The Ongoing Online Dating Advice Thread

These kinds of guys are just sending out messages to a ton of women hoping to get something back. On those guys I wouldn’t waste my time. However, you might want to say something to guys who actually take the time to write something that’s not a form letter. I always liked getting those, even if it was a turn down. Then again I quickly got used to the fact that women wouldn’t respond.

I don’t know if I said anything, but I started dating someone recently, so after almost two years it did work out. She does live 50 miles away though, and close to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which means massive summer traffic when I want to go down on the weekend.

Wait a minute…I live about 50 miles away from that particular Bay Bridge. Are we neighbors? Will you feed my cat while I’m in New York next month?

My next move is to read through this WHOLE thread. I didn’t realize there were so many rules and conventions. (The never a shirtless photo rule, for instance was until today unknown to me)

Depends, are you in the Montgomery county area?

I’m not sure if I would read through the whole thread or not. Most of the rules are pretty self evident.

Rats. Missed it by this much. Balt. County.

Safe travels.

As crappy as my marriage was for the last couple years, I may have taken the benefit of not having to be “out there” for granted.

I would like a romantic comedy to happen to me now, please.

There are more flakes than blizzard on these dating sites. That is my conclusion after 20 first dates, 14 second dates, and zero third dates in 4 months. They have hit me where it really hurts now - my wallet and that pisses me off. I am obviously doing something wrong. My profile has them lined up around the block and I only take the top couple of percent but playing things that way has its downsides.

I think the fact that I am playing the hottest available women near the end of their peak fertility years is a definite disadvantage. I already have two daughters that I adore and they always come first. There won’t be any more but I don’t tell them that at least not directly but they always have leading questions that they drop in somewhere to draw their own conclusions.

Not one of them has ever said anything bad to me. They just disappear with no warning or closure. My goal now is to play along well enough to establish a fake relationship and then dump her painfully just to restore balance to my universe. I kid but not really. I would mainly just be happy if they showed up on time and returned calls when they said they would.

Just a stab in the dark, maybe they are sniffing out your game by the second date and aren’t interested in being played.
Maybe it’s time for Shagnasty to play nicely. :wink:

Of course you could have tried, you know, mailing some people.

Being the same age, have two kids, I’ve found the same thing. Though I had a terrible time getting first dates until I started with eHarmony. Honestly you may want to think of the ‘first date’ as getting to know someone a bit before asking them out and the second date as the real first date. You might also want to think about the first date as being for coffee or something like that. This way it’s cheap and easy enough to get out of, but it also allows things to continue on.

I do agree that a lot of women in our age group seem to either want kids or don’t want them at all and they don’t want guys that already have kids. It took me a year to get a third date, and six months after that to get a second third date.

I also had a lot of women just disappear, I think it’s pretty common, just think though, you don’t have to worry about them doing it later on.

Do what now? That’s crazy…

So, there’s this girl from a long time ago, always changing her profile, updating her picture so I stopped by from time to time to take a look. She’s quite photogenic so her pictures were always fun to look at. At some point she put a link up to her tumblr page so I stop by that as well. Different pictures, lots of other fun links to check out as well, always entertaining. Anyways, quite a while back, I sent her an email, she checked my profile, no response, whatever, I moved on, she deleted her profile, but since then, she’s had like two new profiles, again, always changing them, updating the pictures etc. In her latest incarnation she specifically mentions that she’s more or less drumming up followers for her tumblr page. Based on what I saw over the past few months on that page, it seems she’s always very happy to take a compliment so I figured since the last time I sent her an email was like a year ago it couldn’t hurt to send her another one. I sent her another one mentioning how much I liked her tumblr page blah blah blah. No response, again, whatever, I moved on.

So, fast forward to today. I was looking at her tumblr page and she put up an amazing picture of herself and I couldn’t help but send her an anonymous complement on it. To my surprise, she actually posted it and asked a follow up question. I responded it and ended with “I’d love to meet you someday.” But at first I had a small typo and wrote “I’d love to meat you someday.” Glad I caught that.

I joined OkCupid a few months ago. So far I’ve met three people in person, but none of those meetings were exactly “dates”. And all of them were rather weird.

#1 was someone I noticed lived in the same small town as me, so I sent her a little message. And it turned out that not only does she go to my college, but she lives on the same floor of the same dorm building as me. She said was a “hermit”, which is why we had never met before. So, I walked over to her room and we chatted for a while. She seemed very nice. But after that night, she never answered any of my messages, and a few days later I tried saying hi in person, but she kept saying she was too busy. So eventually I gave up.

#2 also lives in my town, but she’s not a student here. We had been talking online for about a month when she said I could come over and meet her one night. And the place she chose for our meeting was her ex-boyfriend’s dorm on campus, where she apparently hangs out all the time. I suppose I should have been warned… So I arrived, and the two of us just sat on her ex’s bed and watched a movie. She had said she wanted to “cuddle”, but I didn’t really do anything because A) we had just met and I was a bit nervous, and B) I assumed I would see her again the next day, so I was in no rush. But the next day, though we had planned to meet again, she never responded to my messages. A few days later, she deleted her account. A week after that, she was back, and I tried talking to her again. We set up another meeting, which she canceled at the last minute. A few days later she gave me her number and said I could text her, and we arranged yet another meeting. But she never showed up for that either. A week later I sent her a text. She responded “Who is this?”. I told her who I was, and she replied “Hi, I still want to hang out with you, but it may be a few weeks. I’ve been very busy lately and I’ve recently been raped”. And that was the last she ever told me.

#3 lives like 10 miles away from me. But neither of us had a car, so it was a long distance for us. So, we started talking, and we seemed to be getting along quite nicely. After several weeks of this, she came to my school to attend some lecture, and when it was over she agreed to meet me in person. We went over to my room and chatted for a few minutes, and then she had to leave. I gave her a book about zombies, a common obsession of ours. And that night she told me “You were cuter than I expected”. Everything seemed good, and we were going to meet again in a few weeks. But then it all ended. Earlier she had shown me this blog she wrote, and was quite proud of. So I was looking at it one day, and I noticed she had written something about “annoying college students”. And I jokingly asked her if I was one of the annoying ones. She never responded to me… but she made a new post on her blog saying “If you stalk my blog, that’s creepy, and I won’t talk to you again”. And I can only assume it was referring to me, since that was the last I ever heard from her.

For the last month I’ve been having some quite nice conversations with some girl about 50 miles away, and we might eventually meet. There’s one little problem however… she has a boyfriend, which she eventually confided in me although her profile said single.

So, I have come to the conclusion that all girls on that site are crazy. :stuck_out_tongue:

Geezus Weeping, that is bizarre. Maybe since (it sounds like) you are young you have a higher percentage of immature girls just having fun on the site instead of using it to date.

Yup, I’m 19. #1 and #2 were 21 or so, and #3 was 17. (Although she pretended to be 18, haha.)

#2 is a drama queen, no ifs, ands or buts. I’ll bet a hundred dollars when she deleted her account she was back with her boyfriend, when she texted you ‘who is this’ that was either her boyfriend answering because she made sure he saw the text or she was with him and played dumb pretending not to know who you were. The rape, I’ll gladly call BS on that as well. You never heard back from her because you didn’t say “OMG can I come over, can we meet at your ex-boyfriend’s dorm again?”
When she offered to meet you at his dorm, you should have just ended it right there. Even if you declined and changed the meeting place to somewhere else, she would have arranged it to make sure the local gossip saw exactly what she was up to and relayed it back to him. I’ve known people like this. It’s how they operate and they don’t change (at least not the one I know. She’s 30 now and still pulls this exact same shit).

Here’s the thing. She could have just said “meet me at my/my friends dorm” (that is, she could have lied about whose room it was) and not let you in on the drama. The fact that she told you up front that it was her ex-boyfriend’s dorm that you were going to hang out in tells you the situation is going to be messed up right off the bat.

IOW, don’t go out with a girl in a place where she’s specifically making sure her ex-boyfriend is going to be there to watch you cuddle…and on his home territory with his friends to boot.

The ex wasn’t there personally… it was just his room.

Wow. It amazes me that you’re willing to make that call based on a few lines of text on a message board. You’re skeptism isn’t warranted and is the reason rape victims don’t come forward in the first place. It’s better to give the benefit of a doubt, IMO, unless you have real evidence it didn’t happen. Drama queens can get raped too.

I didn’t want to assume she was lying; it would be a horrible thing to accuse her of; but still I couldn’t help but feel a little skeptical.

It just seemed like a very strange thing for her to admit to a near-stranger. Especially since she told it to me in such a casual, offhand manner. And she said the guy was someone she had met on the same website… were that true, I’d think it might scare her away from the whole online dating thing a bit. Also, earlier she had made a joke about rape, so there’s something of a precedent.

But since I highly doubt I’ll ever interact with her again, I guess I’ll never know. I checked a few days ago and her profile is once again deleted.

Y’all made it seem so simple. Message - message -message…meet.

So I tried it. Answered an ad from craigslist. I know, the murder capitol of internet dating…after several friendly emails we decided to meet. It took about half a dozen messages back and forth to nail down a time and place.

Starbuck’s after work tonight. It was a perfectly pleasant time, but no magic. Was I expecting magic? I guess I was. I don’t think I’ll hear from him again. Without any other motive than fighting ignorance I may have accidentally corrected him when he filled a pause in the conversation with an interesting factoid which was, alas, not true. It wouldn’t have hurt anyone or anything to let him keep believing it. Just couldn’t stop myself.

When it was time to leave he said “You’re an interesting person” and did not ask for my number (all of our contact has been through email.) And I guess I’m totally okay with that. I think perhaps it was too soon.

I’m getting psyched to try online dating so I’ve been following this thread for a while and am encouraged. Went to Match.com today to see if there was anyone worth spending the money to message and ran across an interesting fellow. He’s 57 and looking for a short skinny woman between 25 and 40. I don’t qualify but I was so captivated by his intro sentence I just had to share:

“i to have some one in my life to to with for are life to love take walk and by the river blank and look up at the star at night an think ar”

Maybe he used a cliche generator but it accidentally included ALL the words. :stuck_out_tongue: This is absolutely hilarious!