Gonna try Craig's List for meeting women - any tips?

In My Humble Opinion
1

OK, I thought about the pro’s and con’s and am going to try a new way (for me, at least) to hook up with women via online dating: Craig’s List.

Pro’s: It’s free (and thus more available to a bigger pool of women). People have posted about their good experiences with on this site. Being through the internet, it cuts down on the face-to-face rejection factor.

Con’s: Some entries look bogus (links to porn or fee-based dating sites). Fears that I’ll end up robbed or swindled or hooked up with what turns out be a prostitute.

So, if you’ve successfully hooked up with someone through Craig’s List (sexually or otherwise), do you have any tips to ensure success? Mistakes to avoid? Things to say or not to say in my ad or in response emails to someone else’s ad?

2

I’ve gone out with several fellows I met via craigslist, all of whom turned out not to be serial killers, but none of whom turned out to be for me. I’d also suggest trying plentyoffish.com, which is also free and you can customize your profile. There’s also forums there where you can request reviews of your profile. A LOT of people there complain about bad profiles! My suggestions would include:

  1. One nice clear picture of your face, and a full-body pic, and both should be reasonably current. One of my POF dates was so relieved I actually looked like my photo; he said he’d met a girl for a date and she was easily a 100lbs heavier in person than she claimed on POF.

  2. Use proper grammar and spelling in your profile, no l33t speaker. As soon as I see someone typing ‘id l1k 2 tak u on A dat3’ that profile goes on my ignore list. I mean, can you imagine holding a dinner-date conversation with someone like that?

  3. Guys in particular have a bad habit of not filling out the ‘What I Want in a Partner’ section, probably because they’re scared they’ll somehow exclude females. Listen, no woman wants to be just ‘good enough’ to go out with you, we want to be the woman for you! If you know you won’t marry/LTR with a woman who’s not Catholic, over 200lbs, has kids, smokes, etc. then it’s no good wasting their time. Be honest with yourself. If you’re a homebody, then how happy will a ‘wild, funloving girl’ make you when she wants to party all the time and large groups of people give you panic attacks? If you don’t ever want kids, then a divorced single mother of two who would like to have a few more is probably not for you. If you’re Jewish and your religion is really important to you, and she’s an Evangelical Christian who likes handling poisonous snakes, this could cause some roadblocks in the relationship.

3

In order of importance to a woman with discerning tastes like me:

  1. A picture. A must unless your profile is so incredibly different and amazing,which would be rare, indeed.

2)Spelling and grammar. I am most likely much pickier than the average woman, but I would automatically bypass you when I saw that you don’t know that the multiples of nouns do not include a contraction. It’s not “pro’s” and “con’s”- it’s pros and cons. Big turnoff for me.

Everything else is just knowing what kinds of things to say, i.e. what kind of woman and what kind of relationship you’re looking for, and in a very general sense what kind of person you are. Don’t be negative or portray yourself as very picky and only willing to date one very narrow demographic of ladies. Portray yourself as open and accepting and easy-going. Don’t be too serious or desperate-sounding.

4

I dated online for about two to three years until I met my current girlfriend. We’ve been together for over a year now. Here is some advice I wrote for another board sometime back:

5

Good luck. I hope this helps.

6

That’s a buttload of (good) information, Joe. Really, O2BDumb, it sounds hard and complicated, but it really isn’t. There are some things you have to be very keen on (writing your profile is one of them - a bad profile turns off the good women instantly), but it is basically advertising who you are and who you’re looking for, then casting your nets. Best of luck to you!

  • featherlou, celebrating six years of marriage this year to her internet date :slight_smile:
7

I don’t understand how people actually get craigs list to work for them. it seems like every time I email somebody on there, it turns out to be some kind of scam. Their response seems like a real person, but it turns out to be “hey, sign up on this website and we can chat on there, blah blah” FAKE FAKE FAKE. These fckers have fake profiles and fake email addresses everywhere. WTF!

8

I posted an ad about a month ago. 33 responses in 7 days, most were welfare mama’s looking for a sugar daddy or were “between jobs”. 5 were people pushing paid personal sites and 3 were what I considered more in line what I was looking for. I have talked to all 3 on the phone and met one of them last weekend, we are going to Portland this weekend for an antique show.

9

Around these parts (North Florida), Craigslist will get you set up with a toothless meth whore who drives around in a battered pickup with “Sassy Gal” on the back window and several “McCain/Palin”, Confederate Flag, and Dale Earnhardt stickers. You’ll probably get laid by said skank, but chances are her STDs will chew through a Kevlar condom. There’s a very good reason that the ads on Craigslist are free.

Don’t be so cheap. Shell out a few bucks and look around on Match.com or one of the more mainstream dating sites. Your weiner will thank you.

10

Just don’t call yourself Ron cuz I got dibs on that name, seems to be a chick magnet :rolleyes:
The Ron Thread

p.s. How you ladies doin?

11

My advice: Lurk for a month or so if you intend to answer women’s ads. It’ll help calibrate your fake detector.

Craigslist Memphis may be anomalous, but in my experience there’s roughly 30-40 fake ads for every real one (that’s in the “women seeking men” section. Don’t even bother with “casual encounters”; the fake/real ratio there is at least 500/1, maybe 1000 or 1500 to 1).

What I have found out is that if you lurk for a while, the fake ads start to stand out. Some are really obvious; if the header of the ad says “Ebony Princess looking for Ivory Prince - 25” and the body of the ad starts: “SWF, 18…” (I Am Not Making This Up) your fake detector should be pegging the needle–if it isn’t, take it in for servicing. Some aren’t quite that obvious, but after a while they’ll start to be noticable, too.

Don’t worry about being hooked up with a hooker. Most of those ads are in the “erotic services” section. The ones that aren’t will begin to stand out after a few days observation. The use of the word “generous”–e.g., “SWF, 22, looking for generous gentleman friend for special times”–is probably the most common code word (if she uses “generous” to describe the man she’s looking for and she’s not out-and-out for rent, she’s probably looking for a sugar daddy). Gratuitous use of “$” rather than the letter “s” is another common code; "SWF, 35, looking for pecial friend", for example.

In my experience with more mainstream dating sites, the main problem is that the M to F ratio is every much skewed towards the M end of the spectrum. Good for the ladies, not so good for the men. Nothing much you can do about that.

Happy hunting!

Cheers,

bcg

12

I swear we live in the same town. If I were single, I’d never try to get a date through craigslist for fear I’d end up with a toothless meth manufacturer still living at home with his mom who drives a truck held together with dear hunting and/or McCain stickers.

ETA: Yes, the truck could belong to either my hypothetical date or his mom. Either one may also chew Copenhagen.

13

But at least they don’t hunt deer! :stuck_out_tongue:

14

Ha, I hate it when I do that and I usually do when I’m in a hurry. Stupid homonyms.

15

Don’t answer the ads that ask for “X number of roses” for a given sexual favor.

16

I’ve yet to see one of those outside of “erotic services” myself.

Cheers,

bcg

17

To save you wading through **JoeSki’**s Great Big Advisory Post, I have quoted the best information below (and it’s a doozie):

18

Avoid all the cliches already mentioned.

Give more than a one-sentence statement. Make sure it includes punctuation of some kind. Reading “hi just moved to [city] just a nice guy looking for a nice girl I like talking watching movies hanging out if you’re interested send me an email!” is…dreadful. Put more than 2.4 seconds of thought into it.

For heaven’s sake, don’t speculate on why you’re single IN THE AD. Leave that Pandora’s box closed. Entirely. Don’t say “I think I’m single because I don’t go to bars” or “I’m single because I just broke up with my psychotic hosebeast ex-girlfriend” or any variation of the above.

Every guy on the face of the planet posting on Craigslist says he is “laid-back.” While this is probably a good thing, it’s become dreadfully ubiquitous. Don’t worry, girls who see your ad and don’t see “laid-back” won’t automatically assume “hyper-domineering control freak.” They’ll just assume you are a normal human being.

Don’t say “likes to have fun.” This just means you are a person. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like having fun. That’s what makes it fun, and not, say, hard outdoor labor.

On the other end of the spectrum from being one poorly-written line, don’t make it too long. Don’t write a manifesto about yourself. This is Craigslist, not www.allaboutmememememememememememe.com. Don’t go into too much detail about the kind of girl you’d like to see, either. It makes you come across as weird and vaguely creepy.

So, to sum up, write a medium-length, interesting message with some concrete things you enjoy doing, and avoid cliches. Lurk first to get a feel for the place, then post something that stands out. Good luck.

19

Educate me. What does this actually translate into?

I went to the erotic section of craigslist after seeing a news article where the website was being sued for having that section. Saw a couple of listings with those kinds of notes.

Does 1 rose = 1 dollar or what?

20

It actually says things like, “1 hour = $50 in roses”