The balance of approaching your smoking and drinking preferences for online dating

To help find someone you would enjoy dating, how restrictive should you be when choosing your desired smoking and drinking habits for your matches?

The tough part may be making the decision that your ideal mate has similar smoking and drinking habits to you.  Can you see a future with someone who smokes if you are a non-smoker?  If not, you have to be discerning with your matching choices.

Approach your smoking and drinking preferences just as you would the other lifestyle settings, including age, children at home, religious affiliation, higher education, etc.  Whom do you really want to connect with? Just as you may desire someone who has a college education or does not have children at home yet, it's even more important to be heavily matching with smoking and drinking habits because they can last a lifetime.  Selecting a high preference for someone who never smokes is really important if you want to filter out men or women who "smoke socially" or "once a week".

Yes, the number of matches you receive will be smaller, but it will save time and energy spent to view and close those matches who don't match your lifestyle desires to begin with.  The "non-compatibles" you filter out will never contact you, because you've made the conscious choice to pin down your lifestyle preferences.

eHarmony, one of the leaders in online dating, tells us that choosing a preference for someone who never smokes is too restrictive.  That's a little strange, considering that in 2011. only 21.6% of adult men and 16.5% of adult women were smokers.  Could this point to online dating have a disproportionate amount of people who smoke?  Is eHarmony trying to level the playing field for people who smoke so that they are not filtered out of non-smokers search results?

Today I had to make a conscious choice to be more restrictive with my matches on their drinking habits.  I was raised in a family where both my mom and dad abstained from alcohol.  I never saw a drink in the house and people did not bring alcohol into our home. 

It's important to me to continue this legacy with my future family to an extent.  My ideal mate would rarely drink (if at all), not have a habit of drinking more than one drink alone, and hopefully recognize that regular alcohol intake can be a stumbling block to spiritual and physical health.