Guys, can I ask a question?
How often do you opt not to contact a woman because her attractiveness and intelligence intimidates you? I’m skeptical that this happens, but men in real life keep telling me this is a real thing. And recent experiences are starting to make me think they aren’t lying.
Never.
Showoff! Or rather, congratulations. Yes, that is what I meant.
All I’ve gotten is the brush off, and some really mystifying messages. Here is the entire content of the most recent one:
“I’m hard right now”
Not even “Hello, I’m hard right now.”"
Who is opening these messages and being swept of their feet by them? What is the proper response? Congratulations?
Yeah, guy number one is a dealbreaker. If he was just sketchy, he might be okay for a booty call (if you are the type that can keep your head straight in that kind of situation.) But he’s shown a basic, and criminal, lack of respect for boundaries, and that lack of regard for boundaries is one of the number one signs that somebody has the potential to become dangerous. You don’t need that. Attractive guys are everywhere, and there is no need to get involved with one who is actually scary.
Send an email saying “I had a good time getting to know you, but I don’t think we are the right match. Best of luck!” and block incoming messages from him. It’s not worth it.
Your not in to the second one, and usually that’s just how it is. All you can accomplish by moving forward is to waste each other’s time.
Thanks.
Brings up another question. How do you guys feel about “googling” a date.
I don’t do it before the first. But if red flags pop up on subsequent dates, I do.
What are others’ thoughts?
I don’t Google my dates, but I don’t care if others do. I’m Invisible Chimp almost everywhere on the Internet, so it’s pretty easy to find stuff about me. Because of this, I don’t go around sharing everything either.
Once I have a first and last name or an email address, yeah: I usually Google guys before I meet them. It’s just a way to learn more about them. Sometimes the last name is too common for any meaningful results, and I have yet to uncover anything “juicy” and/or that made me change my mind about meeting anyone, but I almost always do a quick search. I definitely wouldn’t care if a guy Googled me before we met.
Intelligence doesn’t put me off one bit. I actually tend to message people who I think are more intelligent. If I start seeing a bunch of net speak I will not message them. Attractiveness is of course subjective.
It has to work at least a bit or it wouldn’t happen so damn much. I just don’t understand why someone would even write something like that. Those thoughts wouldn’t even enter my mind for someone I don’t know.
On the plus side I think I might have met someone. We’ve gone out twice now and have talked on the phone a number of times. She quotes Monty Python and the Simpsons as well. The only deal breaker I’ve found is the two times we’ve gone out she’s been late both times. And both times were 45 minutes to an hour. She had reasons, I just hope it doesn’t continue that way.
I sent a message to someone, and a week later she actually looked at my profile. I consider this a partial success.
The world is weird.
Two weeks ago, I was reading on the couch when my husband said: “Wait, slouched down like that you have a really visible heartbeat pulse in your neck. Want me to film it so you can see it?” “Sure”, I said. “Might as well put that clip on YouTube, maybe someone finds it educational”.
Fast forward a week, and suddenly that clip has 300 views and lots of weirdly appreciative comments like: “Veeery nice.”
:dubious:
Turns out there is a whole fetish group of men and women into heartbeats, and stethoscopes. As the clips usually are totally SFW, they have channels on YouTube, like this one.
Weird. But as fetishes go, this one seems kind of sweet.
With respect to looks…
In real life: Yes, I have declined pursuing women because I thought they were out of my league in terms of looks.
On a dating site: No, I never opted not to contact a woman because of good looks. But on the dating site I used (over a decade ago), I don’t think any of the women I ended up contacting had pictures on their profiles, so maybe I was influenced unconsciously (although I don’t think so).
With respect to intelligence…
I’ve never been intimidated by a woman’s intelligence. If a woman told me that men were intimidated by her intelligence, I’d suspect they were probably more turned off by her ego instead.
Haven’t read the thread, but doubt this came up. I’m trying out OkCupid just to see what it’s like. I don’t spam messages, someone has to be a really good match for me and have a really good profile before I’ll try. And then I write them 3-4 paragraphs customized to them. Friendly, funny, complimentary, talk about our mutual interests or the things they’ve said in their profile.
2 (out of about 12) totally blocked me - it says this person no longer has an account. Now I never demanded a response, sounded pushy at all, made crude comments, or did anything creepy, nor did I ever send a second message saying Y U NO TALK TO ME or anything like that. So having them block me just seems rude and overkill. I don’t know why it bugs me so much but it does.
But maybe it’s not very personal - maybe some people just go through and block anyone who they aren’t interested in writing back? Just wondering if that’s your experience, if it’s common.
If it says they no longer have an account, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are blocking you. They may be a fraudulent account, or violated the terms of use.
If I log out, and try to view their profile, it’ll say “this person requires you to be signed in to view their profile”, not “we don’t have anyone by that name” when you enter in gadeghg8ea into the profile address, so I think it means they’ve just blocked you.
My hypothesis would be that they found 3-4 paragraphs a little too overwhelming or, like you already think, they just block people standard when they’re not interested. Personally, I think it is a total overreaction, but then, they might have got pestered in the past.
In any case, I wouldn’t take it personally. If your post was honest then you’re doing nothing terribly awful. I suppose sometimes you’re just one in many message and therefore your feelings aren’t taken into account in a way they should be. But at least you never got a chance to get invested. Focus on who does reply.
Three to four paragraphs is waaaaaaay too long for an introduction. It’s might be okay after you’ve talked a bit and hit it off though, although you shouldn’t prolong the chat much before meeting, IMO. For an introduction, I recommend no more than one paragraph, three to four sentences.
Fair enough. The reason I send 3-4 paragraphs is because I want to stand out from all the generic HEY BABY WHATS UP replies. I put some effort into writing them, figuring it’s the best way for me to stand out. I don’t think that amount is overwhelming, but who knows. I’m pretty awesome, I write well, it should be welcome.
What’s sad is that they rarely even check out my profile, and the content of the messages is pretty awesome, so I figure most of them just look at my picture and block. Dunno. The shittiness of the approach is that when it fails you’ve wasted more time and you have more of an investment if you’re only interested in writing 10-15 people rather than spamming generic messages at hundreds, so it feels like more of a rejection.
If someone blocks you, you won’t know it. You can still see their profile and you can still send them emails. The only thing that happens is that they can’t tell that you’re checking out their profile and they won’t receive the emails. The reasons for that is that if you could tell you were blocked, you would just set up a new OKC account. Blocking is designed for people that are getting three or four emails a day from another user.
Also, people come and go, I’ve had a handful of people (that I know weren’t fake) disable their profile literally as I was writing them an email. Thems the breaks.
OTOH, while OKC isn’t too bad in this respect, all dating websites have fake profile. You’ll learn to spot them pretty quickly.
This isn’t really advice, but asking an opinion on my friend’s dating philosophy. She has been corresponding with a guy, and she’s annoyed that he only replies once a week. She says this is “controlling behaviour” and she has even called him a nutcase, because he replied at almost the exact same time to the minute each week. Now, I just don’t see the big problem here. He could just be a guy who has decided that he doesn’t want online dating taking over his life and has set aside a certain time of the week. I mean, if she wants to step it up she can tell him so. But she seems to have all but written him off, mainly for this. Would anybody else be turned off by this? I mean, he’s her date so it’s her choice, but I really don’t get it.
I’d be turned off by it, as to me it shows lack of interest. Early on in online-dating, I’d only reply to a guy once a week or so, but if I was growing to like him more, I’d be replying quicker and more enthusiastically each time.
Leaving it a week makes it seem like a chore - “Ah, Sunday night, I’ve finished dusting, time to reply to that stalker-lady on OKCupid”.