Advice for people who are using online match making services.

The BBQ Pit
1

I can understand you being apprehensive about putting your picture on your profile, but for fucks sake you need to have a VERY descriptive write up if you are going to do that. These people who don’t put a picture up and write a whole page about the type of person THEY are looking for sure aren’t giving others much to work with.

“Hi. I have 2 kids who are important to me and I want to be swept off my feet. I am tired of guys who are immature and have no direction in life. I want to be taken care of blah blah blah…”

Then they will have no picture. WTF? I know jack shit about you AND I don’t know what you look like? Goodbye.

The other one that irks me are the ladies who obviously fit the description “A few extra pounds” or “Big and Beautiful” but they will check “Average” or “Curvy”. Why go online to find someone and then lie in your profile? Especially when you have a picture that contradicts how you describe yourself? I am not talking about the women who are on the cusp of being big. I am mean the ones who are OBVIOUSLY large. They waste my time when I search with the filter to see women who meet my preferences. If you were black you wouldn’t lie and say you were white, so why lie now?

Also, if you are going to go thru the trouble of putting a picture online, at least get a scanner or a digital camera. Don’t bother putting one picture that you took of yourself in the dark with your 6 year old webcam. It’s especially irritating when the girl is possibly good looking, but you can’t tell for sure.
And finally, ladies, stop emailing me about how we should get together when my profile CLEARLY says I am looking for someone within 25 miles of my town and you live on the other side of the country. I don’t email women whose preferrences I don’t fit, so don’t do it to me.
Anyway, this online thing I am trying is frustrating me right now. I have a feeling that 80% of the women on these things have signed up for the “free” accounts and can’t actually email you anyway so you are firing off emails to women that can’t respond even if they want to. (BTW, I know there are alot of scammers on these things that try to get you redirected to porno sites. You can pick them out by their pictures and write up if you use your brain.)
BLECH!

2

I found my ex-wife’s profile on a match making service. They had a section where you chose your body type, and she chose ‘a few extra pounds’, which is one step above ‘average’. I think that, at 5’6" and 300+ lbs., she probably should have chosen one of the two choices farther to the ‘heavy’ side of the scale than ‘a few extra pounds’.

Thing is, the pics she uses are shoulders and up, and she does not look overweight at all in them. Some guy could end up seriously misled.

3

I can’t speak for other women, but in the atmosphere of today’s media blitz, which tells women that unless they are a size 2 or less, that they are grossly obese, we’re afraid that if we DID put a few extra pounds, that the men on the receiving end of our posts will automatically translate “A Few Extra Pounds” as “Can Give King Kong a Run for His Money”.

I do need to lose a few pounds, but when I used to use the online match service, I didn’t put ANYTHING in the “weight” column, I just let my pic speak for itself because I KNEW that too many men reading “a few extra pounds” had the tendency to translate it as “HUGELY FAT”.

If on a site that required something in the weight column, I’d put average rather than “a few extra pounds” because of the way that would be translated by the men reading the ad.

There were a few other threads in recent months in this forum that explained other reasons why people check “average” having to do with how the site matching engines worked. I can’t remember the thread titles but I think they both had “match.com” or something like that in the title.

You might find some enlightening reading there. Good luck with your search for Ms Right.

4

I went with my friend to meet 2 different girls he met online. These were a few years apart and I’ve been with him to meet other girls, but these are the two that are relevent here.

Both said “about average” in their profiles.

One had a headshot that made her look very pretty. She must have taken about 100 pictures to get that one good one because she did not have a pretty face. She also weighed, according to her cousin who we later talked to, 260lbs.

The other girl didn’t have a pic, but according to my friend “she sounded hot on the phone” and claimed to be hot. When he asked her for clarification on “Average”, because he had been burned in the past, she said “well, I’m not a whale but I’m not a toothpick either.” She weighed over 300lbs.

To think that putting “a few extra pounds” would limit your responses is just ignorant. A LOT of guys like thick girls. I don’t think even putting heavyset would limit your responses. There’s someone out there for everybody. Lying up front is going to make it a lot harder for you to find that someone though.

5

I met a girl online a few years ago that sent me a pic of herself…her high school pic, that is. Trouble is, between high school and graduating from college, she went from 130 lbs. to over 230 lbs. and neglected to tell me about it until much later in our communication. I might have even given it a shot if she had been honest with me from the get-go, but because she essentially lied to me I said bye-bye.

6

Some men don’t. Obviously you’re not one of them, but too MANY do. Note I didn’t say “all”.

Also, if you’d note where I mentioned how the matching search engines in the various sites work (and suggested going to the other threads where 'puter geeks had explained this in more technical terms), regarding how the site itself narrows down your prospects depending upon what you put in your profile (not just weight either, read where a TON of guys complain about the whole height issue).

I had one guy who was DESPARATELY afraid of ending up with what he phrased as a girl who’d taken her pics “100 pounds ago”. So finally I sent him some pics of me teaching one of my dance classes. The whole “you need to meet my stringent weight/height/looks standards before I’ll even waste 10 minutes to have a cup of coffee with you” attitude is REALLY prevelant, and REALLY sucks (and YES, I know it does happen to both sides, it just appears as if society places MORE of this demand on women).

Even when we’re not fat, we HATE when a man places so much damn emphasis on the whole weight issue. You feel not like a person meeting another person, but like a brood mare having her teeth measured or something.

7

Any chance you could pose as someone else and see what you can draw out of her? Now that would be entertaining.

8

A lot of things really suck in life. Are you saying you’d rather lie to get one of these guys than tell the truth to weed them out?

9

What an incredible leap of illogic, and failure to read my WHOLE post.

At any rate, No, that’s NOT what I’m saying. If you’d read my post you’d have seen that I sent my pic to prospective dates so that they could see for themselves if they considered me “acceptable” (regardless of which category I’d put).

So no, I didn’t lie, I just didn’t agree with the term “a few extra pounds” becaus of it’s tendency to be open to vast misinterpretation for too many of the readers of that phrase. And I no longer use the match.com type sites because none of the men I met were what I was looking for, and after going through several dozen of these “email, then phone calls, then meeting for coffee” things, and meeting nothing but duds, I got tired of it and just quit dating altogether.

Again, I pointed you in the direction of the other two threads on this subject, where people with a far better grasp of the workings of the match sites than I, have posted explanations on how the search and matching engines in those sites work against people.

In order to have a greater pool from which to choose, many people (I did use myself as a brief example, but was not talking JUST of myself I was speaking of the overall reasons), do put in profile choices that will get them the greater number of “hits”.

And again, I explained that the reasons that many women wouldn’t choose “a few extra pounds” is because too many of those reading those words see “HUGELY OBESE”.

I’m am WELL aware that there are women who put “a few extra pounds” who really ARE morbidly obese (and possibly in denial). But they have to deal with the consequences when they show up in a size 20 instead of a size 10 or 12.

JUST as there are men who put 6’ when really they BARELY scrape 5’10" and so on.

If two people are right for each other, they’re right for each other, and no weight or lack thereof is going to somehow “trick” the other person into dating and marrying them if they’re not a potential “the one”.

The match.com type sites are for MEETING. It’s not as if the other person is somehow being bilked out of anything if the person doesn’t meet their expectations. And they can fail to meet the other person’s expectations in ways other than weight, that they certainly hadn’t planned on purpose, through their profile or otherwise.

For all you know, the person could look like a million bucks, and yet have a personality that is NOTHING like what you (collective you) could ever live with, but yet their profile seemed otherwise, (when I was going this route, that happened to me a LOT).

At any rate, my previous posts were in trying to answer the OPs question, which was “why do they do this”. The reasons I’ve posted ARE some of the reasons women do this. I didn’t say they were okay, just what they were.

He asked for reasons, I gave them. YOU are the one taking them as if they are justifications.

10

:confused:

Over-reacting and leaping to wrong conclusions much?

11

IMHO **CanvasShoes ** has carefully explained her point, two times, and you’re not getting it.

12

I met my bf on an online personals site, and he had put “a few extra pounds” (or the equivalent) on his ad. He also had pics of himself, but both were from far away, so it was hard to tell what he really looked like. I was expecting him to be overweight when we met, but from my perspective I’d say he was “average”, since when I see “a few extra pounds”, the connotation (at least to me), is “well, really I’m just plain fat”.
He had the opposite experience, on a date with a girl he met before he met me. Her pics made her look thinner than she was, and she had checked “average” (I think?), so he was expecting just that…however, he estimated that she must have been about 250lbs or so (i’m not sure how tall she was, but he’s 5’7", and she was a few inches shorter than him). For the record, I put “voluptuous” and I’m no 250, I actually AM curvy :slight_smile:

Regardless of what this phrase is supposed to mean, most people are turned off by it because of the connotations, so people are hesitant to use it. This doesn’t excuse the people who outright lie (i.e., the 300+ lb “average” woman), but I think it explains why people who are only literally only a few pounds overweight tend to stick with “average”.

13

IM-nsh-O you and CanvasShoes both missed my point, expect you didn’t waste nearly as much time and effort missing it as she did.

I took one sentence and said:

She said that attitude sucks and I said it’s better to weed out the people with that attitude than lie to get near them.

I don’t understand why you guys can’t comprehend this.

14

Just for the record, I have always been some degree of overweight-to-obese. In my single and looking days, I made it a practice to always overstate my weight and lack of attractiveness. My goal was elicit a “Wow, you are much more attractive than I thought you’d be!” reaction, rather than the reverse. And I always did.

Word to the wise.

15

Speak for yourself. I know what physical characteristics I like in a potential romantic interest and, quite frankly, I don’t want to pursue such a relationship with someone whose body is a turn-off to me. I expect the same in someone looking to date me (if I were single, of course). If you’re looking for a woman who is a size two, I’m not going to cut it. I know this and wouldn’t want to waste my time dating someone who isn’t physically attracted to me. Now if someone were looking to make a new friend, I could agree with your statement.

I’m squarely with the OP on this one. If you’re fat, you’re fat. Don’t lie. You KNOW you’re fat, for fuck’s sake. There are plenty of men who don’t care. If you lie, you’re just asking to get your feelings hurt. Why on earth would anyone want to put themselves through that?

16

I don’t disagree with that, however, when it’s the first and foremost thing out of your potential datees mouth, and then he goes on to reiterate ad nauseum all the ways in which he hates “fat chicks”. It’s ridiculous. And THAT is the sort of attitude to which I was referring.

Sorry, I disagree. As I said, “Fat” is a subjective word. ESPECIALLY in this day and age of size zero lollypop heads that the media forces down our throats as the ONLY acceptable standard of beauty.

To some men a size 10 (my size, and for reference one size larger than Cindy Crawford, who is an 8, the size I’m WORKING toward) is fine and dandy, sexy even. To others (a pretty big number), anything over a size 2 is “too big for my taste” even though they reallly don’t know from looking at a woman what size/weight she is, just what they “like”. And to still others, for whom the whole sizing procedures of the female garment industry is a mystery, they hear a scale weight and think “OOOHhhH HUGE” when in reality that person is very fit and small.

I just very much dislike the wording and easily misinterpreted words of these profiles. But whatever, like I said, 20 or so dud dates later (not including many phone calls and emails from men I DIDN’T date), I just gave up.

17

I think weight is rather silly to judge someone on in terms of looks. Someone can be heavy and carry the weight very well; personally I’m not really worried about some number or dress size. But then again, a woman’s weight is not a dealbreaker for me- and the fact is that women are more likely to scrutinize me over my looks.

Maybe dating will get easier as I get older and more financially independent, and seek out like-minded women who are more interested in the person behind all the veneer. :frowning:

18

The point that you’ve repeatedly missed is that someone putting down “a few extra pounds” on match.com when they are many extra pounds overweight is not, in fact, lying. Why? Because everyone on these sites knows what “a few extra pounds” means or implies, even if it’s not technically accurate.

If a completely independent arbitrator went through all of the profiles on these sites and accurately labelled everyone’s body type, 95% of them would shift 1 rung down the ladder. But 99.9% of the people reading the profiles would still know what body type is being described. It is the very definition of “when in Rome…”

19

Anyone seen Esquire magazine’s “Brutally Honest Personals”? Now that’s the way personal ads ought to be… :stuck_out_tongue:

20

I don’t know, I’m OTD (older than dirt :D) and dating still sucks.

In all fairnes though, that is probably due in part to the “hard act to follow” (no pun intended), that my former nearly perfect boyfriend left in his wake.