I must disagree very strongly with this. My daughter, as a just-married adult, was having difficulties and put on various anti-depressants. Her personality changed, but she couldn’t see that. Over the last ten years, I could see how the fuzziness of the drugs kept her more stable but that was mostly because she wasn’t dealing with the issues at hand. She lost the lows, but she also lost the highs and her individuality. As what I said could only be seen, from her drug-relieved state, as ill-informed, I just bit my tongue and hoped for a miracle. I have no medical qualifications and so wasn’t totally confident of my stand, anyway.
Two daughters later and her new psychiatrist says she should never have been on the drugs in the first place, but should have dealt with the situation. With his help, she is now almost drug-free, handing the situation brilliantly, and my happy, perky, individual, loving daughter is back again. Her marriage is now better than ever, the daughters really happy. She now sees that her real self has emerged again and she told me yesterday: “I am back to stay!” Heavenly words!
I did eHarmony for two months. I had basic formulated contact with, I think, 8-10 women in that time. Not one went to real contact. The one that got closest suddenly gave me one of the standard “I’m now in a relationship” responses, which might well have been a brush off, considering I gave one of those to another woman that I thought was a raving moonbat, or it might have been because she really DID find a real relationship on the site. That is the goal, anyway! Of the other 6-8 women, a couple stopped communicating with no further information, and I did the same to another couple. I cut off two with “no further interest” type responses, both because they not only were complete raving loons, but they were getting personally offensive*. (Seriously people, a dating site is no place to start a flame war with someone. Just walk away.)
I never got the sense that there were more women than men or the other way around. I never even thought about it - it certainly is not in me to create such a thought as an excuse for why I didn’t do better.
For better or worse, I think that the basic rules of dating apply even to those sites: That being, that the men will make the vast majority of the initial contact efforts, and that the women will sit back and sort through said contacts. It may well be that some people do not expect this to be the case, but it should not be surprising that the same rules are in effect.
One woman noted in contact that she was on disability, which was not in her profile. Having recently completed a hostile, bitter divorce from a woman on SSDI for Mental Illness, I asked her what she was on disability for. I told her about my ex-wife and suggested that I wouldn’t have a problem with physical disability, but I hoped she would understand that I wasn’t interested in dating another woman with a mental illness disability.
Turns out she had a physical disability. But she went off on me for several pages about my alleged bigotry towards people with disabilities!
Ok, so now you’re showing me that you have a mental illness disability too, eh?
The wierd part is that she attempted to continue contact with me after making a seriously over-the-top and completely misdirected personal attack!
No. Fuck No. Gold plated, hand embossed Fuck No with dark chocolate and a cherry on top.
Well, that’s a dating story and you might think it’s off-topic, but to me it definitely fits in a thread titled “People are weird in ways you can’t even imagine”.
I hope my comment wasn’t taken to mean I thought you had created an excuse etc., which was not my intention. Rather, when reading complaints, one possibility is always that the person complaining is theorizing factors apart from him-/herself.
Another potential aspect of course is that some are advertising but actually are already married and looking for something on the side, which could work both ways, M/F. I think they’ve gotten tougher (i.e. will prosecute frauds) on that score. Or, what about those with multiple user names on one site, or those who belong to one vs. two vs. ten?
Just from haunting various discussions about such sites I had the feeling that there were a lot more guys than women. The very notion of internet dating seems more like a guy proposition, somehow. But on reflection I’m sure women could detail what seem like inequities that guys would say, “Nah, it isn’t like that.”
I suspect there are lots of people out there to be met. We—men and women—just aren’t meeting what we want.
No, not at all. Sorry for any miscommunication. Rather, I was expressing that it was a new idea to me, one I had never considered. But I could certainly imagine plenty of people telling themselves that to “soften the blow”.
We don’t know what we want, or we want what we cannot have. Or we want that which will not be good for us.
After all, how many women want the “bad boy”? Almost all of them? Will the bad boy be good for them? Hell no. The bad boy is a self-centered jerk who will treat them like shit, cheat on them, use them, and never really love them.
How many guys want the “hot chick”? Almost all of them? Will the hot chick be good for them? Hell no. She’s a self-centered jerk who will treat them like shit, cheat on them, use them, never put out and never really love them.
Ooh. I’ve been on for three weeks. I’ve had some very real contact with one, and am having coffee with two more this weekend. I’m communicating with about half a dozen more.
Ah, I see. For my part, I kind of assumed they would be male-heavy. Maybe it’s my bias but I thought women would want more of a Harlequin romance setup than a computer would provide.
BTW it sounds like you had much better luck than I did with e Harmony et al. I ascribe my lack of success to my inherent nerdiness. I’ve always been book smart but struggled with social stuff. I’ve heard that writing a good profile can make a huge difference and mine was probably off, since I don’t really understand what women are looking for. I bet they can smell a nerd a mile away :smack: :rolleyes: :mad: :o
While I think I have a lot to offer, I don’t think it markets well on such sites. That may be true of a lot of people. E.g. if you were selling a line of guitars, a TV ad allows you to see and hear them; the radio allows you to hear them. A print ad would allow you see them. Which one’s best? That depends on its strengths and weaknesses.
A long time ago I had a human sexuality course. The teacher said something to the effect that people have different criteria for marriage throughout the life span. When we’re really young, it’s all about looks. Then, after divorce, we want someone whose personality captivates us. By the time we’re seniors, we’re just looking for companionship.
My aunt is a good example. She married, had a family. Her husband died when she was 55 or something. She didn’t go through ALL the stages, but she did later remarry. I never saw her and husband number two kiss or act with affection toward one another but they didn’t seem unhappy at all. I think they just wanted a companion. When he died, he was buried alone. Years later she died and was buried with her first husband.
As for me, I’m not ready to settle for mere companionship yet. My watchwords these days are “involved” and “evolved.”
“involved”—if she’s too busy (e.g. a workaholic or devoting huge amounts of time to her kids or a playa) then no thanks. Relationships take time to build and if some haven’t prioritized for a relationship. It’s like having a Ferrari but no gas to power it, and I’ll keep looking.
“evolved”—we aren’t kids any more. There’s a lot of give and take and we aren’t the Cleavers here, with socially-defined norms to guide us. We can’t follow a map—we have to draw one as we go.
St.-Exupéry said something to the effect that love isn’t about gazing into each other’s eyes: it’s about looking outward in the same direction. I think that’s highly evolved.
One of the things I’ve observed in life are that there are people who cannot exist without being in a relationship. If their current relationship is going south, they’ll form another one before breaking off the first one, so that they never have to be alone. If they do end up alone, it’s as if their entire world is falling apart! I’ve seen people in incredibly inappropriate and unhealthy temporary relationships, just to bridge the gap until they find something more suitable, because god forbid they should be without a relationship for even a day!
Then there are those of us who are more independent and capable. For whom a relationship is a “nice to have” rather than a requirement. In the end, I think we’re the more healthy of the two, because we are not continually compromising ourselves in a desperate bid to have a relationship at all times.
My wife is a psychotherapist and she deals with people who are having troubles of one sort all day. Her favorite saying is “Truth is stranger than fiction.” Having lived through a few of those episodes myself I tend to agree.
Which one? Tell her good luck. I’m doing the Lake Stevens half in July.
For the record, I started running and exercising a lot because I was skinny, not the other way around. (Hey, who else would gain 5 lbs because of running?)
This sounds to me as if the drug industry’s self-serving hype and advertising has worked exceptionally well on you. They serve it up, you swallow it. “The answer to this problem is… take a pill!”.
Wrong. If you feel scared to open your mouth, address that issue and resolve it. Don’t cover it up with a drug. This makes as much sense as the politician who ‘tackled’ the high crime statistics by shredding the pages the stats were printed on. It’s the mindset that says “I’ve cancelled out the evidence of the problem, so the problem has been solved”. You start off with one problem (scared to talk to people) and end up with two (scared to talk to people and dependent on some chemical intake supplied by a legalised drug pusher). And, at the risk of stating the obvious, the drug industry has no interest whatsoever in helping you in any way that might result in you paying them less money or using fewer of their products. Their only interest is telling you anything you want to hear, so long as they continue to get your money.
I am genunely astounded that you can see this in terms of me being allowed to “see the real person”. It’s the exact opposite! It’s also grossly deceptive and unfair. I’m meeting you, and it’s the real me. This is who I am, this is what I’m like, this is the real picture. You may like it or not, of course. If you don’t like the picture, I can’t say I blame you. It’s okay. But it’s an honest picture, undistorted by any kind of recreational drugs or any junk peddled by the drugs industry. You are meeting me, and I discover that the ‘you’ I met is the one who is knowingly masking her real self by ingesting drugs on a daily basis, knowing that these interfere with her brain chemistry. If you happen to miss, or miss your supply, you could be dramatically different. It’s not a fair deal. If I can’t be allowed to meet the real you, I’m not really ‘meeting you’ at all. It’s the direct equivalent of me submitting a photo to a dating agency suggesting I’m an improved version of George Clooney or Pierce Brosnan, when in reality I’m utterly devoid of any redeeming good looks whatsoever.
Dishonesty isn’t a good starting point for any kind of meeting with anyone. And all the hype in the world from the drugs industry won’t change that.
I had clinical depression for the first 21 years of my life, all right? I had very very subdued emotions, to the point of most of the time feeling nothing. There was something chemically wrong with my brain. On top of that, I had social anxiety, where I would break into a sweat going into stressful or new situations. And by stressful, I mean making a doctor’s appointment or going to get my hair cut.
After I took Paxil, it cleared up the depression entirely. It also got rid of the physical reactions from social anxiety so I could deal with the mental ones.
I don’t take drugs for just anything. In fact, I currently don’t take any drugs at all. And yes, I think a lot of times doctors prescribe things because the patients want them. But I know a lot of people that SSRI helped, including my family. My mom was an OCD bitch before she got on Paxil. And there was no way therapy was going to fix the chemical problem with my brain.
Hint: Health Industry =/ Drug Industry. Paxil wasn’t covering up anything. The depression and social anxiety were. Paxil took that away.
Considering the symptoms (evidence) of Social Anxiety are unable to interact with people, how is taking that away NOT solving the problem? And good doctors are not ‘drug pushers,’ they’re people who want to help people.
So you’re saying that the ‘real’ person is the one that everyone sees and not the person inside? Because I used to be the ‘shy quiet’ one, but inside I was, well, like I am now (except younger). So what’s the real me? I’d say it’s the sarcastic, witty, creative, slightly-crazy person inside who can now easily show that outside.
I really doubt my experience will change your mind, but, at least in my case and everyone I know, you’re wrong.
Sorry, I type too fast: Considering the symptom (evidence) of Social Anxiety is an inability to interact with people, how is taking that away NOT solving the problem?
Well, I’m pretty good at identifying songs on the radio, sometimes on the first note. But only if I’ve heard the song before…that’s all I can think of.
