internet dating from a guy's perspective

In My Humble Opinion
1

We’ve all read the threads about internet dating. From my perspective it seems that most internet-met relationships are temporary (6 months to 1-2 years tops) at best.

But, this is mostly from a female perspective. Let’s face it, women have the advantage of pick-and-choose from internet dating.

I’d like a guy’s perspective on their experiences with internet dating. What is your success rate?

What’s your strategy? Is it just a numbers game, or did you really think out your profile?

Share your experiences with a fellow male.

2

I’ve used it twice for about a 2 month period each time.

I usually don’t have much trouble having one or two dates per week if I really make the effort to seek out and contact women who’s photo and profile appeal to me. Of those I contact, perhaps 1 out of 4 write back and about half of the conversations turn into a date.

I’ve been very lucky in finding some I dated for almost two years (the first time on line). Alas, we decided it wasn’t meant to be but have ended up friends. Second time was very recent and had the same rate of success. Almost began to date someone seriously but decided I wasn’t in the right mind set to be dating anyone right now and graciously bailed.

No desire to be on line now or to do any kind of serious dating. Don’t really want to waste anyone’s time given my current frame of mind.

But I have largely good things to say about the experience. Not that there weren’t some very strange individuals or people who simply misrepresented themselves on line.

And yes, it’s a numbers game. And yes, I spent a lot of time perfecting my profile. And yes, a good photo(s) is more important than the best profile.

3

I’m currently in the midst of my eighth year with a woman I met via the internet in '98. Relationship prior to that, also met via the internet, lasted about 3 years. The one preceding that one was with someone I met at a feminist art show, not via the internet, and lasted about a year and a half. There were a smattering of multiple-partners / no-one-in-particular periods interspersed in between in various spots. She who came before that was a classmate in college and we were on-again off-again and nonexclusively paired but more or less together from '88 to '92. Before her, another college classmate and a duration of only 6 months. Big empty gap before her, the girlfriend prior to her was someone I met via newspaper-personal-ad, the closest thing to internet dating available to most folks in 1980 (would it have been ARPANet dating back then?)…she and I were also on-again/off-again and nonexclusive but together from '80 to '84.

I’ve never done the kind of internet dating that involves photographs. I’m not auditioning a model to show off my line of spring apparel. Show me some text!

4

I’ve met two women on the net. I married the best one. :smiley:

5

I hope thats not like saying you married the valedictorian from summer school.

6

Haven’t had any luck yet. Always seems that I write about 20 unique emails, two or three respond, and of those only one goes past another email. I think I have had two dates from an online dating service.

7

I used a dating site for a couple of years. Mostly due to lack of options female wise(was in Germany at the time). Anyways, I ended up with a couple actual dates and ended up getting married to the second lady I met. The site I used was pretty specific when it came to target audience though.

8

I have had zero success. Of the 20 or so emails I have sent, all have gone with no response. I dunno why, as I am always very careful to pick women who seem to be a rather good match with my interests and me with theirs.

Of the emails that I have gotten, almost all of them have been from women from other countries. Since I am rather suspicious of very attractive young women from russia randomly thinking I’m hot, I have not responded (also, I would not be interested in a long distance internet romance.)

I am not sure what I’m doing wrong - or possible I am just that unattractive. ::shrug:: in any case, I’m have a better experience just going to a bar. At least I get to have a beer, even if I don’t meet anyone.

9

100%. After dating dozens of women via the usual routes, with varying degrees of success and failure, met Mrs. RickJay on one-and-only.com.

10

Doesn’t seem much different from the average lifespan of any relationship, no matter how the parties met. :slight_smile:

11

It’s crap.

From a male perspective, you have to pay money in order to send messages, knowing that 90% of the women you write to aren’t going to pony up a few bucks to join, even to tell you, “Sorry, not interested.”

Of the few responses I ever got, a high percentage of women wrote back, “I never bothered to pay for this site until I read your email.” Great. Is that why all the other women never bother to answer? They’re too cheap to take a chance unless the guy is perfect?

I quit match.com. Instead, every month I write a profile and put it on a floppy disk. Then I write 20 witty, funny letters custom-tailored to the kind of woman I’d like to meet, and I throw the floppy disk away. It costs less and I have the same success rate.

12

I get the impression that there is a very small percentage of guys who have a great time of it, and the rest of us struggle to get any attention at all. If the offline situation is like that at all, it’s a much less drastic divide.

13

women have the advantage of pick-and-choose from internet dating.

Says you. It’s either creep-os, stupid people who can’t spell a word, or relatively normal men who might be approachable if they didn’t place picture of themselves with a woman as if to say “you must be at least this hot to date me”.

14

Sorry, dre2xl, but women do have an advantage in pick-and-choose, even if it’s the advantage of being able to turn someone down.

In the 2 years I had match.com, I received 1 email from a woman. (And three winks from women who were either too cheap to pay, or too insecure or afraid to take the risk of writing, or too busy to bother.)

You may not like the emails you got, but at least you got some to not like. Some days I couldn’t tell if I had hit “Send Email” or “Delete Email.”

15

I know the OP asked for a guy’s perspective, but I’m finding this thread fascinating. My husband and I do seminars on communication, including 3 on the differences in male/female communication styles (and the conflict and misunderstandings those differences frequently cause). Would some of you who have had little success mind posting some of your letters? Perhaps I could share a female perspective on how your message might be perceived. And guys, please take heart. The vast majority of women are FAR more interested in your sense of humour and willingness to listen than in how you look. My experience was that guys were more concerned with the photos.

16

I actually had a pretty good experience with online dating. Much better than I’d expected, anyway.

At first, I was suspicious of online dating- I had the attitude that the girls I’d meet would be refugees from a feedlot or something. Later, I overheard several of the girls I know having a conversation about online dating, and how they liked it, and these were pretty, smart, attractive girls- the kind I wanted to date!

So I gave it a try. To my complete surprise, I got plenty of unsolicited emails from girls in my area, at a rate of about one a week or so, for about a year. To be fair, I had zero luck at all with getting responses to my emails.

I ended up actually meeting with about 7 of the girls I met online, and actually dating 4 of them for something past a couple dates. 2 of those made it past 3 months, and I’m still dating one of those, 2 1/2 years later.

I didn’t do anything particularly remarkable in my profile. All I did was read a bunch of female profiles, and tried to identify the common desires. Then, I talked up the things I liked to do that fit with what the women wanted, and didn’t talk about what I wanted very much. Think about it this way… if you’re looking at someone’s online dating profile, do you really care much about what they want, or are you looking for how they fit what you’re interested in?

I also put plenty of pictures on there- ones where I was with female friends, male friends, traveling in Europe, etc… no funky posed pictures or pictures of me doing nerdy stuff (there are plenty!).

17

I haven’t been back to match.com for months, and I didn’t always save every Sent email. I don’t think I have any to show. I did make sure to write an email long enough to demonstrate good grammar and spelling (say, 3 paragraphs long), and I was careful to mention specific things from their profiles so it was clear the email wasn’t simply copied-and-pasted from some other pickup line.

I find no reason to take heart from this. Considering how many women told me they hadn’t planned to pay the fees to respond to any emails until they find the perfect one, I can’t see any reason to take joy in the fact that they liked my emails … they just didn’t fifteen-dollars-like them.

18

Maybe. I hear this alot so women must believe it. But I can tell you that I had far more romantic experiences when I was young, built well and basically an asshole than I do now that I am middle aged, chubby and genuinely a nice man.

19

Difficult for heterosexual men, but not impossible.

Even if the gender ratio is 1:1, men still tend to make the first contact. That means women are flooded in responses – at least those with average or better profiles – and they can pick and choose from the responses coming in. Women often respond to the flood of responses in one of three ways:

  1. Respond to those from only the most desirable men, which means there’s going to be a small minority of men getting the vast majority of dating “action”. (See my earlier post about the sustainability of the model of online dating.)

  2. Tweak their profiles to make them more selective, in an attempt to throttle the flood of responses. The result: women often demanding qualities in their prospective dates that end up narrowing down the range of men to those that IRL would be out of their league. Example: a 5’ 2" woman with an average build, a high school education, employment as a secretary and no stated income seeking men who are at least 6’ tall, a full college education, an athletic (not average) build, and a 75K+ income.

  3. Overwhelmed, they ignore everything that comes in, without even reading the responses, and step away from the computer. They’ll delete all their messages, and wait until things simmer down. I have the best response rate from profiles where the woman still has an active profile, still checks in daily (which you can see with match.com), but she’s been on the service for at least four to six months. Not great; maybe one in three or four will respond instead of one in 15, but still a lot better.

I do get women who write to me unsolicited, but I’d say most are either Russian romance scammers (“I look ,your structure the online very nicely and I seekingly , nice manly to date and ,marriage. I with shall impatience shall .wait your answer.”) or women that are far below my league (Jean Teasdale-types, 30-something grandmothers, and obese women. Pit me.) Occasionally I’ll get a legitimate response from a “peer,” but more often than not it’s someone who lives a little bit further away than I would normally consider. I can’t get a Jewish girl in Cleveland to give me the time of day, but I get a lot of email from Jewish girls (and those of other faiths) in Akron.

Checklist dating is rampant; “You MUST be (list of 20 qualities).”

Three more things men have to deal with:

**Generic profiles. ** I think that because women will generally get lots of email if they just make their presence known, they don’t have to put a lot of effort into their profiles. You see a lot of this:

Can you keep up? I’m a kind, caring woman who works hard and plays hard. I love walks in the park, strolls along a moonlit beach, candlelit dinners, and lying by the fireplace with that special someone while sippng wine. I like going out and staying at home, and being active or just sitting on the couch. I love to laugh, and I love life. I want a man who love to laugh, love life, know what he wants, works hard and play hard, doesn’t play games, enjoy going out for a night on the town as well as staying home and watching a DVD, and who is just as comfortable in jeans and a t-shirt as in a tuxedo. Must be at 6’ tall, very athletic, square-jawed, accomplished in his career, (and about 10 other qualities)

I hate generic profiles because it gives me nothing to start with in crafting a response. What am I going to say; “I love to laugh too!”?

**Internet disease. ** Call me superficial, but when every photo of a women is only from the neck up, shows her hiding behind objects so you can’t see below her shoulders or upper chest, or is taken from overhead LiveJournal-style, she’s gonna’ be a big girl. Men fib about their height. Women often try to conceal their weight. After meeting one too many women with “average builds” who are 5’ 4" and probably pushing 200 pounds, I’ll usually ask those writing with the symptoms of Internet disease to assure me they’re not larger than me. I usually get the runaround. Pit me.

Instant chemistry. I found that with women i the real world, they’re more willing to take the time to determine if there’s any “chemistry” or any potential of a relationship; the standard “two or three dates if it’s not a disaster” rule applies. With women I meet from match.com, they seem to expect instant chemistry; if’s there’s not massive fireworks in the first two or three minutes, there’s not going to be a second date, no matter how perfect the date may seem, no matter how smooth conversation may flow. I think it could be because if things aren’t quite perfect, there’s hundreds of other suitors waiting in the wings.

Online dating for a typical man isn’t impossible, but prepare to put a lot of effort into it, and to face a lot more rejection than in the real world.

20

True, but the grass on the other side isn’t all that green either. Try and post a personals imitating a single young woman on Craigslist in an urban area, and report back to me on how many pictures of weenies you get.