I have no experience but I had an internet friend who used it alot. He was a young, handsome guy with a good body (he is an amateur bodybuilder). He also oozes sex (he was molested when he was young and grew up to become a sex addict, don’t ask me about how it works but he says women are drawn to him sexually because of it and the experience did something to his personality to make his sexual side very omnipresent). He gets 20-30 responses from women a month, plus another 50+ from gay guys.
On another note the book freakonomics covers this topic a little bit. I wouldn’t feel bad about never getting a respoinse, according to that book 23% of women & 50% of men never get a response (the figures were something like that). Maybe he said ‘never got contacted’ instead of ‘never got a response’, I don’t know.
That should say ‘unsolicited emails’ not ‘responses’. Responses implies that he writes them and they write back. They just wrote him out of the blue.
I felt pretty bad for the guy. He wanted a meaningful relationship but all women wanted was to have sex with him. He’d have sex with them and think he was in a meaningful relationship and then find out a few months down the road that they have a boyfriend and don’t really care about him, they just wanted him for sex. He was the male equivalent of the pretty woman who can’t find true love.
Once you cut through all the bullshit, the personality compatability and insecurity and you accept that we are all just apes who are out to use each other to try to have the healthiest progeny possible and using the most basic, least rational parts of our brains to do it the idea of dating becomes alot less frustrating and it makes alot more sense. It still sucks though.
As Lizard put in other words, you don’t really seem interested. You’re busy at work, with friends, etc. You don’t really give the impression that you’re willing to make time for dating. A man doesn’t need to be needy to want to spend time with a lady he wants to see, and I get the impression you only want to give whatever time you happen to have leftover. That’s not encouraging.
Other than that, I think it’s fine. You express your interests well, and your pictures are fine. All you need to do is wait for the right guy to read it.
Lizard, Lavender, and Frank, I have taken (most of) your advice and altered my profile. I am working on being more positive, as much as it pains me. It usually takes a day or to for text revisions to post (lest I was writing smutty stuff, I suppose) so we will see what happens. At the worst, an interesting experiment. Thank you very much for your feedback.
My .02 worth. Purely from a marketing standpoint…dump all of the references to athiest. I for example am an athiest but I ended up meeting and marrying a kinda non practicing catholic. There are tons of non practicing “believers” of various calibers out there who still get a negative vibe from ther term athiest who will still probably very much respect your POV.
Some of it also is a little too cerebral, a hefty percentage of guys couldn’t spell cultural anthropology let alone know what it is. Also you are isolating yourself to college grads and over $50K/year, axe about 70% of the pool there. Camping reference, great, emphasizing the cleaning up after aspect, bad.
Open up the pool a bit. There are plenty of bright guys who didn’t finish college or have 2 year degrees that are doing just fine. Do your sorting in person, don’t let match.com make decisions for you that you are more than bright enough to make for yourself.
Got a problem with well educated guys who are not white/caucasian? I ran into plenty of times where I was told sorry, no white guys, but why limit yourself.
I miss almost every aspect of your criteria, and I think your pretty and I’m a doper who occasionally scores a point in GD. Hell, I’d have traded a kidney for a meet with someone like you back when I was single and looking. despite missing almost across the board, I go on some nice vacations, own a home, a nice truck, a business that is doing great so far, I have stumbled across a few of the women I dated at various times who are floored to hear what a wonderful life I have.
Do you want to marry a degree and a paycheck or a man who might be vastly different from you in many ways and still love you more than life itself.
Personally, I like the intellectual ads, because it gives me something to grab on to in crafting a response. I pass by the majority of WSM profiles because I don’t know how I’d respond to them. “I like laughing and having fun too!” Meh.
Please forgive me for being blunt, but there’s a few reasons why your ad might not be getting you the responses it should.
Three photos, no smile. Excusable if there’s only one or two photos, but if there’s a choice of more, and there’s no smile in any of them, a prospective suitor may think you’re too serious and brooding.
Your claimed body style is “average,” but there’s no photos below the chest. See my earlier reference about men betting burned by profiles with Internet disease. Some also call this the “fat girl angle shot”. Even if you’re thin, a lot of men will keep clear of profiles without photos above waist level, unless there’s a lot of other clues in the ads that will reassure them you’re not a larger woman.
Replying to myself here. There’s a couple of clues in your profile that might tell men you’re not really fibbing about the “average build” part, although you have to remember men are visual creatures; many will see the photo, see nothing above waist level, and assume the worst.
Your preference for body type in men is “About average, Athletic and toned, Slender.” The profiles for “average” women I’ve seeen where the photo shows someone who is actually plus-sized will often add “A few extra pounds” and “stocky.” The real “average average” women I see seldom include anything larger than “average” as preferences in the “About my date” section.
Your exersize habits are “Exercise 3-4 times per week.” Women who exercise aren’t necessarily thin, but it gives men hope.
If you were in Cleveland, I’d be so tempted to write – you’re a brainy, non-generic chick who doesn’t seem to be looking for a man to entertain her, and it seems like we share a common mindset and have quite a bit in common – but a few things would keep me from doing so.
Again, getting burned in the past with face-only photo profiles.
The religion thing. You’re looking for someone who’s “Atheist, Buddhist / Taoist,
Other, Spiritual but not religious, Agnostic.” Why are Buddhists okay, but not liberal Christians? (Ever hear of the Quakers or United Church of Christ?) What about a less-than-observant Reform Jew? What about a deist or Christian-leaning Unitarian Universalist? Remember, the experience of most men is that the preference list in a WSM ad is usually non-negotiable.
You’ve got a kid, but you’re looking for a man who doesn’t have any. I don’t have any, but I’m a bit wary of profiles from women who ask for things that they can’t offer; in your case, being free of children. It reminds me a bit of the profiles from women with “average” body types making $35K looking for men with "athletic " body types only who have a minium income of $75K.
I look like a complete dork when I smile. It was very difficult to post these pictures as everyone I have ever met says I am way more attractive in person than any picture I have ever had taken. I have way worse pictures than this and I am smiling-ish in all of them. If I knew how to post pictures onto SDMB, I would find some for critique/hilarity. The swimsuit picture is actually full length but I cropped it. It seems very skeezy to have a pic of yourself in a swimsuit so that one is probably on its way out anyway.
Yeah, I have heard that from a friend of mine who is a non-believer who lists “Any” in the hopes it will get her more men. (I don’t want more men, I want the "right"men.) (Errr, man.) That’s a subject I get stuck on. I just can’t fathom why anyone who believes that they have found/been given the key to the meaning and purpose of life and eternal salvation would want to be in a relationship with someone who firmly rejects both.
That one is pretty much going to have to stand. I do, in fact, have a child and I do not do well with other people’s. I understand that it seems unfair to not be able to reciprocate, but I really don’t like little kids. Middle school and up are probably ok (hell, I used to be a middle school principal and I loved them) but there is not a box for that.
I was impressed at how quickly Match got my profile updated. Thanks again for all the feedback.
So, from the flurry of responses to this thread, it seems that eDating from a guy’s perspective is pretty much as hopeless as meeting someone in the real world.
This is kind of depressing because I actually thought eDating would allow me to weed out the undesirables and those with dissimilar interests without actually having to invest time and money into a bad date situation. It looks like I’m going to have to invest some money regardless with eFees as to “Date Fees” (dinner, movie, drinks, etc).
Plus, I’m kind of shy in the real world, which doesn’t help, but that’s another rant altogether specially reserved for the Pit.
Of all the sites out there, which one, IYHO, had you had the most luck with?
I propose that online dating from anyone’s perspective is no better than any other kind of dating.
No woman worth your time would object to splitting the cost of the first meeting, and even the first few subsequent dates. Hell, I all but insist on at least paying for myself, and have picked up the entire tab for several first meetings.
Unless you were hoping to know that the meeting/date would go well before even meeting the woman, in which case you were being totally unrealistic and I’m glad that you’ve learned something from this thread.
OR unless you’re one of those martyr types who believes that the guy should always pay for everything and then goes on to complain about how expensive dating is.
As my marriage broke up last year, I read these threads with more and more interest and became increasingly scared about how it would be out there. I’ve been on my own since October and it’s been about a hundred times easier than I could have ever imagined. This is from a guy who couldn’t get a date if his life depended on it back when he was in college. In fact, I have had more 22 year old college women interested in me now than when I was a 22 year old college student myself 20 years ago. (This isn’t saying much because two is greater than zero but you get the point.)
I’m fortunate to be in what I think is the perfect demographic for a single man: early 40’s, fit, not balding, tall, no kids, make a comfortable living, own a home and not a drinker or a smoker.
I tried match.com for two months and didn’t have a whole lot of success. elmwood had already done an excellent job describing the pitfalls of match. I sorted out women more than ten years younger and five years older, the ones with more than two kids and the fat/bbw/few extra pounders (pit me too) and limited the search to within 25 miles of my house. There was still a lot to choose from. I wrote a bunch of letters tailored to the individual and maybe one out of four or five wrote back. Excluding the Ukrainian rent-a-wifes, I got hit up by six or seven women who wrote to me first. With one exception, the communications ended after about two or three emails each.
As others have said, I think that there are a lot of women who have non-active accounts so they can’t write back unless they pay for a new month. I think that the ones who wrote to me probably wrote to a few other dudes as well and kept narrowing the list down to a sole survivor. Finally, I think that the main problem with match is that there is too much information. People tend to read profiles looking for a reason to reject and any little thing that you mention offhand could kill you. I can expand on that more if there is interest because this is getting too long as it is.
I have had an enormous amount of success with craigslist. I believe that it works better because you can write a short, pithy ad with only some basic information. Then as the emails go back and forth, you can learn more and more about each other, eventually share pictures, talk on the phone and then meet. It’s a more natural way to get to know someone online. It took me a bit to figure out how to write a craigslist ad for maximum success but I finally found the key. This is also something that I can expand on if there is interest. In the last six months I had a couple of six week very fun flings and when the flings weren’t happening I averaged a little over one date a week. You do have to go through a lot of dates to find mutual interest but they’re usually interesting and I have only had one somewhat bad experience.
I have done some non-internet dating too but that is outside of the scope of this thread.
RE: all this stuff about pitting men who aren’t attracted to BBWs/fat women. We don’t care that you’re not attracted to us. We care when you let us know by calling us “fatties”, “lard asses”, “porkers” and “Shamus” - all of which, btw, I’ve seen in personal ads.
That’s what’s pit-worthy. Not the lack of attraction - the manner in which it’s put across.
I’d like to hear more about what worked for you if you don’t mind sharing. I had a male friend use Craig’s List with zero success and I’m curious about where we (I tried to help him jazz up his ad) went wrong.
I very recently had a little luck with some dating, and most of em were from online. Some freak of luck or fate led me into about 4 dates in one month (March), three of which I had met online! One from facebook, one from match.com and one from myspace. None of them quite worked out, however.
I don’t know how true this is, but I have a hypothesis based on my experiences and what I infer from them. Women get lots of emails. There are much more men than women on the internet, and men tend to be less picky overall. Since there are so many men, it is like candy in a candy shop to women. Too many guys makes them jaded, and only the spectatular ones stand out.
Since this occurs, you have women that are extremely picky. He eats too loud, he was too nervous, the other guy was richer, etc. Soon you have a Seinfeld episode going on. Girls that are on a dating service for long are there because they are exceptionally picky or shallow. Probably the same with guys, or they are like me and not perfect looking, rich, or outgoing enough.
I don’t know how accurate this is, and I may be way off, but it seems pretty accurate in a general sense. There may of course be exceptions. I tend to think I am exception. (Sterotype, 28 male that isn’t too terrible to look at, never married, no kids, single for long periods of time- Womanizer or inept geek) Simply not true in this case. (at least as far as I know)
I’d say that is dead on, and I’ve met women who said this was the case too. I think another factor is that a woman is at her most attractive at around 18-29, while men are at their least. Physically men are attractive, but they are not ‘tested’. To be a good parent (which is all this stuff breaks down to at the end of the day anyway) aside from good genes and good semen (implied by good looks) a man has to have status, stability, power and the ability to commit in order to raise a kid. There is no way to tell if young men don’t have any of these things, there is no telling where the 23 year old guy will be in 10 years but the 43 year old guy has already proven himself and found his niche in life.
