Ladies, how do you make online dating suck less? :(

In My Humble Opinion
1

Ladies. Men have their own set of issues that don’t interest me.

So… sigh. I’m thinking of trudging my ass back to OK Cupid. I’ve recently changed my dating angle from half-assed to using my whole ass, and it’s kind of shitty. I meet people, but I don’t really like anyone who I meet. They’re mainly fine (except for Mr. No-Means-Yes), but no one who I really connect with. Then I had the brilliant idea of expanding my dating pool by a jillion percent by going online! Except I’ve done that before and it sucked.

I’m not sure what to do about my complaints. (Funnily enough, I suppose, is what prompted this is a friend telling me she’s returning to OKC, listing the *exact *gripes that I have.) There are just too many goddamn messages in general, making it fairly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. A huge chunk of the messages essentially boil down to “Hey, you’re pretty/nice/interesting/funny/cool. We should chat and maybe hang out,” which doesn’t seem terrible, but when you’re rained on by messages everyday, “You’re cool, let’s talk” isn’t something worth responding to. I get that for guys, online dating is a different ball of wax, so maybe they don’t feel like composing thoughtful responses considering their 5% rate of return, but this just kind of compounds the problem on the other end of women not responding because messages suck.

So how the hell is it that other women are navigating around this conundrum? I don’t like to think of myself as terribly picky, but if someone’s message was acceptable and they were at least average looking based on their profile pics, I responded. Sadly, these types of messages were startlingly few and far between. What the heck?

I’m sure that many of the guys with the lame messages or profiles are actually cool, but how am I supposed to know that? I can’t just respond to everyone in hopes that he’s secretly cool but doesn’t come off as so online. All I have to go on is your message, profile, and photos, and if those aren’t sparking the magic, then I just won’t respond, else I’ll be e-mailing random dudes all day. Other people seem to be navigating this territory just fine, but I can’t get this shit to work for me.

There are times in my life when I arrogantly conclude that I’m right and 50 million Frenchmen are wrong, but I’ve gotta be missing something here. Ladies? Share your knowledge. Do you just kind of widen your criteria, or change them to…? Or are there certain things to look for that wouldn’t be intuitive…? Are you writing certain types of things in your profile? Pictures…? I dunno. Fight some ignorance!

2

Not a woman but what about putting something in your profile saying you’ll only respond to meaningful messages?

3

I gave it up long ago, the percentage of “real” guys vs those just looking to get laid and using the shotgun method of contacting potentials is WAY overboard. It never seemed to matter what you put in your wants either, or HOW clear you are that (no smokers for instance)…They’ll contact you no matter what.

I got soooo many “ur cute, let’s have drinks” idiotic messages back when I tried. Argh, sorry I guess that’s not much help.

4

Also not a woman, but at one point I added a line to my profile that said “Don’t wink, send an email”, then I started getting emails that said things like “wink” or “I’m taking your advice and sending you an email” on top of all the “Hi” and “Hey there” emails. Like MOL said, I’m sure some of them are great, but, for the love of god, you’re making a first impression on a person you (in theory) want to have a relationship* with…put at least a little effort into it.

Also, I hate seeing the lines that say “If all you’re looking for is sex…”. From what I’ve heard, putting that in isn’t going to stop the messages and for the people, like me, that aren’t just looking for a one night/casual/NSA thing, it’s a bit off putting. Just ignore those messages and like MOL mentioned, just keep in mind that guys have their own crap to put up with as well.

*That’s the nice way of putting it, but I think there’s even for people looking for a long term relationship, I think there usually tends to be some shorter term goals.

5

I might be fortunate in that my “lol lets fuk” messages were rare. They existed, but the bulk of the useless messages I received were from people who had nothing to say other than “You’re cute, hi.”

And at one point, my “Message me if” field said something like “If you have something to say other than hi.” Not sure that works. Guys who don’t read profiles don’t read disclaimers within the profiles, so that didn’t have any effect. If it did have any effect, it probably was making me seem bitchy to the guys who actually did read.

Edit: Aha! Joey P just confirmed my suspicions! :beard stroking emoticon:

6

Women get too many messages to be able to respond to all of them, men have to send too many messages to get a response to be able to put in much effort into individual ones. It’s the circle of life in online dating.

7

The people sending meaningless messages aren’t reading profiles. They’re just spamming everyone and anyone looking for nibbles.

As a man who’s sent no more than 30 initial messages over the course of the last six months, the only advice I can give is to be sure that your profile is detailed enough to allow me to send a meaningful message. Otherwise, I don’t think there is a magic answer.

[QUOTE=MeanOldLady]

A huge chunk of the messages essentially boil down to “Hey, you’re pretty/nice/interesting/funny/cool. We should chat and maybe hang out,” which doesn’t seem terrible, but when you’re rained on by messages everyday, “You’re cool, let’s talk” isn’t something worth responding to. I get that for guys, online dating is a different ball of wax, so maybe they don’t feel like composing thoughtful responses considering their 5% rate of return, but this just kind of compounds the problem on the other end of women not responding because messages suck.
[/quote]

Rate of return is one thing, but honestly what you said in quotes basically all I think when I read a profile. It’s harsh to say, but the world isn’t full of special snowflakes. 90+% of profiles I see are essentially the same and it’s a very very rare one when I see something that legitimately makes me think that we are more compatible. It’s really hard to come up with something unique when essentially what it comes down to is that (in no specific order) I:

Don’t think you’re crazy
Find you reasonably attractive
You’re geographically near me
Think you’re a functioning member of society
There’s a decent chance we are compatible
Have at least some confidence you will respond

I think if you are expecting to see a profile or receive a message that will give you butterflies, you are expecting way too much. You should be shooting for what I listed above and then try to go on a low key short date to see if there is something more.

And don’t think everyone is having a blast on OKCupid. Of the 13 women that have messaged me in the last month, 12 are still on. If I go back to 4 months ago that number drops to half. I think a lot of people don’t find success and give up, so don’t worry too much if that is you too.
The other thing I would suggest is to just ignore the incoming messages and go out looking at profiles. If you do the math, one spammer is going to send more messages than 20 guys who take the time to write something meaningful. So even if the good guy to spammer ratio is 20:1, you are going to get more spam messages than good ones.

8

As an aside, the best feature OKCupid could add is a way to see how many messages a person sends a week. Far more useful than how frequently they respond.

9

Look at guys’ profiles and write the ones who seem appealing from their profiles. That was my strategy and it allowed me to meet a lot of guys who were appealing instead of just sifting through a lot of lame messages.

10

-It helps to give potential responders hooks and prompts to latch onto. They can be serious or silly or whatever. Ignore the chumps who don’t follow any of your prompts–obviously they didn’t even read your profile. Change them up often.

-Try “uglying up” your profile pictures. You’ll get fewer responses, but they’ll tend to be from less retarded guys.

-Don’t get discouraged by dry spells–the long game is the way to play. You have to find a way of making it fun for yourself in the meantime. Try thinking up hilarious ways to mess with the real dirtwipes who message you. This can actually end up being more fun than the serious dating part.

11

I wish I could tell you it’s easy, but I’m not a fibber.
I joined match and got the usual landslide of crass, stupid emails you get when you have a halfway decent picture. So few were within my interest/age parameters I quit pretty quick. I made a thread on here about it.
Then I joined SciConnect but my lack of a degree earned me plenty of rejections; one person I wound up corresponding w/ for several months turned out to be a mentally ill cutter who soldered things into his arm. The other was stringing along me and another woman w/o telling either of us; she found out about me a few weeks before we met and told him to cut off contact or she’d dump him. I gave up and went back to Match, then quit again for the same reasons as before.
After I moved to Charleston I joined OKC but that’s back when it was fun tests and profiles; now it seems to just be a dating site. I had one good date from OKC w/ a nice, normal guy who - wait for it - said he’d call me and never did.

Good luck to ya. It’s ugly out there.

12

I had no idea the ratios were that bad. I had a lot of activity on match.com and did not sent that many messages. In fact I sent very few but the ones I sent were responded to at least 70%+ of the time. I got way more (hey, you sound interesting) messages from women than I sent out. Maybe it’s my age cohort (45-55) and people don’t play as many games. Oddly I got a lot of women with professional degrees contacting me.

Don’t know how old you are but I think match.com might be a useful place to look if you are over 40. I get the impression OKC might be for a younger demographic.

Per the other responses anything negative or overly defensive in a profile about how poorly they had been treated or cheated on by other men or warnings akin to “don’t waste my time with X” would get a pass. IMO it spoke to a potentially angry, confrontational attitude and that was not the field I wanted to play on.

Another red flag was women who indicated they were retiring or winding down and now wanted to enjoy life with a companion. I’m 55 but I’m still working a lot of hours and the vibe (from my perspective) was that wanted someone available for cruises and extensive vacations. I am not that guy, I will probably never be that guy.

Good luck!

13

I had the best luck with guys I initiated messages with (including my now husband.) I would respond to guys who messaged me first now and then, but I found it much more efficient to actively focus on finding guys I wanted to date, rather than passively filtering out the ones I didn’t.

14

Yup. I managed to at least have meaningful conversations (if not many dates) with guys I sought out myself, rather than the other way around.

I actually ended up with a dude NOT from OKCupid, but if I were ever to find myself in that position again, I wouldn’t even bother with the vast majority of the guys who message me first.

(Also I read part of that thread you linked above and holy shit, what is WITH all the victim-blaming up in there?? “Well maybe you should’ve realized that dudes just DO that, man!” I…just…no. Get out.)

15

I responded to no one after a few lame tries. I chose to do the picking and had much better results.

16

That seems wise. About 15 years ago I tried online dating, and oh the psychos I encountered. A few women contacted me, and it was great; at least one of them hit it off with me (more or less–after a few dates things fizzled out, but at least we got a few dates out of it).

17

Shit, man, not encouraging.

So okay, it might be helpful to actively recruit as opposed to sifting through resumes, hoping someone fits the bill. Fair enough. I must admit, like most women, I took the approach of sifting through messages and going from there, which obviously didn’t work. Time to stop being a pansy and take charge of the situation. It’s very rare that the solution to a problem of mine is to be more assertive, but this seems to be one of those cases. And just as a bonus, so that people can do a forehead smack when reading this, I almost never messaged anyone on OKC, but the two that I did, I ended up going on dates with. Didn’t turn out, obviously, but there were dates. You’re thinking, “Hey dummy! Why didn’t that clue you in that that might be a better approach?” Because, okay? I don’t like being rejected. :frowning:

God, I hate this. Maybe I should go back to the former husband. No, just kidding. That guy’s an asshole.

18

Now now, no cause to reheat a plate of leftovers when you’ve already decided to make a new meal!
Yes, it sure is riskier to be the one reaching out and the rejection stings. But w/ a greater chance of success, how can it not be worth it?

19

I’m not a woman, let alone a lady, so I don’t know if you want my advice. . .

Online dating sucks for both sides. One friend spend a good amount of times and money placing paid ads in the classifieds in Tokyo just to get tons of responses “send pics”.

When I’ve advertised for entry-level positions, I’d get flooded with resumes. Enough so, that sorting out the good from the bad would be difficult. This is sort of the same thing. You don’t use the same criteria for the first cut as you would for a final interview.

I used to sort through the crap, eliminating the obviously bad and then do a cut and paste response. This second letter would be slightly modified to fit the particulars, but it wouldn’t have to be regenerated from scratch for each person.

You do have to get an understanding that this process is absolutely not a reflection of you personally. It’s simply the nature of the game. Look at how many guys you don’t consider because of their photo or something in their profile.

You can’t do in depth interviews with a zillion people. Nor can you get your hopes up on each and every one you think may be cute. I used to date a lot of women I’d meet in singles bars, and quickly found that things were very different on the second meeting, even though we had met once previously.

Good luck.

20

That matches my OKC experience here in Charleston. Some women who wanted to email, a bunch of no-responses (and I send out thoughtful messages, not one-liners) and one date that seemed nice but there was no follow up. Disappointing.