“Plenty of Fish”, eh? I hadn’t heard of that one. I may have to search it out.
No reference to “can you keep up?”, this time?
The match percentage turned out to be totally irrelevant. I contacted my BF because I thought his profile was weird and funny; I told him I found it refreshing that someone was breaking the mold. If I had gone by our match %, I never would have bothered with it.
BTW, I’m 35, he’s 34, and I found plenty of people our age on okcupid.
I can always count on you for unexpected compliments. You da man. 
But, while I appreciate the sentiment and agree that I’m pretty cool, I would not equate that with being hip. 
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in real life who didn’t match me at least 80%, but that’s not to say I wouldn’t – it’s just that I always ordered my results by match percentage, so I’d see those profiles first. As for how useful the percentages are, I say “meh.” It depends on how many questions each person has answered, but it also depends on which questions each person has answered (which you can’t know unless you’ve both answered all of them). I think I’d be wary of anyone who didn’t match me at least 50%, but I haven’t found that an 85% match was better for me than an 80% match. In fact, I think my ex’s percentage was higher than my current boyfriend’s, but the ex was wrong for me in one huge way that OKCupid couldn’t test for. And both the ex and current boyfriends match me higher than a former co-worker who uses the site, but I know that he and I got along famously (and flirted with each other well, too).
All of which was a long-winded way of saying that I think the percentages are useful initial filters, but I wouldn’t put too much stock in them.
Thanks for your thoughtful and useful contribution to this thread!
You sure seem obsessed with my previous posts to reference a cliche that I might have pointed out a year or so ago.
I made what I thought was a useful, on-topic contribution to this thread. You felt the need to snark. Can you EVER respond to one of my posts without being snarky for once? How about just putting me on your ignore list so you don’t have to bother to read my oh-so-offensive prose, and others don’t have to deal with your dislike of me, okay? :rolleyes:
It was…just a…gentle…jab…
Another vote for OKCupid. Met my boyfriend on there, and we clicked well enough that I’m moving to Maryland to be closer to him and give us a chance to date like normal people.
The thousands of questions really do help weed out people who are completely incompatible with you, so I’d recommend answering a bunch of them. The “match percentage” thing is a little fuzzy, but I find I seem to connect better with people who are up around the 80% range, compared to the 65% range. I was a 92% match with my man, which is why I contacted him in the first place (ok, so he’s good-looking, too).
Their extensive survey that you have to fill out which is clearly full of correlative interrogatives which they’ll use to quantify your personality to the nth decimal place. (I actually find this amusing, because the people they show in their ads all look like pasty, droll people who have less personality than a vanilla milkshake.) What really creeped me out about eHarmony, though, is the fact that, despite being a pasty white guy with no particular kinks or radical opinions on topics not pertaining to public key encryption or quantum mechanics, they totally blew me off with the “sorry, but we can’t match your profile” with no further explanation. They didn’t charge me for it, so I can’t really complain, but it makes me wonder what kind of Stepford Folk clients they can match.
I used Match.com and the Spring Street Network site (the ones you see on the sidebar of Nerve.com, TheOnion.com, Fark.com, et cetera) with no positive result. Out of over 300 messages sent out on Match.com, for instance, I had a total of 12 responses, 6 continued exchanges, and 4 scheduled meets that resulted in 2 stand-ups and 2 meet-cutes that went nowhere. And yes, I posted several different pictures, had the ad vetted by multiple people (including folk here), was sufficiently broad about my preferences not to exclude majority sections of the possible pool, and (for the most part) wrote unique and reasonably brief (2-4 paragraph) messages to each woman I was interested in. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not particularly handsome, and my sense of humor can be offputting to some, but still, it was just a massive waste of time.
On the other hand, some people (mostly women, I’ll note) speak of online dating with great enthusiasm and reported success. Go figure.
Stranger
I think our match percentage was in the low 80s and I rather liked that feature of that site. Personally, I’m not interested in dating someone whose politics or religious beliefs differ all that much from mine. Granted, when you meet someone by chance, you’ve no idea how closely aligned your worldview is going to be, that’s part of the fun of dating is finding all that stuff out. When a lot of that stuff is already quantified and readily available, I found it easier.
I had more than a few email and/or IM conversations with men on the site and never found a good conversation with anyone who I didn’t match at least 70% or better.
I found** Drachillix** on Yahoo!Personals 7 years ago. We’re celebrating our 5th wedding anniversary in August. My 6th Doper anniversary was this month.
No offense to anyone using/happy with OKCupid but, at least in my area, I found it to be mainly geeky/ videogamer/ heavy-metal-music/ extremely-liberal/ multicolored-hair-and-piercings/ not-very-attractive crowd. Then again, when I was using it, I was in more of the geeky-liberal-not-very-attractive phase. Eh. I had some luck with craigslist, where met the current boyfriend (who famously didn’t give me a christmas present, but whatever, I’m over it), but craigslist tends to drop a few pegs every week or so, and is definitely the most, er, variable site out there in terms of reputable posters, so I’d screen extra carefully- although there seem to be more freaks on the men’s side, so perhaps you’re a bit safer than the female contingent. Bonus: there are SO many freaks on the men’s side that, if you’re at all normal, you’ll look great by comparison!
Oh and about eharmony- I remember taking an hour out of my life to fill out all those questions and, at the end of the line, they told me I was in the small, “unmatchable” percentage of their testtakers. Unmatchable! Me considering myself eminently matchable, it makes me wonder what the hell they’re actually screening for… ?
Plenty Of Fish is a great free site. I found my girlfriend there.
Casualkiss is another good site. Unfortunately, it has gone pay over the past year or two now.