I blame internet personal ads for giving us false hope.
After much trial and error I’ve decided that personal ad dates have three possible qualities:
A) Attractive
B) Sane
C) Employed
They can be two of them, but never three.
I considered the ‘mail-order bride’ approach, but discarded the idea when it turned out to be too expensive. Still, the thought of all those single women in Russia does pop up from time to time.
So…
Mail-order brides are out.
Arranged marriages are out.
Hermithood is out.
Dating is out.
Guess I’ll just have to be… urk… social.
Why, that’s so crazy… it just might work! 
Good luck to all the warriors out there willing to brave the minefields. Some of us live vicariously through you.
The other side of the coin:
In grad school (the first time around,) I was invited to a party with a ton of other geography grads by an undergrad who worked in the map library. We didn’t really know each other, but she was cute, so I had certain intentions of seeing if we could get to know each other better.
She turns out to be a vacuous piece of fluff. Utterly uninteresting. It’s turning into a bad party. My roommate is over in the corner scamming on some dazed coed by (inexplicably) prattling on about the New England fisheries (“Ya gotcher cod. Ya gotcher scrod. Ya gotcher…”)
I’m thinking about making an exit.
Suddenly, the map library girl’s roommates walk in. They’re all renting this fairly large house together, so there’s quite a few of them. The last one through the door, a cutie carrying a bag of groceries, catches my eye and smiles.
Things might be looking up.
We started talking, and it was like we had known each other our whole lives. We chatted until the wee hours, then didn’t want to leave, so we went to Waffle House for a post-party debriefing. I asked her out the next day, and we dated for six months.
I ended up breaking up with her, because I was moving halfway across the country.
She looked me up two years later on the pretense of giving me back a hammer (clever girl.) That was 10 years ago, and we’re still chatting each other up (and we married two years ago.) 
Who says they’d reject you? Everyone knows we ugly girls are desperate. :rolleyes:
(And if you take that as me saying someone would have to be desperate to date you, that’s not my intention.)
Sheeyit. If I could find a girl who was A and B, I’d gladly bankroll her ass. Be a sugar daddy and all that.
In my experience it’s, “you can have any one of the three.”
If you dont mind long-distance relationships and a frequent case of blue balls, take a page from my book and date foreign women over the internet. It sounds absurd, but it’s worked great for me so far. Meeting in person after all that buildup… ooh la la.
But yeah, dating sucks, but what’s the alternative?
On the other hand, meeting in person after all that buildup could be more, “Oh, no!” than “ooh la la.”
I actually have a date coming up and frankly, I feel ill from nerves at the thought of it. So many expectations…
Does it really take 6 dates to work out I am too old for you? I told you on our first ‘date’ that I was 38, divorced, had a (non-physical-custody) son. We laughed a lot about you only being 23, and that there were few cultural points in common between us. So if after 6 dates you don’t want to continue it, fine by me - my mind was along the same tracks. But don’t blame it on the age gap…
It is to shrug. I’ll maintain a dignified silence, then. 
All the cute sweet cuddly guys are married. 
To girls like me who were lucky enough to meet them before and outgoing enough to ask them out, most likely.
Yeah, I know I’m fat, but I’m still cute and I’m working out and dieting and I have good hair and did I mention a sparkling personality? :rolleyes: It’s tiresome. I’m not even thirty yet but there seems to be nobody sane and eligible and not freaking creepy and intensely annoying near my age. This city is supposed to be great for singles. The only person who’s chatted me up in ages was NINETEEN. That was frightening.
I like to think I’m actually too intimidatingly beautiful for anyone to want to date me.
I can actually see her point of view on this one. Maybe there were things she found compelling or fascinating about you: maturity, urbanity, stability. Maybe she thought the age difference wouldn’t really bother her, but she just couldn’t ignore it once you two started hanging out. The thing about blaming the age gap is that if she’d said it after only one date rather than six, you might be going, “you didn’t even give it a chance.”
Anyway, I don’t blame you for being frustrated.
~OneCentStamp
(33 and totally feeling you here)
Don’t be so damn rational about it, OneCentStamp!
You’re probably right. And we both got benefits from the whole thing. She got to be taken to a lot of places a 23 year old boyfriend probably would/could not have taken her, and I got to tell my ex I was dating a 23 year old. Not quite sure how that one came up in conversation…
All these single guys and girls bemoaning dating in this thread, it makes you think.
Any single women from North Wales in?
:: nods :: Been there. About a month ago. A woman who was fascinating and seductive in text on the screen, and when we met, there was… nothing.
I don’t have a stake in this thread (married 10 years) but this remark always gets me. What’s the deal with self-confidence being an attention getter? I’ve known just as many losers who were self-confident as those without it (or just average confidence). It’s never ever been a reliable indicator of anything other than
confidence. Is that trait so prized?
When I chased women, their “self-confidence” was not in the top 10 qualities I used to gauge my interest.
Am/was I so out of step with mainstream thinking?
That’s why I’m meeting this one quickly. I’ve only been talking to him a week and he keeps kicking my ass at Scrabble (go to the Scrabble server, everyone!). But I don’t want a long build-up. If I’m going to be let down, I want it quick.
Good luck! Woot.
No different than the job hunt. Who is it that said anything worth doing has a success rate somewhere around 1%?
This is how the species winnows out the unsuitables and preserves its fitness. If you don’t put yourself in a position to hear “no” early, often and loudly, you not only don’t reproduce, you don’t eat.
No?
Thanks. In honor of it, I am having an old-fashioned high-school-style pre-date freakout. I hate all my clothes, can’t decide whether to wear perfume or not, and the only decision I have made is polishing my toenails, because my mother impressed it upon me that a lady polishes her toenails when she wears open-toed shoes. Of course, then she also said that a woman would be lucky if a man actually noticed that she had feet, so I don’t know how helpful her advice is.