Despite our phenomenal success during the last century in understanding nature down to distance scales of 10^-18 m, the only thing we know about most of the matter in the universe is that it is "dark". I will begin by describing how we know of the existence of dark matter, how we think it was made in the very early universe, and how we search for it today. With a potential discovery of dark matter around the corner, I will emphasize an alternative approach to the one most commonly used by theorists in thinking about dark matter. Instead of studying specific models, I will highlight model-independent correlations that link results of DM searches in different channels, and robust predictions for distinctive features of possible signals. Specifically I will focus on two cases: 1- How a discovery of high energy neutrinos from dark matter annihilation in the sun, along with existing direct detection bounds can point to the existence of new particles within the reach of the LHC; 2- How unitarity considerations can be used to obtain a lower bound on the strength of a gamma ray signal arising from dark matter annihilation.