Just curious. I happened to spot the post on mailorderbrides.com and started thinking about it, having perused the web and found many, many dating or match making sites, most of which like to charge anything from a small to a hefty fee for questionable results, and those who mainly are for sex or from the new Russian market - which almost guarantees that once you get him or her over here, they’ll dump you.
How many of you out there have tried such agencies and what type of success or failure have you had? A friend of mine tried one, being fascinated by lovely oriental women, and wanted to meet one not all that Americanized and established several good contacts in Japan but then they wanted him to pay the stiff immigration fees, which he could not afford. Another, older man I know, met a Puerto Rican lady that way, brought her over and married her and is pretty happy but she has to keep sending money over to her family to help them out and I raised an eyebrow to that. Another guy met a beautiful Vietnamese girl 10 years younger than he and she came over and they are married but now she is very Americanized and very business like and he’s not all happy with that. She cut her beautiful long black hair into a short bob that a lot of the Vietnamese-American girls wear and he was devastated.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of guys who look like they barely managed to make it through the Vietnam war with Vietnamese brides who seem saner than the dude looks. I’ve also seen a lot of guys who look like the white trash, big bellied, TV watching, beer guzzling stereotype with tiny oriental ladies who seem almost afraid of them.
So, certainly someone from the SDMB has had some experience with these services and perhaps a good success story?
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
Well, Ive answered the personals in the paper, and posted ads a couple of times. Met my last two SOs that way, had some good dates, and also (unfortunately) had some experiences where the best that can be said about them was that I got material for some funny stories. But that’s kinda the odds for RL, isnt it?
My mom tried a dating service, but every guy they sent her was the opposite of what she’d said she’d been looking for. Finally she met a wonderful, respectful, intelligent, loving guy…at the local bar. Go figger.
Suffice to say, most of the online dating sites are questionable morally. For example, one-and-only.com Looks pretty nice, right, but I noticed they don’t put a date on any of the ads. They just keep all the old ones up even if the person doesn’t subscribe anymore.
Come on! With the THOUSANDS of people reading and posting here, SOMEONE has had to have had an experience or two with these places.
Milossarian:
Yeah. I know that scene. I used to do it a lot but all I ever met were lady drunks and nut cases. I kept hearing about great stories from guys and gals who met their SO in bars and what a great life they have, but I never encountered anyone worth staying with and a few that I could not get away from fast enough.
Now and acquaintance of mine met an English girl through one of those sites and linked up with her and she came to the States and they’ve been living together for about 2 years now and seem happy.
I don’t know. Most of the good girl friends I have met have been just chance, personal encounters or determined pursuit.
I think it is extremely creepy to get a poor oriental girl thru a mail order bride thing, the whole thing is sick. Guys who do it are control freaks and can’t deal with real women, so they get themselves what they think will be their own personal slave and use them as such. You see amateur porn pictures in magazines, I would bet the farm many of the women are boughten brides. It always makes me feel good when I hear of one of them ripping off their owner or costing him a fortune.
That said…do they still have dating services around, the kind where you go for an interview, fill out a list of a hundred nosy questions, and wait for your phone to start ringing off the hook? Back in the olden days I had signed up with such a thing (this was even before they videotaped you!). I would get a postcard with some guy’s basic vital statistics and phone number, at the same time he got a postcard with my info on it, and that way either of us could make the first call. I have to say, I think I got over a hundred postcards in the 3 months I signed up for. Some of them sounded so good I was meeting two guys for coffee per day! And for the most part they were nice guys, with jobs and cars and interested in meeting women outside of a bar! Nothing terrible happened to me other than meeting a couple of losers. I met a couple of interesting and charming foreign gentlemen, one of whom whose father was an EXTREMELY wealthy man.
Most of the guys told me they only received a handful of references for women and the girls they did meet were , well, “disappointing” (as in obese/crazy/homely/wouldn’t put out, I guess). The best part was the rare and heady experience of picking and choosing between my many gentlemen callers, like Scarlett O’Hara. Of course the way things worked out the men I was really attracted to never called me again, while the losers could not take no for an answer. It was maddening and frustrating, though the dating pool was considerably larger, the same dynamics pre-dating service signup applied! Whether I met 5 men a year or 25 guys a month, the one I really wanted always got away! But it was fun, and I did meet a lot of nice people. As a matter of fact, I kept one.
Probably not contemporary, but, yes, I did subscribe to a video dating service ~20 years ago (No! I can get closer than that; it was 1983-84).
I’ll not belabor myself with trying to translate the experience in a strict manner to what’s available today.
Why did I do it? Is subscribing to such not some sign of desperation (and concommittant acknowledgement of one’s undesirability to the opposite sex)?
Well, no.
At the time I did it, I had just been through one of those really messy break-ups and I decided I wasn’t going to work the bars or hibernate. It was a great experience!
I met quite a few women, from all across the spectrum, and learned some volume dating economics pretty quickly. There were only a few out of the ~75 I met during my six month membership whom I saw more than once. I did have a few really great evenings.
The main things it did for me were: 1) it chilled me out about going out with a new woman - if it’s friday and you’re going out and you also know already that you’ve got a date for saturday you relax a bit, 2.) it got me limbered up, so to speak - being accustomed to calling a woman and making a date made it much easier for me to pursue the same course with women I met on my own.
It’s been said many ways before, but a volume approach just knocks the wind out of the old fear of rejection.
Well, the person who set me up with my wife isn’t a professional matchmaker; she’s a friend of both of our families. But we’re not the only couple she set up (though I’m sure we’re the happiest…at least I am ), so she’s probably an amateur of Olympic-level.
Obviously, I’m not “still with” any of the others. However, except for one girl who practically bored me to sleep, I can’t say any of them were disaster dates either.
Just have to mention I once stumbled across a personal ads site for gay men and spent an whole entertaining morning perusing same. No caring-sharing, long walks on the beach, seeking soulmate stuff here, folks. Hundreds and hundreds of personal ads from all over North America, all of them describing their dicks! I never knew there were so many lonesome John Holmes body doubles out there!
My pals in Pittsburgh and I used to read the personal ads in “In Pittsburgh” (free weekly) for chuckles. There was one ad that ran in the Men Seeking Men section for weeks and weeks. It was at least three times longer than average (ha ha) and described in great detail the kind of person he was looking for (specific activities, beliefs, even the past experiences he wanted his SO to have had). The last statement was “No fats or sluts need apply.” Now, those are both very loaded terms, and I’m sure they turned off 95% of his potential audience. What probably happened was that someone figured out that anyone who could afford to run that ad regularly must have money to burn, in which case he got the SO he deserved.
Remember, I’m pulling for you; we’re all in this together.
—Red Green
Same case here in the Syracuse New Times some years ago. This guy ran an ad looking for another guy and listed all the particulars he desired, including WAIST size and brand of blue jeans. The ad ran for over a year, and apparently he found someone, but a few months later the ad came back with an explanation that the relationship didn’t work out, so he was going to launch a new search.
You mark my words, someday someone is going to invent some kind of sex robot, like in that Cherry 2000 movie with Melanie Griffith, and that will save everyone a whole lot of trouble!
Rilch, you should check out the “Nashville Scene”. Great local weekly independent in the Music City but their personals ads are the best - downright kinky! What a hoot!
), so she’s probably an amateur of Olympic-level.