Online Dating Experiences

In My Humble Opinion
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Unfortunately, my job prevents me from going out and meeting women the conventional way at bars and clubs. I hate the fucking graveyard shift, believe me.

Keep in mind that I’m 21, so resorting to online dating seems a bit iffy to me, but what else can I do really. I opened up a profile on okcupid and so far I’ve messaged about a dozen girls.

Out of those messages, I’ve had all of ONE person reply back to me, and since then she has either changed her name or deleted her profile because I can’t find her anymore. I’m going to keep at it and message some more women, but I gotta tell ya that so far my experiences with online dating have been less than heartening.

Any advice is welcome I guess.

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Fair enough, I did miss that sentence.

She’s right though, except it’s that humanity is full of exceptionally bad people. You just notice them more on the internet because it tends to be where folks go when they have difficulty fitting into society. (Though it should always be noted that that’s not 100% of the people who choose to spend their time online.) Plus, their thoughts are written out for anyone to see, rather than just being another face in the crowd at the bar who doesn’t say anything to you but will masturbate while thinking of you later that night.

And if you’re not very attracted to the sort of person who would like online dating, it probably looks even worse. I want someone who quotes internet memes and plays World of Warcraft, but MOL probably runs screaming from that kind of person. Doesn’t mean they’re bad people, just that she’s not interested in them.

I dunno, I could be misreading badly. Maybe MOL is the sort of person to think someone is genuinely a worse person just because they’re not personally attractive to her. I know there’s some folks like that floating around, but she never struck me as one.

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She has said a lot more than that. And most of the people I’ve known who’ve had good luck with online dating don’t fit the stereotypes in your second post. I also doubt that 17% of newly married couples are geeks.

Mol is a pretty cool poster on here, ime, but my experience differs wildly from hers on this.

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Oh crap, I was supposed to pay? Good grief. May have gotten better results. Well whatever, glad that’s over now and there’s no longer the need.

I get that. I’m out of school, don’t meet folks through school or work these days, and even moved to a new town somewhat recently. Meeting people (friends too, not just dates) was hard when I first got here, but it came together. If dating online is easier for you, have at it. I could see how it’s different for someone with children and a second job, but I don’t have either of those getting in the way of my free time or ability to go out. Online dating seemed like it would be easier to me too, which is why I tried it, but it turned out to be much harder to weed through OKC than it was to throw myself outside.

Yes. I am going to accuse you of making her up. Seriously, can you please not pretend there’s no difference between “There seems to me to be a relationship between how much one likes to dick around online and how favorably one views online dating” and “There is no such thing as a person who’s found a partner online who doesn’t also spend a lot of time online in general”?

You know, I didn’t think this at first, but considering how easily these people cry when you criticize this medium of dating…

I’ve also said that I’ve dated online and have meet several men who were nice, smart, good looking people, but that we didn’t connect in real life. I guess this means I thought of myself, a lot of my friends, and everyone I met up with who was fine, but not for me, as losers too? Or do you just like that sentence because it offends you? I’m not going to say everyone on Match.com is a loser, but there is a whole lot off chaff out there, and getting through it to the people you might actually connect with in person is extremely difficult. It’s not like a huge party where you may only know something like 25% of the people in the room, but they’re all connected somehow, so will probably be at around the same age, have similar interests, education, personality types, and you’re much, much more likely to have an interesting conversation with the first person who talks to you than you would with the first person who messages you on OK Cupid. Online, you just have this whole sea of people, most of whom are nothing like you, and you wouldn’t date in a million years. I double dog dare any straight woman, even the ones who think dating online is so cool that it wears the cat’s pajamas, to tell me they were not inundated with gobs of terrible messages every single day, and that the percentage of quality exchanges with folks they might be interested in was not vanishingly small.

Edit: Bosstone, ha! Yes, I would run away screaming from someone who spoke in internet memes and played a lot of World of Warcraft. Doesn’t make him a bad dude, just not for me. I actually dated a pretty serious gamer once. It… did not work.

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And that’s all we’re trying to say. Nobody is saying that internet dating is a superior form of dating, or that it works for everyone, or anything like that. If it’s not your style, cool, not your style. But plenty of perfectly everyday average people meet online these days.

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Honestly, if you want to continue giving it a shot, I would at least give a pay service a chance for a month or two. Like I said, for me the difference was very apparent, although some prefer the free sites. I just think there’s a lot more garbage floating around in the free sites since, well, they’re free. Your mileage may vary. And the generic advice: have someone go over your profile, write specific, interesting things about yourself not just shit like “I like to laugh”, don’t lie, include a current photo as your main picture (I think you’re allowed to put in older photos deeper in the album), etc.

Oh, and when you do get a date, don’t dick around for weeks writing back and forth. Set an in-person date early on, so you don’t get wrapped up in some kind of fantasy only to discover you don’t “click” in real life.
And if it doesn’t work, the more traditional dating routes might work better for you.

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Mol, you can’t be reading your own posts. Never mind.

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I’d modify this a little bit and say that one of the things about the internet, in general, is that it makes not only cheating easier, but all sorts of dishonesty, including self-deception. It’s very easy to write on a profile that you’re a kind, thoughtful person who enjoys great conversations. And even when it’s not true, often the person saying it really believes that’s it’s true. And that’s assuming people want to be honest. I just got done with a woman, utterly out of her gourd, who came on strong (practically sat in my lap at one of the places we went on our first date, was kissing me by the end of the first drink we had that night, had her hand on my inner thigh and her nails dragging down my back for much of our date, which went till 4:30 a.m. etc), talked about how awesome I was, how she believed in me, etc… and then later revealed that she was on a break from the love of her life, a man who was “the exception to a great many rules” (:rolleyes:), that she’d just recently ‘broken up with’ him a handfull of weeks earlier, and was still suffering “epic heartbreak”. And, by the way, they were getting back together.

As for my story in general, I’d been with the same woman for 8 years and we recently mutually decided to split, about a year ago. As I’m a teacher, I really don’t have free time for dating much. As I’m an INFP, it also generally takes me at least one time meeting someone and observing them until I figure out how I want to relate to them. For me, online dating tends to ‘solve’, or at least, ameliorate both of those problems. I can send/receive emails while grading papers, and set up dates for nights I happen to be able to clear from work obligations. I can also learn enough about a person (assuming they’re honest and open) that I can tell whether or not it makes sense to meet up in a romantic context.

Of course, as has been repeated very, very often: you have no idea at all if you’re really compatible until you meet in person. None. So I try to chat up/go out with as many women as possible. In general I’ve had the most luck with OKC. Met some awesome women who are still friends, a whole bunch of FWB’s, and one short relationship. Match.com is a fucking joke, considering that it’s “matching” ability is anemic to the point of fainting. Other sites like AdultFriendFinder are useful for casual hookups, and NSA and, less commonly, FWB stuff, if that’s what you’re looking for.

I think that, in general, online dating has some significant advantages over meatspace dating, including but not limited to a greater ability to gain minor background information about someone you’re considering approaching. It’s also got significant drawbacks, including but not limited to the “Guys’ inboxes vs girls’ inboxes” situation. Another thing I’d point out is that it’s tremendously seductive to buy into someone’s persona before you meet them. It’s often a tremendously bad idea to go into a first date with any expectations about the person at all, but online dating tends to encourage people to think that they have an accurate, and complete, picture of another person’s mind.

Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.

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^ And that kind of shows how variable the dating sites are, and how some personalities click on one and not others. For me, it was OKC that was the joke with their stupid quizzes and Match that worked great. Vice versa for FinnAgain. So if one doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t mean they all won’t work for you. But I think we can all agree eHarmony sucks, right? :wink:

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That is very true. I have a difficult time believing that my experiences were uncommon in regards to meeting deceptive women via online dating.

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Yes, really. Would you rather meet someone who you’ve actually met or someone you’ve never met?

You don’t have to be an attractive woman to meet men in public. You really don’t.

It’s also not easy to use online dating to meet people if you’re a guy.

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Personally, I was disgusted by the number of not-at-all dishonest women who had no compunction at all about admitting they wanted to cheat on their boyfriends or husbands. “Do you want to meet for drinks Friday?” “yeah, Friday is perfect. My husband works late Friday nights!”

Forget about trying to hide it from me, they never even thought to ask if I was ok with it.

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That’s horrifying!

At least, they were honest. However, the women I met lied about their appearance (the biggest lie), interests and occupations. It’s troublesome and awkward when you have to ask random people this (due to the fact that the picture was taken 5 years ago): Are you soandso114?

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I was to meet a woman one time, I swear, for a walk on the beach. I saw her pictures and she was blonde, fit, early 40’s and very attractive. I get to the meeting place and a woman comes walking towards me and gives me a smile. Well, she was blonde but flabby and a good fifteen years older than the pictures. I was not pleased at all. Luckily, my real date was following a few yards behind her and looked exactly like the pics.

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Looks like you won the lottery. I thought a requirement of online dating was a basic understanding of photo shop.

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going to repost these stats, as MM and MoL still act like you have to get some kind of lucky to have success at online dating.

it’s fine to have whatever opinion you have, but you can’t ignore reality. there is a metric for the *actual *success of online dating.

are all these people just getting lucky as well?

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Great story.

Well I may take back my comment about POF and free sites, I met a lady 3-4 months ago on POF and we had a few dates and clicked pretty well but alas she and I were not in the right head-space at the time to continue it. So 3 months later a phone call out of the blue and well it looks like it’s on.

She went on the free site to test the waters so to speak and then went off the site and did some soul searching and realized that well I’m a decent bloke and remade contact.

Some people it seems jump on these sites and are bowled over by the responses and to be honest they aren’t ready for it. So be a gentleman, play nice, don’t be a freak and you never know what may happen.

But the best advice I can give you is be yourself but be your best self, don’t spend 6 weeks on line (1 to 2 weeks for me is maximum before IRL meeting) and when sending an email read her profile first.

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Every woman I met through online dating, without exception, looked accurately like her profile picture. There is a caveat–I did not go for woman with “too good to be true” looking photos or with “glamour” style shots, and I went out with women that generally had at least three different kinds of photos: a head-and-shoulders picture, a full-body or three quarters shot, and a “personality” shot. OK, my approach wasn’t quite THAT scientific, but I’ve found in retrospect, those were the commonalities. I was not disappointed by any of them physically.

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Back story: several months ago, I put a profile on Match and, later, eHarmony. I sent over 20 “hey, you sound like an interesting person. I’m intrigued by the ________ on your profile. Let’s get chat” messages and got NOTHING but “no, thanks,” and very often, not even that.

Now, I admit that at 55 years old, I’m no smokin-hot babe, but I’m very presentable. Tall, not overweight, fit, blonde, good features. Good job, friendly, smart, funny, have an interesting life. I didn’t sound desperate (at least I don’t think so) but got nowhere. Zip. Nada. I’m not so good with that kind of blanket rejection, so I cancelled my memberships.

Time goes by. Okay, so I ginned up some courage this weekend and put a profile on okcupid. Took new photos and everything. I was honest that I’m looking to date, am not really ready to get married again right now but would like to have a “steady guy.” If it leads to more, great. I was honest about my height and weight (5’8", 160), my interests and activities, and my “non-negotiables”: no smoking, no hunting, no devout/preachy Christians.

There are exactly SIX men who met the basic criteria of 53 to 65 years of age and living with 25 miles of me, and, no, I don’t live on the far side of the moon. I sent messages to two of them; two of the others couldn’t pass one of the non-negotiables; and the other two looked at my profile but didn’t contact me. One of the ones I contacted wrote back immediately and said that I wasn’t thin/fit/buff/athletic enough for him. I emailed back and forth with the other and we met on Sunday for coffee but concluded that there’s no connection.

Obviously, the pickins are pretty slim for me on okcupid, but Match and eHarmony are huge. So, any guess what might be wrong? The only thing I can think of is that I am horsewoman. I own two horses, which I regularly ride, train and show. I am NOT a cowgirl (is that the image most people have when they think of a woman who rides?) I ride dressage, which is classical and very elegant, but I don’t think most people have even heard of it.

Are men turned off/intimidated by women who ride horses?

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100% of the time?

Sample size?

How do you define “too good to be true?”