Valentine’s Day can be an uncomfortable reminder to many singles that they are missing out on an important part of life–romantic love. Online dating services often see the most traffic in the period just after January’s New Year’s Resolutions have kicked in and leading up to Valentine’s Day.

I got the chance to speak with Trish McDermott. Trish was apart of the team that launched Match.com back in 1995-basically she created online dating. Today she’s a dating coach at Meetopolis (www.meetopolis.net). Meetopolis is like the Kayak of online dating, allowing singles to see the dating profiles of potential matches from many different sites, all in one place.

Here Trish shares The Valentine’s Day Survival Kit For Singles…

For singles, staking your own claim to a piece of Valentine’s Day is a great way to move past any sadness or awkwardness you may feel. You do this by making February 14th about giving, rather than receiving, love, affection, and attention. Giving makes you feel good. It’s a reminder that with small, kind gestures you can make a difference in someone’s life.

Look around. It’s likely that there are many ways you can give a little love and attention to others on February 14th.

• Send your mom flowers.
• Bake cookies, or buy chocolates, and bring them to a local nursing home.
• Volunteer to help out at your child’s school Valentine’s Day party.
• Pass out chocolates at your office.
• Put Valentine’s Day cards in your friends’ mailboxes.
• Call your father, just to say hello.
• Give your bank teller, or bus driver, or someone who provides a service to you a gift card from your local coffee shop.
• Volunteer at a soup kitchen and help feed people hungry for so much more than romance this Valentine’s Day.
• Post a fun, appreciative or inspirational message to your friends and family who follow you on Facebook.
• Call someone you know is struggling and invite them over for a home-cooked meal.

If you approach Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to give a little love to your community, friends, family, and even total strangers, you won’t need to focus on the fact that you are without a significant other over the holiday.

It’s also good to understand the numbers because when we struggle without dating lives, especially around Valentine’s Day, it sometimes feels like we’re the only person not getting dating and romance right.

It can be almost impossible to avoid the barrage of Valentine’s season media reminders that while you are dateless, so many others have deeply loving romantic relationships. There are 98 million single adults in the US. If you’re dateless on Valentine’s Day, you’re in some very good company. You are not a romantic anomaly.

Much of the coveted romantic moments we are bombarded with in February, like the look of adoration in her eyes as she opens the diamond necklace he so lovingly hands her, are really just media-manufactured images of romantic love.  These might seem unattainable for some, even for those who do have a romantic relationship but never get that adoring look. It’s important to remember that these images exist to sell products.

Real love happens in life’s trenches, the day-to-day moments in the lives of ordinary people, and single people experience it too.  Kids don’t see Valentine’s Day as a holiday that excludes them because they don’t have romantic love in their lives. For them Valentine’s Day is about acknowledging friendships by exchanging cards or candy. They’re thrilled and excited and don’t use the holiday to beat up on themselves for lack of true love.  We should follow their lead.

I’ve watched millions and millions of singles search for love. This search can often be a long, tough, discouraging experience. Finding romantic love is often a process of failing one’s way to success. The trick is to stay in the game, even after an awkward, discouraging or disappointing experience. When it comes to finding love, you have to be in it win it. A good way to be in it on February 14th is to stop looking for love and to start giving some love away.

Have fun on Valentine’s Day. Play. Laugh. Feel good. Spend the evening with dear friends, Play with babies. Help out some elderly people in your town. Have dinner with your family.  Then, on February 15, ask someone out, put your profile on a dating site, take a risk and swipe right on someone.

And buy your chocolates on the 15th too – they’re half price!