A friend of mine just moved to the East Coast and she’s joining Match.com to meet new people. So my question to you is, have you ever tried this and what were your experiences?
I’ve tried it. I’ve met a couple interesting people, but nothing lasting, net yet anyway. It delivers all that really says it will, but tell your friend to keep her expectations reasonable. It’s not a magic bullet. And I’m told that women on there can get absolutely swamped with messages.
Thanks for the heads up, Robot Arm. I am thinking of joining as well, but I want to know what I’m getting into! I’m 25 and female and not looking for stalkers… =)
Who said anything about stalkers? As near as I can tell, it’s a pretty good cross section of people, except that they’re smart and well-to-do enough to get on the 'net (which isn’t even much of a hurdle anymore). I don’t think there’s anything in the system to cause it to channel more than its fair share of obsessive lunatics. You’d be just as likely to pick up a stalker in the grocery store.
Besides which, the security on the site is pretty good. It re-routes e-mails anonymously, so no one will even know your name unless you tell them.
Welcome to the boards. And be careful around here, especially if someone should casually ask which grocery store you go to.
I met my wife through a dating agency. Very happily married, even if I also acquired a seventeen pound step-cat. If I had not met her, I’d say the money was wasted. Since I did, it was the best £400 I’ve ever spent.
But I met a few dogs and acquired some great anecdotes along the way.
If Lupert Greystreak Shadow Plum Divine is reading this, I love you too, really!
I used Yahoo! Personals about a year ago. I met a great girl. Flash forward one year… She moved in with me this weekend and the wedding is next Spring. So, yeah, I’d say it worked out pretty good for me. Your milage may vary.
I’ve browsed a few and met a wonderful man on yahoo and we’ve been together about a year and a half–just moved in together recently and will be buying a house soon.
As long as you’re careful, the Internet can be a very safe way to meet people. And if you’re female, the odds are definitely stacked in your favor!
I put up a pic in date.com and got responses from ladies in the Phillipines and Khazakstan. Can you say Green Card?
Haven’t tried Match.com, but friends tell me it’s pretty good, because you can post a quite detailed profile, so you get a better idea of who the person is before meeting in person. One friend met his girlfriend of 18 months there, and he’s pretty happy with the whole thing.
Sure, put match.com in the search box, this should bring up some real interesting old topics but I just look at the women
there, cause Im in a pretty small city (15000) people & you kinda know some of them.
I tried Match.com and it was a waste of time. Nerve.com (which participates in a pool of personals with Salon, the Onion and others) has brought much more success my way, including a nice girl I’ve gone out with three times thus far.
The interesting thing about Match.com is that you can specify how high of an income you’re looking for in a prospective partner.
If you go through and look at the ads that some of the very attractive women place, most of the time they put a high income level under their requirements- $75,000 +, $100,000 +, $150,000 + per year.
My wife and I met via her responding to my Match.Com ad. I’d had only one other response in about a year and a half, but I was looking for quality rather than quantity anyway.
I wholeheartedly recommend personal ads generally, and on-line ads in particular to anyone who really thinks they know what they’re looking for in a companion, be that a long-term relationship/marriage or cheap sweaty sex (or even both ). Meeting through an ad and getting acquainted via correspondence can help set the right tone of openness, and expedite the initial get-acquainted process, without a lot of hesitance and obfuscation (I wonder if she’s available/interested? I don’t want to seem too interested… etc.).
Photos are the rule with ads now, rather than the exception, and that overcomes pretty much the only serious drawback I ever found with personal ads. My wife and I met 6 years ago, before scanners and webcams became so common. We lucked out in terms of physical compatibility, but I’d had numerous prior disappointments (and, I suppose, caused a few as well).
I certainly don’t think there’s anything more dangerous about meeting through an ad than there is meeting through any other means, unless you only ever date people who you or your family know very well beforehand, and who since the 19th century can say that?
I’ve never tried ‘Match.com’, but I have used ‘Yahoo personals’ and have mixed opinions about it. This was when I was 24 (two years ago) as a rebound measure after a break up of a serious relationship.
I was very specific in my add, looking for a nice computer game lover like myself, a plus if he was a Buffy fan who liked the outdoors. I also wrote that I was looking specifically for the eventuality of a long term relationship or serious friendship, mentioned I didn’t like anything that involved playing games and that I was not into one night stands etc…
I met many nice men of all walks of life and in many ways it was fun!
But…it was the married men who annoyed me. The married men who would icq/yahoo messanger me with propositions for one night stands…looking for the exact opposite of what I had listed.
I consider cheating with an older man to be ‘playing games’ with everyone involved…(I specifically left the age/income open because personality was my driving factor…but for some reason the fact that EVERY married man who propositioned me was at least 10/15/20 years older bothered me.)
Just something to warn you of, but maybe it’s just that way in Minnesota…
Viv
My wife and I met through Match.com, but this was several years ago, when they were still basically a free service (Internet advertising! ha ha ha). So I have no idea what value, if any, our success story might have with respect to Match.com’s current service.
You want a video gaming Buffy fan that likes the outdoors? Something tells me you should’ve visited the SDMB a lot sooner.
I can’t understand why any woman would put an income requirement up. It’s horrible and will only encourage people to lie anyway!
I think I’m going to try it, since you all gave really good advice. But now I’m afraid of going to the grocery store because I just might pick up a stalker! =D
And don’t worry Anise, I won’t put an income requirement up. I’m with Vivien on this one, I’m looking for personality and not one-night stands.
I signed up and got hit by a nice little scam. The steps:
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Received message from guy via match.com. Town was local. Message said something like “Hi, I’m posting from my friend Tom’s account because I’m too cheap to sign up. <then a few personal details>. Send me mail at address xxx@yyy.com if you’re interested.”
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I responded to message, because, hey, what the hell.
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Got a message back which said “Thanks for the mail, etc, here’s my personal web page, which has a few snapshots of me.”
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I click on the web link, which brings me to a page that has some clothed pictures of a girl, and an AdultCheck link to some “naughty adult pictures” of her. Which wanted my credit-card number.
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I forward everything to match.com. Losers.
It was a very well done scam. Looking back, both notes were very broadly worded, so they could apply to almost anyone. They were very well written as well, with just the right level of hesitation and wariness. The idea of being too cheap too sign-up, so using your friend’s account was a very cute angle too, since it could get you out of their double blind e-mail system really quickly. The guy who sent the first message was local to me, about 2 towns over. (Which I am still impressed with, techically.)
But the really amazing thing was that I can’t believe anyone would fall for it. All this effort, and once they get you to click onto the webpage, who would actually pay? Are some people that stupid? I was just pissed.
So just watch out.
(insert long, weary sigh here)
Yeah, I had to deal with a bunch of those when I had a personal ad on Yahoo, except the link to the website was usually at the bottom of the initial response, (“click here to see a few pictures of me”), so I didn’t have to send an email to discover it was a scam.
I feel your pain.
Those replies made me feel like dirt. Here I was, all excited about getting a reply to my ad, and it turned out to be a trap to get me to sign up for some sleazy porn site.
What really got my goat was that whoever was responsible for the scam went out of his way to make the fake respondent sound “real”. I can understande making her into the “typical” male fantasy (“I have blonde hair, blue eyes, my measurements are 36C-22-35, and I love to suck dick”), since that would be more likely to attract the kind of man who’d be willing to fork over 20 bucks for porn access, but most of the fake replies sounded like they were written by charming, intelligent women who were interested in a real relationship rather than sex.
It seems counterproductive to go through all that trouble to fool me into visiting a porn site when all I’m going to do is get pissed off when I discover it’s a trap. Oh wait – I’m a man, and everybody knows that once you show a man a few nekkid pictures, his eyes will glaze over and he’ll hand over his life savings. :rolleyes: