Fucking Plenty of Fish

[billfish678]

@Dung_Beetle

Well, I don’t have a Facebook account, so all I get is your name and picture.

Me too.

There is NO way in hell I’d ever date that guy or have sex with him though.

Then again I am a straight male

All kidding aside, he looks pretty good to me (well besides the fact it looks to me that he likes to roost like a bat sometimes) and seems to be a reasonable poster here so he is fairly dateable on any given dateable scale.

During these desperate times I am reminded of one of our other posters. IIRC he went through some LONG and detailed questionaire on a big name dating site ( I think it took and hour or two to finish…maybe match dot com ).

He thought he was fairly normal…and to be honest I thought he was pretty reasonable here on the Dope…the site came back and said he was “unmatchable”.

Ouch.

[Malthus]

@Wesley_Clark

Another unpleasant side effect of HR getting tons and tons of applications is that they can afford to become extremely picky and demanding. That is a natural consequence of it being an employers market. You can demand people be trained in a wide range of skills, have advanced education, total loyalty and only offer them $10/hr in exchange for it. Then you can get upset because ‘there are no good applicants left’ who are willing to put in the work in exchange for the reward being offered.

Back in the offline world, the gender ratio is 1:1. On the internet a woman may have an endless number of men throwing themselves at her, but back in concrete life (assuming monogamy still exists) the highest quality minority of men are going to commit to the highest quality minority of women. A woman who, when taken as a total package, is a 5/10 isn’t going to land a committed, monogamous relationship with a man who is an 8/10 unless she has an amazing personality (and most human beings do not have amazing personalities). So the men feel cheap and unwanted, and the women are unrealistically demanding or holding out for unobtainable men because the artificial market of online dating skews their perception. It is a terrible system.

Part of me also feels (and this could just be bitterness) that any man who has real life options is going to pick them over online dating since real life options tend to be more productive than online ones. Plus a man who is comfortable in his own skin and comfortable being single will probably be quicker to give up on online dating. So in a way, it seems like online dating holds more appeal to men who do not have an offline social life/social network, and men who feel they ‘need’ a partner. Both of those things seem like they would cause lower quality men to be the ones more likely to stick to online dating (and I say that as someone who has tried online dating). Men who are more likely to have active social lives, who value their time, who have more self respect, who are more comfortable in their own skin and able to feel whole and complete even when single, etc. seem like they are more likely to give up on online dating quicker. The point is, the system is dysfunctional.

Assuming it’s in part the “Paradox of Choice” problem (particularly from a woman’s POV), the issue may be inherent in the nature of online dating. Too many choices = shallow decision-making, leading to men who are not handsome and wealthy losing out because they don’t get a hearing (and presumably women losing out because they vast number of choices leads to shallow decision-making unsuited for happiness).

Online Dating: The Paradox of Choice

Basically, we choose differently when we have more options. That is, because a greater number of options are more difficult to manage (in terms of our ability to weigh the options and make the best selection), we tend to use more heuristic choice strategies (quick and easy cues to make a decision) as opposed to a more comprehensive choice strategy where we consider deeper criteria when making a decision. Part of the reason is that too many options are overwhelming. For example, in a speed dating event (which also included online profiles that could be accessed after the event), daters were more likely to use the quick and easy cues (such as age, height and weight) to make their choice when the size of the group was large compared to small, and were more likely to use cues that could not be discerned visually (education, occupation, smoking status) when the size of the group was small compared to large.2

Researchers suggest that this heuristic strategy may be better suited for daters who are looking for casual sex as opposed to a long-term partner. If you are looking for long-term love, too many options may not be a good thing.

[Wesley_Clark]

@Malthus

Assuming it’s in part the “Paradox of Choice” problem (particularly from a woman’s POV), the issue may be inherent in the nature of online dating. Too many choices = shallow decision-making, leading to men who are not handsome and wealthy losing out because they don’t get a hearing (and presumably women losing out because they vast number of choices leads to shallow decision-making unsuited for happiness).

Online Dating: The Paradox of Choice - Luvze

That is an interesting study, and would help explain why on internet dating sites the guy with a good face and good body (but average income/profession) does better than the man with an average face and average body but good income/profession. In a larger selection pool they use more visual cues to pre-select, in a smaller pool they use non-visual cues. Like I was saying earlier, a man with a face and/or body in the top 5% does far better in online dating sites than a guy with an income or profession in the top 5%.

[pulykamell]

@billfish678

He thought he was fairly normal…and to be honest I thought he was pretty reasonable here on the Dope…the site came back and said he was “unmatchable”.

Ouch.

That sounds to me like eHarmony. I got that response from them when I tried signing up, which completely perplexed me. No matter, as I was happy with another service (eHarmony was a little too Christian-y and serious for me at the time. I think they may have loosened up a bit.)

[billfish678]

That coulda been you

[pulykamell]

@billfish678

That coulda been you

I’ve heard of a couple of people I consider fairly normal getting such a response, which is perplexing. I have a feeling it thought I was not serious enough or something. This would have been about 10 years ago. eHarmony, at least back then–I don’t know how it is now-- kind of billed itself as the place to go for A Serious Relationship. It’s not like I was looking for a casual relationship, but perhaps I was a little too frivolous for its algorithm. I did end up re-taking the test a month or two later, just for kicks, and got in the second time, but I never bothered using that service because, well, it probably was right that it took itself a bit too seriously in finding long-term relationships for you. So perhaps its algorithm was correct all along.

[billfish678]

Makes sense.

But that still has to kinda sting to get “unmatchable”

Though if I filled out one of those I’d probably get “what the FUCK is wrong with you”
)

[Mona_Lisa_Simpson]

When I tried E-Harmony, (Late 2004 or early 2005, I think) I went through all the questions and profiles and things. It took a really long time, (or maybe it just seemed like it, since I had a really young child) and then at the end of all that it told me I wasn’t matchable because I listed my marital status as “separated” not “divorced”. It bothered me that it didn’t ask those questions up front and save me the time and effort.

Anyway, that was my experience with E-Harmony.

[Loach]

@Mona_Lisa_Simpson

When I tried E-Harmony, (Late 2004 or early 2005, I think) I went through all the questions and profiles and things. It took a really long time, (or maybe it just seemed like it, since I had a really young child) and then at the end of all that it told me I wasn’t matchable because I listed my marital status as “separated” not “divorced”. It bothered me that it didn’t ask those questions up front and save me the time and effort.

Anyway, that was my experience with E-Harmony.

Exactly the same thing happened to me. I think they justify it by saying if they told you up front then people would lie about it. And they are probably not wrong. It still really annoyed me. I have heard that if you go back and try again after being divorced they ask for proof. I don’t know since I never went back.

[pulykamell]

@billfish678

But that still has to kinda sting to get “unmatchable”

I honestly found it more amusing than anything else, and a bit irritating because I just wasted my time on all these goddamned psychological type questions only to have it prove a waste of time. But mostly amusing (for me, it wasn’t a matter of marital status, as I was single, never married, at the time.) Like I said upthread, don’t take any of these sites too seriously, and it’s fine.

[stillownedbysetters]

FWIW, online dating (at least in my experience) can be just as awful for a female as it clearly is for a male. I worked at it (and believe me, it was work) for five years. I met a couple of friends, but came nowhere near forming a true relationship. That isn’t to say there weren’t some lighter moments. Eharmony persistently tried matching me up with enivornmentalists of one type or another. Problem was, that at the time I was working for a major oil company. I valiantly soldiered on and tried to talk to a few of these folks, but unsurprisingly, it went nowhere fast. It also seemed to me that Eharmony ‘matched’ me up with any male 50 and over that lived in a contiguous state, whether or not we had anything in common. I suspected this was because the pool of candidates 50 and over wasn’t very deep, which was reinforced by the low number of matches I received. Match.com wasn’t any better, really, and a good 40% of the Eharmony ‘matches’ were also match.com ‘matches’. I did meet some fun people from a local singles club that sponsored activities and get togethers at that time. But friends, while nice, wasn’t exactly what I was searching for.

I finally decided that online dating was a younger person’s game and gave the whole thing up. It was hard not to feel down about it. The process IS personal, after all. I’m not sorry I tried it, but wild horses couldn’t get me to do it again.

[octopus]

@Cognoscant

This describes perfectly my experience with internet dating, at least so far as mainstream dating is concerned. Basically if you’re a straight male looking for a straight female, you have three options in internet dating, none of which are good, or really work well. (Of course if I had the looks of David Beckham and the cash of Tony Stark things might have been different, but then could you imagine me sifting through endless pornbots on match to try to find a date?)

1. Spend a lot of time crafting personalized, thoughtful messages to the women who you feel attracted to or who you think are a good match. This is what your female friends who get dates on the internet tell you to do. Result: you spend hours upon hours writing emails to women who never respond because they’re dealing with the mountains of messages sent by guys who use method #2.

2. Spam every woman who meets even your minimum interest level with a form email. What happens is either you get a 2% response rate and those 2% mainly consist of the women you looked at and thought, eh, might as well send this one the boilerplate email too…or, like I did, you get a 0% response rate and you curse your ugly face and lack of Stark Industries largesse and abscond to the nearest bar to get lonely-smashed drunk.

3. You go on a hybrid type site like eharmony which, at the time I was on it, only let you correspond with a very limited number of partners at a time. Then option #1 came back into play. But your pool was so limited that it was unlikely you’d meet someone you felt a bond towards. I dated about four women over two years through eharmony; of those four, I only saw two of them again, and neither of those two felt much of a spark on date #2. That was *successful *according to most eharmony vets I spoke with.

Meanwhile, while all of that is going on, you talk to your female friends whose complaints about dating sites consist of “I got 50 messages in my inbox and only 10 of them look like the guy I want.” Yes, another ten might be total creepers. But your odds of finding a good man in 50 are a little better than finding a good woman in four, and a whole lot better than finding a good woman in zero. I spent the first eight months on match sending out emails ranging from carefully written to casual to spam like and everything in between. I received zero replies. Not a single response to over 100 emails. Then I talked to a female friend of mine from high school who casually commented, “oh, I don’t like match, every time I log in I have to go through at least 20 messages.” I never logged into match again.

And I don’t mean to say “oh those mean old women on dating sites, they are so spoiled and don’t care about man’s struggle wah wah wah.”. Women have to deal with so much oppression and sexism and discrimination in dating as it is. The problem I see is that internet dating makes it worse for both sides. Men who have had success with dating habits IRL get a rude awakening online and some guys who are already not mentally able to handle rejection and who have a low opinion of women get hateful. Women get exposed to that " 10% creeper" fringe and rightfully recoil from all online encounters. It’s not a good scene for anyone.

I won’t doubt that SOME people find their mate online. I know many who have. But it’s interesting to hear stories which start out with “the first guy I met online was perfect and…” If she’d met that guy after six months of being hit on by sleazeballs who knows whether she would have taken that step to meet him in real life? In my situation, after eight months of getting no–and I mean no–contact from other women, my self-esteem was in negative figures and when I did get a date on eharmony my goals were so low (let’s make it through this date without spilling food all over her) that not seeing her again was a relief. Just wanted the date to end before it began. Bad self-esteem does that.

Internet dating does that. You can’t be going to a bar on a regular basis for eight months with NO contact at all, not even a “not interested.” And at some point you’d feel like you could at least start a conversation even if it went nowhere. Baby steps but miles ahead of sitting at your computer time and again looking at “Inbox: 0.”

Some MRA nutball might look at this situation and say, see, this is why beta males are so suppressed in this country, the world is designed for alphas and women, who hold all of the real power in society. This is ripe bullshit. For obvious reasons women are cautious about dating, experiences on the internet, and men who come on strong. I feel the entire premise of internet dating is a little flawed: “better human interaction through impersonal communication!” Someone’s going to get hurt in any kind of system like that. It just happens to lean on men a little more. Sucks for those of us on the bottom of the pile, but it’s not as if we’re not used to it–or, maybe, didn’t deserve it.

Having said that my only successful experience in dating sights was when my female partner and I managed to secure a six-month relationship with a second female through a site which…well, I won’t name it here but you can probably guess what kind of site it was. Hilariously, option #1 worked perfectly there. She was probably the only woman I wrote to who appreciated what I’d written. Who could have guessed?

Best humble brag I’ve read all year.

[Leaffan]

So, as mentioned, I’m done with it for now.

A couple of SDMB members have connected with me on Facebook though: not for any dating purposes but just as friends, and that’s cool. I like to have friends.

Thanks to everyone for great responses. As far as I can tell internet dating is the shits. I guess I’m going to have to hang out at bars or something. Lovely.

[Cognoscant]

@octopus

Best humble brag I’ve read all year.

I guess I lost the point at the end, which was: I wasn’t successful in internet dating until I went out dating as part of a couple. Otherwise I would have failed like all the other times.

But yeah you’re probably right that it sounded too much like a humblebrag. I think I’ve said here that my life has been a complete failure except for the times I’ve succeeded beyond all belief. This isn’t meant to be a humblebrag either, this is what it’s like to live out one’s bipolar disorder.

[brainstall]

Just want to say that not every woman on internet dating sites is inundated with emails. At 50 plus and a few pounds overweight, I might as well have been invisible. I think I’m a cool chick in my own quirky way, but POF was a crashing disappointment, with only a few dates and a couple of times of being stood up after agreeing to meet.

So, yeah, I gave up, too, and resigned myself to eternal spinsterhood.

[Cicero]

Leaffan, not being critical but I had to read half the thread- well, almost- to try and understand you were talking about a dating site. I thought it was some reference to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Anyway, any male who believes their sex drive is as great at 52 as it was at 22 is dreaming. If you find a nice lady you well find yourself a lot more frisky.

As for dating sites, I have no experience with them but a friend did marry a guy she met on such a site (Okay she was pretty hot. and I also know of a lady who had no success but plenty of offers. There was a reason she had no success).

Good luck.

[Tibby]

I had quite a frisky sex life in my youth (well, not my extreme youth, only that after 14) of about 1 or 2 sexual congresses every week or so, but it has slowed down a bit in recent years. I’m now averaging about once every 15 years (that assumes I get lucky before midnight today…my last romp under the sheets was 15 years ago). Hang in there; pays to be patient.

[Leaffan]

@Cicero

Leaffan, not being critical but I had to read half the thread- well, almost- to try and understand you were talking about a dating site. I thought it was some reference to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Anyway, any male who believes their sex drive is as great at 52 as it was at 22 is dreaming. If you find a nice lady you well find yourself a lot more frisky.

As for dating sites, I have no experience with them but a friend did marry a guy she met on such a site (Okay she was pretty hot. and I also know of a lady who had no success but plenty of offers. There was a reason she had no success).

Good luck.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

ETA: Signed: The dolphins.

[Cicero]

@Leaffan

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

ETA: Signed: The dolphins.

Exactly

[Dunkelheit]

@ThelmaLou

YES! It’s like when women get phone calls from men they’re not interested in. And you’ll hear a woman say, “I keep calling him and telling him to stop calling me!” DUH. Calling him is contact. If you want NO contact then do not have any contact. It’s very simple.

To simply refrain from replying to an internet dating wink/email (whatever the site calls it) is not rude and it is not rejection. However, to reply and say “No, thanks, not interested”-- that IS blatant rejection and it will feel like a challenge to the person on the receiving end. So don’t do that. Only reply to people with whom you want further contact. A reply of any sort sends the message that you **do **want contact. Why? Because the reply **IS **contact.

Problem with that is, you also get men who keep contacting you to find out why you haven’t replied even with a polite refusal, and further lack of reply causes them to escalate as described above, so you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.