Sorry, I am not your monkey (Responses to personal ads)

The BBQ Pit
81

[QUOTE=John Mace]
OK, here’s my honest, unfiltered response to that add:

Gee, it’s amazing you don’t have half the males on the planet banging your door down with that invitation. Maybe if you just spend some time being an obviously friendly, outgoing person without all the extra self-congratulatory junk you might not even have to inhabit the online world of internet dating. But as long as you’re there, don’t go out of your way to insult 90% of your audience. You’re going to get a lot of junk replies no matter what you write. Ignore them. That add might even attract more than you’d get otherwise. Trolls are out there all over the place, and that add says: Go ahead, push my buttons (and not in a good way).

Take that for what it’s worth. I’m not trying to be mean, even if this is the Pit.
[/QUOTE]

I’m not in the least offended, no worries. like I said, the first ad was pretty much the same minus all the sarcastic stuff. And I got way too many responses, most of which sucked. Answering and tracking became like a job in itself and wasn’t worth it. I didn’t want to be rude, so I thought I’d cut down on the noise right out the gate. The guys that “got it” were exactly the kind of guys I wanted to get it, for the most part.

And you are not saying anything new, I’m sure you must realize. In fact…

A quote from an email the #1 guy wrote me after our first night together:

“I was thinking this morning that your craigslist ad is very ballsy (just look at the title), aggressive almost. While you may be a confident woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to ask for it or go after it, you are not harsh or aggressive. You are very soft and warm, emotionally and physically. You want to be held, caressed, and made to feel safe (me too). That’s a vulnerable position to put yourself in, hence the initial guardedness from both of us. I wonder what sort of response you would get to a more tender ad, who you might lure into your cozy web. Like you said, if not for my persistence (part of my character), we may never have gotten past our first conversation and visit on Sunday. Just like you thought about me, I figured your best stuff was being withheld.”

Well, one of the things I’ve actually come to understand via my relationship with this man in particular, held up against all my other relationships, is that what I’m truly desperate for is someone who will be persistent, who will see past the noise, and who, at the end of the day, is plenty strong and confident enough to handle me in all my flavors. Dialing it down just makes it safe for the wimps and submissives and assholes, and I don’t want it to be safe for them, I want them to stay the fuck away.

If a man doesn’t get it, it’s a pretty good bet he won’t get ME.

82

I thought that that was a great ad, stoid, for what it’s worth and I have seen and responded to a lot of them.

83

[QUOTE=Slithy Tove]
In the Op’s defense, note that she’s dating in Los Angeles, an experience only slightly more pleasant than hiking in New Guinea with a runny eye infection.
[/QUOTE]
“With all things being equal, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”

Stranger

84

[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
“[M]y average body temperature is 98.8, I don’t like beets, I’ve never been to Lichenstein, and I’m left handed. You?”
[/QUOTE]

This should be your personal ad.

85

[QUOTE=Stoid]
Now I figure I should post the ad they were responding to. Which actually went through a few incarnations. I’m posting the last version, which is way more sarcastic and challenging in response to the avalanche of responses I’d gotten and the crappy experiences I’d had, but the main stuff is pretty much the same.

The first guy who answered that I posted above had answered my first version of this, which was mellower. We’d exchanged some email and he’d sent a number, but I had so many responses I completely spaced. Then when I posted this version, he wrote me again to remind me, so I guess it didn’t put him off…(iv’e deleted a few things just for privacy’s sake)
[/QUOTE]

I can’t believe you got any responses at all to that ad unless they were from poker hustlers. Where in the ad do you explain what your interests are, with the exception of great sex, which will of course, almost surely not be up to your standard? That is actually the most egocentric piece of claptrap that I have ever read. You are appparently big and fat, but you want young, handsome and thin. This is the problem with internet dating, among other things. Because everyone has to appear confident and worthy of a response it seems to be de rigueur to tout yourself to the point where you may actually believe your own press clippings. You are not all that. Get over yourself and write an ad that contains a little bit about what you have to offer besides great blowjobs and you might get a response from an interesting person.

86

One other thing. It is interesting that you find it necessary to judge everyone by the level of interst their first e-mail, to you - a complete stranger, aroouses in you and yet you freely admit that the best response you have had so far has been from someone that you ignored the first time around until he wrote to you again. You really should rethink your position on the judgments you are making about people who are only trying to be nice to you. I for one can’t figure out why they try, but you presumably should want to.

87

[QUOTE=Slithy Tove]
In the Op’s defense, note that she’s dating in Los Angeles, an experience only slightly more pleasant than hiking in New Guinea with a runny eye infection.
[/QUOTE]

Sure, but at some point you have to consider whether you are only suffering from the problem, or whether you contribute to the problem yourself.

88

[QUOTE=Autolycus]

Who in blue blazes are you talking to? Are you talking to the guy who was almost old enough to be your son? For that matter, why the fuck do you include that kind of baggage in your profile? I dont think it’s some hypothetical reader who needs to ‘hie himself to a therapist.’ You dont come off as witty, self-confident, or sexy in this ad. You come off as a middle-aged, baggage-laden, arrogant behemoth, whose only goal in life is to get laid long enough so she can forget the trail of tears that characterize her pathetic life.
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, pretty much. The ad screams baggage and issues to me. From Stoid’s posts on this board, I don’t get the sense that it’s an accurate reading, but that’s the vibe I get from reading that ad. I would never respond to that, unless I’m feeling particularly adventurous and masochistic.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with having an ad that edits out a large pool of the dating population. As she says, “If a man doesn’t get it, it’s a pretty good bet he won’t get ME.” She may be 100% right. She also may be potentially shutting out a lot of very nice men out there who may get along with her very well in real life. It’s a calculated risk.

Personally, I sympathize with some of the gripes. I don’t like the “I like to have fun”-type introduction emails. No shit. Who doesn’t. My own personal ad was an anti-profile making fun of all the typical dating ad cliches. However, what do you want from an initial email? It’s supposed to be kind of light and “hey, how you doin?” not some sort of paragraphs-long missive spanning god knows what range of subjects. I find that emails are a weird way of sizing people up. If someone seems nice enough, what’s wrong with just a quick coffee to see if you might connect in real life? I hate conveying my personality through emails. Some people just do better in face-to-face confrontation. You don’t have to give them a chance, but I get the feeling you may be potentially passing up some perfectly reasonable guys in your approach.

89

WOW!

Stoid, you might want to check some of that emotional baggage if you want someone to spank that fat old ass of yours.

90

[QUOTE=Stoid]

Met this guy, too…wasn’t that big a hit, but I sure loved his response (this is only the seoncd half, the first was telling me more about himself, and I know this was his standard pre-written spiel because he answered a couple of my ads not realizing they were all me. This was Craigslist. All three were, actually.)

[QUOTE=Plagiarising Jackass]

As I recall (And I admit my memory is hazy for some period of that afternoon!) my legs got a little over-excited to be confronted with so much slipperiness. As soon as I stepped onto the ice they decided they wanted to visit every corner of the rink at once, from lots of different directions. They went this way and that, scissoring and splaying, sometimes getting as much as 12 feet apart, but constantly gathering momentum, until at last they flew out from under me and I landed on my butt with such a wallop that my coccyx hit the roof of my mouth and I had to push my oesophagus back in with my fingers. “Wow!” said my startled butt as I clambered heavily back to my feet. “That ice is hard.” “Hey, let me see,” cried my head and instantly down I went again. And so it went for the next 30 minutes, with various extremities of my body - shoulders, chin, nose, one or two of the more adventurous internal organs - hurling themselves at the ice in the spirit of investigation. From a distance I suppose I must have looked like someone being worked over by an invisible gladiator. Eventually, when I had nothing left to bruise, I crawled off the ice and asked to be covered with a blanket. And that was it for my attempt at ice-skating.

[/QUOTE]

[/QUOTE]

Maybe the reason he turned out to not be so interesting is that this is plagiarised more or less verbatim from Bill Bryson’s weekly column in a British paper (that I came across after it had been made into a book called I’m a Stranger Here Myself, which is about his return to America after a 20-yr stint in the UK).

[QUOTE=Bill Bryson]
And I do know how to skate, honestly. It’s just that my legs, after years of inactivity, got a little overexcited to be confronted with so much slipperiness. As soon as I stepped onto the ice, they decided they wanted to visit every corner of Occum Pond at once, from lots of different directions. They went this way and that, scissoring and splaying, sometimes as much as twelve feet apart, but constandly gathering momentum, until at last they flew out from under me and I landed on my butt with such a wallop that my coccyx hit the roof of my mouth and I had to push my esophagus back in with my fingers.

“Wow!” said my startled butt as I clambered heavily back to my feet. “That ice is hard.”

“Hey, let ME see,” cried my head and instantly down I went again.

And so it went for the next thirty minutes, with various extermities of my body-- shoulders, chin, nose, one or two of the more adventurous internal organs-- hurling themselves at the ice in a spirit of investigation. From a distance I suppose I must have looked like someone being worked over by an invisible gladiator. Eventually, when I had nothing left to bruise, I crawled to shore and asked to be covered with a blanket. And that was it for my attempt at ice-skating.
[/QUOTE]

I suppose we should be grateful that he changed the spelling of esophagus just in case someone googled that section. :rolleyes:

I don’t date online, but now I guess you have to worry about people who only seem interesting until you run a google search on their carefully-crafted responses like a teacher picking out the students who couldn’t possibly have written what they did. Sorry for throwing another barb on the fire… or something.

ETA-- Can someone tell me how the quote tags work? The part in my post where it did work was auto-generated, and I thought I did the same thing for the next quote but it didn’t work.

91

[QUOTE=Omegaman]
Damn! That was harsh! Nothing wrong with being comfortable with who you are. Face it, guys are a dime a dozen, the ladys hold all the cards. I say hold out for a good one.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, but men don’t have a “sell by” date.

92

Wow, here I thought women googled guys to see if they are sex offenders or something.

Now they have to watch out for plagarists!. But I do see the irony you pointed out, BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed.

93

[QUOTE=Gaudere]
Considering that the response rates even to men’s well crafted emails is probably less than 1 in 20 I can’t blame them for not writing a lengthy missive for an initial contact.
[/QUOTE]
Thats why I wrote basically a 2 page well crafted essay on me, my life, what I like to do, who I want to meet and my thoughts for a mutual future. Then I sent it to 300 women :smiley:

Amazing how I had 25 replies, 19 of them positive.

94

[QUOTE=denquixote]
One other thing. It is interesting that you find it necessary to judge everyone by the level of interst their first e-mail, to you - a complete stranger, aroouses in you and yet you freely admit that the best response you have had so far has been from someone that you ignored the first time around until he wrote to you again. .
[/QUOTE]

You are mistaken, read again. I did not ignore him at all, we exchanged several emails and then he sent me his number. Because I was sifting through many dozens of responses, I simply spaced out on his, I was very glad to be reminded.

95

[QUOTE=Vinyl Turnip]
How about “no fat chicks?” Can I still say that? Because for me, that’s like, major deal-breaker…
[/QUOTE]

Send them to me.

I always say if my wife and I ever split up I will be easy to find…sitting in front of Torrid with a box of Krispy Kremes and 2 cups of Starbucks looking for someone to share with :smiley:

96

[QUOTE=Slithy Tove]
In the Op’s defense, note that she’s dating in Los Angeles, an experience only slightly more pleasant than hiking in New Guinea with a runny eye infection.
[/QUOTE]

Aww, c’mon, LA is ok…well, alright, I love LA in most respects, but trying to connect with someone here is quite the challenge, that is true.

I got scads of positive male attention (relatively speaking, of course) when I was in New York, which surprised the hell outta me because I always figured the coasts were equally superficial, looks and youth obsessed. Evidently not. Too bad New York has weather, or I’d consider moving.

97

I did some online dating after my divorce and this, dear OP, is why men do not put more effort into their replies: it doesn’t make any difference.

I was very careful in replying to women I had something in common with and I would tailor my reply to them. They love cats? I’d talk about my cats. They like food? I’d talk about how I love to cook (especially desserts). They love to read? I’d discuss one of the three or four books I am always concurrently reading.

Positive responses? Less that 10%. Dates? A few, but most of the women were not very serious about dating, more about sharing Emails. So now, I’m thinking it’s me. Guy in his 30’s, divorced and with a kid. But talking to other friends, they had the same results with online dating. Some were older and some younger. A few had never married. Some would reply in-depth and some were “U seem cool. Email me.” But regardless of the variable, it was about 10% positive responses and a few ho-hum dates. So being the brilliant guy I am, I pull up MS Word, write a boilerplate response, and use copy/paste. Guess what - no change whatsoever in precentage and types of responses.

98

I think maybe some folks need to hang up the online dating towel and, you know, meet people through friends, common intrests, etc.

Not trying to be snarky, I think there’s positive benefits to both, and when one doesn’t seem to really work for you, its time to change tactics.

99

I totally “get” your OP Stoid. GRRRR, I mean come on guys, use a wee bit of imagination. Show that you actually read something that was in my profile. I did have to respond to the guy who said something like “I’m 60, fat and balding, Oh yeah, and I’ve only got about half of my real teeth left. I’m looking for a rich, hot 25 year old to take care of me in my declining years” Only he did it much better.

Unfortunately, he lived in Washington or something. But THAT was a clever response. Now, who knows maybe that was his standard one, but at least it was not the normal barely jumped up version of “ur cute, call me”.

100

[QUOTE=Autolycus]
This thread is making me angry in so many ways that I can’t even express them all without boiling down into a VC03 meltdown of infurious rage.
[/QUOTE]

Jeez. I certainly wasn’t going for that, I’m sorry. It’s not about you, ya know, don’t let it get under your skin.

[QUOTE=Autolycus]
Oh, what the hell. I’ll reveal the tip of my iceburg. To Stoid, For starters, while I’m sure in person you are sweet and kind and an all around swell person, from your OP and your personal ads you sound like a smug, selfish, hollow shell of a woman whose standards are so high that April 20th is your favorite day of the year.
[/QUOTE]

I have no clue what that reference means. But apart from that, and entirely seriously, what is it about my standards that are so ridiculously high? Seriously. Of course, it’s all in the eye, of course, but don’t we all have standards? Don’t we all want to be with people that genuinely interest and move us? I really have very little control over what actually moves me, you know, I don’t think many of us do.

Besides, it doesn’t seem so unreasonable: I’ve had a lifetime of truly exceptional and wonderful friendships with amazing and special people, both male and female. Not simply “hey, let’s hit the movies..” but incredibly deep love and connection, lasting my whole life. I have never lost a single friend, once made, and I have more than once been completely knocked out what an amazing gift that has been. (I’ve also seen how unusual it is. Hijacking my own thread: next year is going to be a remarkable milestone. I, along with about 10 other people I know, including 5 of my very closest friends, are all turning 50 next year. [along with Madonna and Michael Jackson, neither of whom are among my closest friends] What’s remarkable about it is that all of us in that group have known each other nearly our entire lives -most since about age 10- and have remained and are still friends to one degree or another today. Two of them are married to each other, and didn’t even start dating until their late 20’s, so it wasn’t a high school sweetheart thing. I keep trying to get everyone on board for some big celebration, but we can’t agree on what it should be. And all this in shallow, cheap and superficial LA! And some of us are even in the Biz! And we’ve connected with many other people along the way, so it’s not like we’re clinging to our pasts cuz that’s all we have, either. It’s pretty amazing, really.)

I’ve also had some incredible sexual connections, and my 10 year relationship was exceptional on many levels (and probably guaranteed to end, given the age gap, but pretty damn fabulous for most of it) – I’d actually go out on a limb and say “spectacular” is not hyperbole applied to certain aspects.

My ideal, of course, is to have both at once… is that so outrageous? And if I can’t have the incredibly deep love and connection, then I want to genuinely like and enjoy the person I’m sleeping with, as well as really enjoy the sex. I don’t get how that’s so unreasonable. My standards have been formed by my experience…aren’t everyone’s?

[QUOTE=Autolycus]
You want somebody who doesn’t describe themselves as funny, yet you describe yourself thusly.
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, I did on the profile, as noted. But the distinction between my two sentences I don’t expect anyone to really read here and the ads and profiles I actually put forth is a very real one. Oh well.

[QUOTE=Autolycus]
Yeah, so, tell me again why a man should extoll his time to write a heartfelt missive to you when it’s obvious to a rational reader that you’re only in this for yourself.
[/QUOTE]

And others place and answer personal ads for what…the children?

[QUOTE=Autolycus]
Obviously the biker/rebel/virgos/hotties/??? are going to message you; they are perfectly happy to fuck your brains out and then fade into the sunset.
[/QUOTE]

No, actually the biker/rebel/virgo/hottie (he’d plotz to hear himself described that way) and I made a pretty great connection that has endured, with some bumps, since we first met. I guess you missed the part where I said we are still friends.

It was the guys I knew I shouldn’t be bothering with in the first place because they didn’t really measure up to my ridiculous standards that turned out to be flakes and assholes.

[QUOTE=Autolycus]
So wait, can you explain how the hypothetical replies to your ad were so atrociously bad that you decided to dismiss them out of hand? Is it because you’re so full of yourself that you make the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man look like Starvin Marvin? What stops you from receiving these benign compliments, at their surface a simple acknowledgment of liking your profile, reading the senders profile, and then deciding whether or not to pursue contact? Why exactly do they have to sweep you off their feet from the initial message?
[/QUOTE]

They weren’t hypothetical, they were exactly the kinds of replied I get all the time.

And they don’t have to sweep me off my feet. They simply have to be interesting on some level. They picked my ad, this leads me to believe that they put some value on finding someone interesting. I think they should step up and be interesting themselves. I gave three examples of not interesting, and three examples of interesting. If you found my not-interesting examples perfectly fine examples of the sort of response you’d be all over, great. That’s good news, because it means that my standards are not depriving everyone. But in complete seriousness: life is really, really short. If I made it a point to make the effort with everyone who wasn’t egregiously stupid or rude, well, I’d just run right out of time, period. So I gotta do some kinda triage…and since I think we all understand that we are trying to make an effort to be in some way noticeable, interesting, intriguing, something, I can’t sweat the fact that the best a lot of people can do or are willing to do is just not enough to get my time, which is the most precious thing I have.

It really boils down to this: it’s precisely like looks, only with personality. Everyone wants to be with the best looking people, but most of us understand the limits of what we are likely to be able to attract based on our own looks. Most of the time, 3s aren’t dating 9s. 9s expect, and get, other 9s, 10s, 8s and 7s. They pretty much blow off 6 and below, no matter how sweetly and sincerely the 2s and 3s and 5s tell them how beautiful and sexy and hot they are.

Well, “You sound great. I’m 6 ft tall with brown hair and live in Encino. If this sounds good, call me.” Is the personality equivalent of a 2.

[QUOTE=Autolycus]
Here’s another tidbit from your advertisement, a gem of hateful psychosis:

Who in blue blazes are you talking to? Are you talking to the guy who was almost old enough to be your son?
[/QUOTE]

Young enough, I think you mean. And technically, he was.

[QUOTE=Autolycus]
For that matter, why the fuck do you include that kind of baggage in your profile?
[/QUOTE]

Which “baggage” are you referring to? The fact that my committed relationship of ten years is recently over? Should the recently divorced refrain from saying that? If the answer is yes, would you explain why? Or do you consider it “baggage” that he was so much younger than me? (15 years, but who’s counting? And by the way, that’s just a year or two greater than the age gap between Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins…is he her “baggage” too? Are the hundreds of thousands of women who are 10 or 20 or 30 years younger than their partners “baggage”? Just looking for clarity here.

Or maybe you are referring to the “fuck you” part as the baggage? Who I was talking to was one guy very particularly and one or two others incidentally.

And to answer the question… (even though I’ve just outlined where I don’t’ follow exactly to what the question refers)… about why I would include ANYTHING in my profile or ad…because I’m okay with it. It might be information that could be helpful for the person reading it, either to keep them from answering, or two inform them about me if they are going to. I have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of, and I am not particularly concerned about coming off as without baggage or flaws. I don’t know anyone who is without either, but I’ve met a lot of people who expend silly amounts of energy trying to hide that fact, and all they do is exhaust themselves.

In my current ads, I try to make it a point to include some specifc “stuff you might not like about me”, precisely because I think we are so fucking full of shit with our endless portrayals of ourselves as so goddamn bitchen. Back to the beginning, and the walking on the beach: this is such a ridiculous cliché it stuns me that anyone would actually put it in their ad as anything but a joke: if so many people are so fucking into walking on the beach at sunset, why the hell haven’t we all crashed into each other by now? I don’t’ know about you, but I’m very real, and I want to be someone who is both real and comfortable with their realness. That’s surprisingly difficult to find. After all, if we bust our asses to hide our true selves to make sure we are liked…then we are not really liked at all. The façade we have constructed is what is liked, and where is the value in that?

[QUOTE=Autolycus]
I dont think it’s some hypothetical reader who needs to ‘hie himself to a therapist.’ You dont come off as witty, self-confident, or sexy in this ad. You come off as a middle-aged, baggage-laden, arrogant behemoth, whose only goal in life is to get laid long enough so she can forget the trail of tears that characterize her pathetic life.
[/QUOTE]

Should I take this to mean you won’t be asking me out either?

[QUOTE=Autolycus]
I could go on, but I think I’ll end here. For the record Stoid, I sincerely hope what I wrote above was wrong.
[/QUOTE]

Well, I appreciate that, but I don’t know why you would hope one way or another, it’s neither here nor there in your life. But it’s nice of you to say.

And of course, you are, but what else would you expect me to say? “Ya got me”?
I am genuinely interested, though, in why this thread has pissed you off so much. I could venture a guess, but it seems way to obvious and cliche…then again, life is filled with obviousness and cliches. It might be a good question to ask yourself, in any case.