not professional at all. I didn’t bother responding. Since you can’t block a LinkedIn user, the only way for me was to report his message as spam.

Some say I should be flattered and maybe I might meet the man of my dreams on LinkedIn. Who knows, right? Nah. If I wanted to meet someone then there are a lot of online channels I can hop on to. At least, the expectations have been set.

Have you been experiencing the same thing? I would love to hear from the men if you’ve received some messages from women.