*Berift of love and left on the shelfie
'cause my heart’s fate rests
On my bathroom selfie. *
So I missed a comma and didn’t put his thought in quotations. That’s what an editor helps with. Sorry I didn’t hire one for my OkCupid profile.
Moving along- those are all good points about making my profile more positive. I’ll turn what I wrote as negatives into positives. I’m going out with a friend tomorrow and will have her take some pictures of me (smiling).
Will also ditch the irrelevant cat mention.
Meh, I agree. Punctuation is something for the hired help to deal with. But that’s why you’re asking for help.
No, that’s what a good writer knows how to do in the first place.
And while I understand the general rebuke that your OKCupid profile is allowed to be more loosey-goosey to reflect the free-form beauty of independent thought that is so deliciously you, I’m not sure under what rationale the same generous standards apply to your short stories.
Antigen, you are good at this. You should be a dating-profile consultant.
Hey.
And then fix the part about it being hard to date because men are being snatched up at ages 18-22. I mean, I guess *some *are, but who’s getting married at 20 besides Mormons and folks in the hills?
Anyway, not to agree with Bricker, but I gotta agree with Bricker. Claiming to be a writer, then putting forth some terrible sentences, makes one go :dubious:. I’m not even one of those anal types who makes a fuss of every comma omission, but the writing in your profile struck me as particularly bad, especially when juxtaposed with this business about your being a writer.
But since you’re ignoring that criticism, because coherent sentences are an editor’s job, I’ll just repeat myself and the advice of others and say your biggest problem is your profile is incredibly banal with a smidge of pretense thrown in. I guess now is the part where I twiddle my thumbs and await the update.
The thread I linked to, while long even when I stopped reading it 3 years ago, has lots of linked examples and comments. It can help to read others’ profiles, by both men and women.
For me, it probably would be. I wouldn’t object to dating a vegetarian casually, but I couldn’t see myself in a long-term relationship with one.
I don’t have any personal antipathy toward (non-militant) vegetarians, but I get a lot of enjoyment from eating a wide range of foods— many of which involve animals— and being free to try new dishes without fear, and I prefer to be with someone who can share those experiences with me. Someone who isn’t merely tolerating my carnivorous side while silently (if not vocally) disapproving, or hoping that she can eventually convert me to her side.
Equally true if you substitute “picky eater” for “vegetarian.” I wouldn’t divorce my wife if she suddenly developed food allergies, but at the vetting stage? Definitely a consideration.
My wife turned vegetarian after we got married. It’s occasionally annoying but she’s not militant about it and doesn’t demand that I give up bacon or anything. That might just be because she knows she’d wind up in our crawlspace if she tried anything like that.
This might be a little too enthusiastic.
I liked your profile. Of course I’m a good decade+ outside your target market and things that appeal to me now, didn’t matter as much two decades ago.
One thing that struck me in the OP was:
Is that because your expectations are to be entertained by the guy? If so, work on making that more of a two way street.
Is it just an OKcupid thing? I’ve heard anecdotal evidence from friends that the site has a LOT of guys just trolling for hook-ups. Those guys aren’t always the most shining examples of the male species.
I looked at this thread while I was lurking, because I thought I was a hopeless failure too at online dating.
When I looked at the first post in this thread I thought of a story. Somewhere there’s a fisherman who curses his luck and calls himself a worthless fisherman. “I never catch anything,” he rails to his friends, “I don’t know why I try.” And one of them says, “But I see you coming home with fish just about every day, enough to feed your family and still have enough left over to sell at the market.” “You don’t understand,” grouses the fisherman, “I never seem to catch the fish I want. And I throw my line in maybe 200 times a day, and I only catch 20, 25 fish. So I throw in my line 180 times a day for what? Nothing.” Now our fisherman’s friends and family, they see him coming home with 20 fish a day and they’re thinking, “Damn, that is one successful angler.”
So I read the headline of this thread and see “dating fails”. But the first post in this thread almost starts out “well, I’ve gone on dates, lots of dates, but I can’t seem to find the date I want.” I wouldn’t exactly call this a “fail”, to be honest. A fail is when you send out 100+ responses to ads and do not get a single reply. A fail is when you go on another site and finally get a reply and you excitedly open it only to find someone ranting about you because of your “sinful divorced nature” because you mentioned your marital status in your profile, and yeah, that was the only reply I ever got on that site too. So the first advice I’d give you is, for heaven’s sake, be realistic here.
Another thing I see in your first post is that you’re blaming the dating profile for things that happen long after the profile ceased to be part of the relationship. I would assume that, three dates into any encounter, the other person has long forgotten what the profile contained. I cannot see the other person obsessively checking your profile after date #2 and thinking, “Hmm, misplaced comma there, and she SAID she was a writer!”
Lastly, the title of your post is “Obviously I’m doing something wrong.” I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. You say that most of the guys you meet are boring or jerks. Well…I suppose that could be true of most guys, period. I suspect that if you met me you would probably think I’m boring. Had I shared your interests, though, you might not. The only thing I can think of that you’re “obviously doing wrong” is that you haven’t met the guy you’ve wanted yet.
To be honest, the only thing you could do wrong is to write a profile that described someone who wasn’t like you and so therefore attract guys who are looking for that not-you. My advice would be, put together your profile then ask someone who knows you best “Is this me?” I can’t guarantee your inbox will be full of fish (or guys) but it might have one of the fish you actually want.
I haven’t been worrying about the dating situation lately. I’ve been busy with stuff at work as we’ve had several people quit. Most unfortunate. However, I figured you guys would be pretty appalled to hear that someone calling himself a writer messaged me and all of his sentences were lowercase with some randomly capitalized words thrown in. The horror! The horror!
Ugh. Reminds me of getting a smudgy little note in grade school that said “July I love you”.
Burn him!!!
Was it e. e. cummings?
Well, it’s OK Cupid, so there probably was something in there about the thickness of his love.
ee cummings?
Well, it’s OK Cupid, so there probably was something in there about the thickness of his love.
Nailed it twice!