After being out of the dating scene for 14 years, I have no earthly idea how to meet someone new.
Last years, right after the divorce, I went to eHarmony. After spending about 15 minutes filling out their survey, I was told that I was in the 20% of people they couldn’t match. :smack:
I started looking around at other sites and the ones that say they are free are free. Unless you actually want to read a profile, that is.
The one that was actually free had a lot of scary looking people.
OKCupid is completely free. It’s also completely crazy, but that may be what you need.
And if it was the site you meant in your post, well, yeah, a lot of people there are scary. I won’t deny that. But there are also a lot of very nice people there.
I don’t think OKCupid is particularly crazy – in fact, since they show you mostly the matches who live on the same planet as you, it seems less so than some other sites. I’ve met several guys from there – none of them Mr. Right yet, but all of them perfectly nice people.
I have been single for a year and tried just about every site out there… I have met a guy that hit me and tried chocking me, that was a drunk and was called to the ER to get, a number of guy that were all out for sex and nothing more. It’s depressing to think that there is no one decent out there.
I met a few guys on Match, but nothing that panned out and I quickly grew tired of paying for it. Originally went to OKCupid to take the tests for fun, wound up meeting my boyfriend there. We’ve been together two and a half years, quite happily, so it can work out just fine and dandy.
OK Cupid and plentyoffish.com are both completely free. OKC is fun and I made a few friends on there. I had the most luck with just writing personals on craigslist.
I don’t know your religious affiliations, if any, but a few years after my wife died I joined catholicsingles.com. I met my wife of 1 1/2 years there. Yes there were some weird people there too, but all in all I’d say it worked out pretty good. There’s J date if you’re jewish. I’m sure there are others for other religions.
I think just dating is asking for psychos. Online dating just gives you more opportunities to experience anonymous stalking.
Yeah, they didn’t like me either. Of course, I seem to be very difficult to match (one female friend suggested that I need a “special” woman–I decided not to delve into exactly what she meant by “special”), so maybe they just want to keep their percentages up.
I think dating, especially in the post-collegate world, is a matter of finding a matching pot and lid at the Salvation Army Store. You’ll eventually find a set that is more or less a match, although you may need to hammer away at the lid until it does fit. It may not look to pretty when you are finished, but it gets the job done, at least until it explodes due to thermal fatigue, lodging pieces of shrapnel in your face and chest, causing you to slowly and painfully bleed out.
Actually, I have no idea what the above simile even means. I was just enjoying the imagery. Now I’m going to go enjoy a glass of Irish whiskey and a Sam Peckinpah movie.
Neil Clark Warren is chairman and co-founder of the online dating service eHarmony. He is a former dean and psychologist at Fuller Theological Seminary. Warren holds a bachelor’s degree from Pepperdine University, a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D in clinical psychology from the University of Chicago in 1967.
It could be that your average doper doesn’t fit a religious profile that he has in mind.
Back when I was “looking” (I’ve got a boyfriend now), I liked OKCupid a lot. I was able to attract a decent amount of dates from it, and all the men I ended up going out with were decent, nice, fairly normal folks.
If you know what your “special” woman would be like and can articulate it, put it in your profile. Chances are there’s someone compatible with you out there, and the Internet is an excellent medium for finding fellow, er, uncommon people. At the very least, you’ll separate a lot of the chaff from the wheat.
I’ve never done the online dating thing, but I do know that my brother-in-law met his girlfriend on Geek 2 Geek (gk2gk.com he says). Maybe a theme dating site like that devoted to hobbies or personality quirks you have in common might be a good place to start.
There were once two people (whose gender & orientation were the same yet unspecified for this story) in the same city who registered on the same site at the same time.
One met a lot of great people with positive outlooks, along with a few needy clinging vines.
The other met a lot of smooth-talkers just out for what they could get, along with a few gems who really seemed to care.
To save registration fees, they’d shared the same profile.
If your average doper is an atheist (not impossible on the SDMB), that’s almost certainly true. Google “eHarmony atheist” for a bunch of articles (and lawsuits) pointing out that they won’t match atheists. Some of them have filled out the questionnaire repeatedly, varying only the religion questions, and found matches only for believers. (Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to matter what religion you believe in, so long as it’s not atheism).
I’m not their target market, being married and all (although I notice there’s a tab for me on their home page…I didn’t click it), so I haven’t tried the experiment myself.
ETA: Went back and clicked the “Married” tab, and was chided for not trying to make my marriage better, and that I’m not being fair to my children. Which is alarming, since I was unaware until then that I had any children.
I’d started filling out the match.com questionaire, but did not complete it because of the cost. I still ended up with them sending me a “match” - a “good Christian woman” seeking a “good Christian man”. I’d entered atheist as the religion choice.
Met my future wife through match.com. Still freaks me out to say that!
But keep one thing in mind - internet dating is still dating - you still have to vet your choices, and there’s a chance you may end up with someone not so great. Just think of internet dating as meeting people that way rather than at a bar or social gathering, you still have to go through all the steps of actually dating them and making sure they’re not a psycho who wants to kill you or a gold digger who just wants your money, to name two examples
I would say the free sites probably get more whackos - after all, it’s free so why not? I think Match.com has a way of reporting stalkers, though I never had to use it.
