Okay, I’ve basically stuck with spring street personals for a few years now, and am sick of it. I haven’t gotten a decent date out of it for a while, and I keep seeing the same old profiles posted again and again and again (and yes, I realize other folks are likewise looking at my profile and saying “Not him again.”) Furthermore, I’m getting annoyed at the way they keep knocking me over the head to cough up money to them - “pay an exorbitant subscription fee for these useless, unhelpful features…” blah, blah, blah - which wouldn’t bother me half as much if the site wasn’t already clogged full of sidebar ads. I want to start posting on a new dating site. Can anybody reccomend one?
If it helps, I can tell you I’m a gay guy, mid-(soon to be late) 30s, sober, professional, blah, blah, blah. I’m not looking to just hook up, or just a fuck buddy. I’m aiming at having a dating someone, with the possiblity of a relationship.
I’d prefer not to have to shell out bucks for the ‘priviledge’ of using the site. (A fee for something like the Straight Dope, I’ll pay for that. But frankly, after some of the dates I’d been on because of ‘Spring Street’, I rather think they owe ME some money.) The sites for pay also tend to be jammed full of unnecessary junk that does nothing but make their site look more complicated, and amazingly crash and freeze up a lot more than free sites.
I haven’t seen a whole bunch of gay guys on OKCupid, especially not out of the 18-21 range. (I’m assuming you aren’t looking for a “child bride” situation!) For some reason, bi guys are few and far between, too. You could look at that as “there won’t be much competition,” too, if you like; but there’s the facts.
But it’s free as far as cash (it would take a bit of time to fill out a profile and such, of course).
I’m assuming you’re already trying the method where you hang out with friends of a similar age who have a large social circle and who might be willing to set you up with someone?
The last thing I’ll mention is something I’ve told my boyfriends-- I went looking for websites with articles about men who knit and appropriate patterns (because, for instance, my sock pattern book has infants’, children’s, women’s medium, and “women’s large/men’s medium” which I have to add increases to so I can fit my foot in it) and discovered that knitting is becoming so popular among men that even straight men are trying it! (In other words, 4 out of 5 men who knit don’t care if it attracts chicks or not.)
If you don’t like knitting, perhaps there are things that also attract a higher proportion of gay men that you would like?
Well, I have do hang out with friends of a similar age, and have a large social circle, but have someone set me up? Hah! Nobody I know is rushing to play match-maker (except for themselves, perhaps).
I don’t have the patience to knit anything either. And frankly, it’s not something that interests me. (Nothing against guys who do it, mind you, it just doesn’t thrill me.)
OkCupid seems like the only free site worth using. Its members are skewed towards younger people, but since you live in a big city, there may be enough users in your demographic.
The only site I managed to meet anyone interesting was eHarmony, but I don’t think they have a service for gays. (And I probably wouldn’t have used their service if I knew that.) They’re also rather expensive.
You didn’t say whether or not you tried gay dot com. I don’t think you have to be a paying member to get into the chat rooms, but you do if you want to see anything besides another member’s primary picture. There are bots in the chat room, which is a minor annoyance, but you can put them on ignore or put “please have a detailed profile before chatting” in your chat bio. It looks like there are well over 3000 people online in NY.
I just logged on and noticed they are having a half price membership sale ($43 for a year).
For whatever reason, back when I was trying to date, Match.com did nothing for me; not one response out of countless messages. Now, I’m a hetro guy and I assume the system is saturated with the same; it might be a different experience for someone flying a different flag.
eHarmony didn’t like me, and I’d probably be classified as a moderate social liberal-type; it seems to skew toward socially conservative, religious, marriage-oriented clients. Plus, the people in their ads just grate on me like a Dremel tool at high speed; I want to take their doe-eyed, glutenous newlyweds and run them through an acid bath.
Nerve Personals were run by Spring Street; assuming they haven’t switched services, they’ll be on the same system as the rest of the SS services (personals.fark.com, personals.theonion.com, et cetera). I used Spring Street for a while with very modest (some would say discouraging) response and essentially no result.
I met my man on OKCupid, so anytime someone asks about dating sites I have to chime in and say that this one’s great. I like that you can answer a ton of questions and also specify what you’d like your ideal match to be answering. Obviously, it’s not perfect, but it can help you find a couple of decent needles in the haystack.
I’ll also recommend OKCupid, though I doubt there’s a lack of gay men so much as a lack of men over 35. However, I just did a quick search for gay men between the ages of 35-45 living within 20 miles of NYC (sorted randomly, not by match percentage), and got 16 results. Might be worth setting up a profile just to do a search, since it’s all free and everything.
I have completely soured on Match since discovering that you can’t even find out who sent you a message without being a paying member. I can understand having to be a member before being allowed to reply to a message, but I miss the good old days when you could get messages for free.
I don’t think that that’s correct. I was on match and cancelled my subscription months ago. I got an email from someone in mid-December with a link to their profile. I didn’t even realize that my profile was still available. I ended up having to go through a major pain in the ass to disappear my profile so no one else would email me.
When/if you do-- a while back, some of us decided to mark each other as “friends” so we’d share a network of known people-- drop me a message (to user: nhinx) and I’ll add you, if you want. (I’d have emailed this to you, but can’t.)
Anyhow, it’s a darn shame you don’t live here locally; you’ve got a job, a car, you’re obviously smart, and not neurotic (or at least you hide it well) and that makes you a PRIME candidate. For, uh, taking home to meet Momma or something.
Sometimes I wish dating sites had a review kind of section, where you could match people up and then the people you matched could rate your ability to judge compatibility. THAT would be fun!
Actually, the two people I met through eHarmony were both fairly liberal. Even though the service was started by an evangelical Christian, I think they’ve run a fairly neutral ad campaign. I seem to recall they even advertised on Air America Radio (though I may be wrong about that).
I’d vote to bypass eHarmony. All I discovered (in the past four months) are guys who either would rather communicate through emails (instead of actually meeting), or won’t cough up the money to communicate at all (you get matched, then it never goes any further because they don’t have an actual membership).
It is correct. I don’t know how our experiences wound up being different, because I also cancelled my subscription months ago, but when I got the message notification e-mail the URL sent me to a page that said:
I know this is exactly what it said, because it’s the same page I still get when I log into my account and try to look at my in-box.
Again, our experiences differ: all I had to do to hide my profile was click a link on the “My Profile” page. Making it visible again would be just as simple.
Spring Street takes profiles written for some of its websites and posts them on other websites to boost traffic. I signed up for Fark personals and found my exact profile had been copy/pasted onto another website that I had never signed up for and never would. The only reason I found it was because they kept my log in name exactly the same. I don’t trust any of their services.
That’s really weird. I just checked again and I can search profiles and see the profile from the lady who emailed me. I can send her a canned “no thanks” response but can’t send her an email. I wonder what’s up with that.
Maybe it’s a demographic thing and they think that they know what it takes to make it more likely for different groups to re-up. Doing it “your way” makes no sense at all. If they told me that someone wanted to meet me but I couldn’t see a profile, there is no way that I would fork out another $30. If I could see the profile and was very interested, I might pay to write to them.
The reason for this difference is because I was a dumbshit and it took me a while to find the way to do it.