My experience is that it blows. All that happens if your a dude is that you send a bunch of messages and get nothing back.
From what I could tell, the liars did so by about three inches. I know how tall I am, so if you claim to be two inches taller than I am, but are actually shorter, you’re lying. If you claim to be three inches taller than I am, but we’re the same height, you’re lying. Basically, every short guy I went out with (defined as 5’8" or shorter) lied, which is pretty noticeable considering I’m 5’7.5", so with me, no, they can’t get away with fudging about an inch or so. The 6’ plus guys I met either were honest, or were too tall for me to notice the difference. I suppose a 6’1" guy could get away with adding an inch with me.
Truth. This reminds me of my friend’s girlfriend trying to set me up with someone before the friend cut her off. “No, no, no, no. Mol’s not gonna like that guy.” When I asked him why, he began describing his personality, and yeah, so not for me. Both friend and girlfriend agreed on the personality description, except girlfriend didn’t know me well enough to realize this kind of guy would never work for me. I would accept a set up from a good friend, and no one else.
I really truly am 6’0" exactly. I have had a couple of woman tell me that they were pleased that I didn’t fudge my height. I have met a few women who subtracted a couple of years from their age. They told me that “everyone does that.”
It’s a girlfriend of a good friend my good friend won’t get any peace until he gets me to agree. It’s getting better now that the girlfriend knows me a little better and my friend screens out the worst (for me) ones. The last one wanted to know my birth date so that she could look at my chart or something. My friend said not to even bother after that.
Ouch. No wiggle room for footwear or hair?
Perhaps I’m just really bad at gauging heights - I know a guy who looks like Lurch from the Addams Family and I always assumed we were the same height because our eyes line up, but he’s got a forehead you can project movies onto, so it turns out he’s actually a little bit taller than me.
I agree that would be more ideal. But for me that just didn’t seem possible. I let it be known to all my friends, particularly my female friends, that I was available to be set up. Maybe it was because of my age. All the friends of my friends were either married or total train-wrecks that they knew to keep away from me. I got zero dates thru friends.
This explains everything! I actually tell the truth in my profiles. What a fool I’ve been.
Speak for yourself. I’m already 6’5 and I don’t bother lying. Still no one replies.
I find this all pretty interesting. It seems to me that some people work really well in selecting potential mates and attracting them in an online context, and some don’t. As I said, I’m a very average looking male, balding, and I would say two-thirds to three-quarters of the women on Match.com I messaged responded to me. Of course, I didn’t write them stupid shit like “I like to eat pussy.”
Well, sure, but if everybody lies, and everybody knows everybody lies, then they’re mentally subtracting three inches and think you’re just a pipsqueak at 6’2".
If we were to take the heights from everyone’s OKCupid profiles and plot them out, I wonder how it would compare to the general population. Would there be evidence of systemic exaggeration?
When I post ideas like that, my disappointing results on such sites becomes something less of a mystery.
OKCupid crunched the numbers (back when they still generated those excellent blog posts) and it turns out men add 2 inches on average. Surprisingly, so do the women!
Both also pretty egregiously inflate their incomes. My workplace blocks like half the Internet so I can’t dig it up, but someone can probably find it and post the URL.
I’m simply convinced it took only a few guys robo-spewing dozens of those each day, thinking it worth it if it works 1/10,000; and how few insecure women, who put up profiles only for the validation that they’re desirable, to contaminate the entire process.
Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes
Now I don’t know if I should post that I’m 6’8 to lie or so that they’ll know how tall I really am.
I guess I’m a rarity. I was 100% truthful in my profile.
I was also truthful and made a point to put up a flattering but honest picture (I am overweight). I also early on decided to just contact women who approached me first since I have a thick skin but even I have limits to the amount of rejection I can handle 
and I could assume that women who approached me already found something they liked about me.
The result was I corresponded with many women and met several of them. Got (and gave) a lot of, “thanks but no thanks” but I had one relationship that lasted several months and I am currently in another relationship that just reached its six month anniversary and in each case it was all people I would have never met any other way. Like I wrote earlier in this thread, it really isn’t much different from any other form of dating. If anything it is better because it makes breaking the ice easier and the pool of people is bigger.
I will agree that online dating is likely to be much less successful for people with very specific requirements. It’s more like browsing a slightly offbeat independent bookstore, and less like ordering from Amazon. If you absolutely need a vegetarian iItalian doctor over 5’11, you aren’t going to find that. If you just want to meet a fairly wide array of single people who have cleared a few of the major deal breakers on the off chance something clicks, it’s great.
I think it also depends a lot on how well you get on with people. I had a ton of fun with it, but I find meeting and chatting with a somewhat random assortment of people from my city is intrinsically enjoyable, even if it doesn’t lead anywhere. I had a lot of fun exploring the city while learning about the lives and jobs and hobbies of people who have such different lives than my own. Someone on the Dope once said people are like short stories written by God, and (minus the religion) that’s what it kind of felt like- a bunch of neat little random short stories.
If you are more particular about your company and don’t tend to “click” with people easily, it’s probably going to be pretty tiresome.
Hey! I am not dull!
Not in my experience or that of my female friends. By the way I am a bloke but what grils tell me is that if they exclude the men looking for a one night stand or send them dick picks there are not that many left over. So for a decent bloke who has a job and is not butt ugly it seems to work. Then again this is Australia and maybe it is different here?
In my experience, the men who fail to have any luck whatsoever fall into one of three categories:
1.) Their profile sucks (awful photo, boring info, goes into depth on the wrong details) or they’ve been so screwed by the gene pool that they’re simply too unattractive to really get much return no matter how good the profile is.
2.) They send women the same horribly cliché one-line message and hope for the best. IMO this type of “spray and pray” approach to messaging attractive women, especially if you don’t say anything different from every other guy who messages her in a given day, is just a recipe for failure. There are many websites out there with instructions on what to say, just do a search and you’ll get stuff like this online dating article with examples of what to send / not send women. IMO, it all comes down to this: don’t be boring, whatever you do!
3.) They give up too easily. Seriously, if you’re not a loser, have a decent photo / profile, and send women messages that aren’t boring / cliché, then it’s basically just a matter of patience and perseverance before one of your messages turns into a date. Even if it takes 10 dates to find someone special, how is that any different from the offline world?
I think some people on here have had a few bad experiences and then decided online dating is a waste of time… but let’s be honest, if that 17% stat is true, then it’s way more effective than walking into a nightclub where you might be lucky to have a 5% success rate…
True 'dat. Separate yourself from the pack and it’s a solid way of meeting like-minded people of the opposite sex.
Oooh, meow! You’re trying really hard to earn your username, aren’t you?
17% seems pretty impressive to me, given that I bet not even 17% of single people are even on dating sites.
6 dates that had no click would have made me give up too, but I know other people who gave it longer and did find the love of their lives, while some others are still trying, finding it frustrating but finding real-life hook-ups frustrating too, mainly because they’re looking for a very specific type of person who happens to be quite rare.
Online dating is not entirely made up of dull, undateable people, but if that’s what you think of them - even your own friends who use online dating - then it’s probably not for you.