This was an EH match. We were in the middle of the guided communication stuff. She asked me some open ended questions. This would be the first time either of us had a real opportunity to actually write something. I wrote a few paragraphs and sent them to her then asked her my questions from the choices I was given. Waited around a few days with no response. My EH membership was about to run out so I switched over to open communication and gave her some other options to contact me if she wanted. No answer, so I sent her one more email today along the lines of “EH said you accepted my request for open communications but it didn’t say if you actually received the letter I sent, just wanted to let you know my sub ends today and I don’t plan to re-up…here’s how to get a hold of me if you’d like to…”
I don’t plan to hear from her (since she hasn’t written back to me for the last week or so), but I figured my membership ends today so why not.
You’re still doing better than I am.
Alright, people. After much procrastinating, I decided I should try out online dating. Went to the homepage of a largish site, and fell at the first hurdle - username.
I have no ideas on a username.
- I don’t want to use my Dope name (It’s a album title, not a personal description, but would come across wrong on dating site).
- I’m passionate about the field I work in (Mental Health) but no way in hell is a reference to that going in my username
- This site discourages using your actual name, which I would not be comfortable with anyway
- I don’t want a random collection of numbers and letters that some people tend to have
- I’m a fan of a number of books, movies, music etc, but referencing them in my username seems like I’m defining myself by being a fan of them too much
- I don’t have any suitable nicknames (I used to be called Miss Evil in High School, something tells me that may attract some weirdos)*
- A lot of names based on personal descriptions seem very insecure or too try-hard
- I’m probably over-thinking this, god knows how long it will take me to write an actual profile
Help me, oh wise Dopers. How did you pick your dating site usernames? What usernames appeal to you when looking at profiles?
*Actually, being a ‘weirdo’ in general probably not a deal-breaker, but I think it may attract the wrong weirdos.
I was Invisible Chimp on OKCupid before I was on the SDMB. My OKC account is currently disabled. I’m still single, so if I ever give online dating another try then I will probably delete my old account, start over and get a new name. I don’t want any potential dates tracing back to here or other places. I’m Invisible Chimp to most of the Internet. I’ve said some too personal stuff. BTW, this why some people end up with random numbers and letters. Don’t over think it, your user name isn’t that important.
My user name on here and on the dating sites is different but only because on the dating sites “Joey P” doesn’t work. Either because it’s taken or because it has a space. That ended up working out well because I had to pick out something different for the dating sites and it kept that identity separate from the rest of the internet like Chimp said…until I mentioned my OKC user name here :smack:. A few weeks ago, for some reason, I decided to google my OKC/Match user name to see what would happen (the same thing I would do to a potential match) and realized that when I mentioned it here, not only did I cross reference my dating persona to the rest of the internet, I gave them a handy jumping off point with 10,000+ posts to get started with.
I only did in one or two places, I may ask a mod to add a space in the user name for me. Just so that anyone reading the thread can still find them, but you can’t google them.
Miss Evil, you say? How YOU doin’?
I use the same username on most sites I’m on, I’ve never heard anyone complain or gotten weird vibes from people.
Well, it’s not that important to some people. Personally, I tend to judge people a decent amount by their usernames, at least at first. A good username (one that I personally find interesting, funny, or clever) is much more likely to get me to take a look through someone’s profile, and a bad one (numbers, 1337, bordered with x’s, random intercaps, etc.) will push me toward barely skimming the profile or ignoring it altogether.
BTW, in case in one is interested, my EH account lapsed. It’s odd though. It said it expired on the 22nd. I got an email in the 21st saying “Your account expires today” and everything was functional until the 23rd. I figure it’s just a grace period.
Anyways, from what I can tell, nothing has really changed except that I can’t see pictures. I can still get new matches, I can still send questions (I tried sending them to one of the people that I knew/assumed to be a defunct account then closed it), as far as I can tell I could still send an open email. Just can’t see any pictures, which I guess does make the site fairly useless for the majority of the people. I’m going to leave everything alone for a few days to make sure that one girl has a few days to email me or write down my email address if she feels so inclined then I’ll copy all my info over to a word document and close out the account and wait to see if EH will offer me any great deals to re-open it. I know I swore I would never give them another nickel, but up thread someone mentioned getting a deal for $15 per month, I would re-up for that.
My hope is that if I close my account it’ll just suspend everything. I’ll be really angry if they do offer me a great deal only to find out I get matched with all the same people.
Pssh, now now. No griping in the thread in which you get compliments ;).
Strange Bird, I think you should pick a book/movie/tvseries/etc that not many people will understand and which you often have in common with most of your friends. I don’t think it will show overcommitment at all.
While I’m not on any dating sites, I have my username here and on Amazon reviews. Almost anyone I’d be interested in would either have heard of Arrested Development (and have it in their Netflix queue to watch) or have seen it and liked/loved it. That’s a somewhat-important distinction for me because (unless you’ve been living under a rock) if you’re between 20-28, Arrested Development came out when you were in high school/college and appealed to almost every nerdy/geeky/smart people. That’s my target demographic and it’s much easier (to me) to winnow out the pool that way and then see the attractive few, whereas many more people I may find physically attractive may have nothing going on upstairs. YMMV obviously, but your username is a good barometer of who you’ll attract as well and you wouldn’t run into the problem of attracting weirdos.
Point taken, and I do appreciate the compliments. They just always seem to end with “if I weren’t seeing someone”, or “if I weren’t 1,000 miles away”. I’d like to hear it without the ‘if’ part, eventually.
Well, it’s hardly our fault if you do live 1000 miles away. 
Also, while we really only touched on it, having a username like lindsaybluth makes you damn near impossible to track down on the internet.
The girl I had the highest match% with was a redhead and apparently a southpaw because her name was redlefty or leftyred or something like that. I never messaged her because she seemed like an exercise nut, while my only exercise is walking everywhere since I don’t drive.
I live in Portland, so a lot of names had the letters PDX in them. You could do something with your city in your name if you like where you live.
I remembered one girl who winked at me had the word “mama” in her name, so I wasn’t interested. Another had the word “crazy,” and you really shouldn’t. “Evil” is better than “crazy” because you’re less likely to actually be evil than crazy.
So, in another thread, someone mentioned a problem with match.com in that they turned off auto-renew and Match charged their card anways. When they called to complain, Match asked for the emailed that they got when they unsubscribed. The poster said they remembered getting the email, but didn’t save it.
Now, I always have auto-renew turned off. Normally what I do, is let my subscription lapse, and then I wait until I’m ready to email someone before I turn it back on. No point in paying to browse when I can just do that for free. But after hearing that story, I figure there’s no harm in turning on auto-renew and then turning it back off just to generate that email. This way I could save it and if there is a problem, I would have it to show them.
Upon turn unsubscribing I was given a list of reasons to chose from. Normally, I just pick a random one. This time I told them that it was too expensive. The next screen gave me two options 1)I would resubscribe if it was cheaper and 2)I just can’t afford it at all right now. Assuming option 1 would get me a discount and option 2 would get me a better discount I chose option 2. They offered me two months free (based on their 1 month at a time plan). I took it. So, where I normally pay $60 for 3 months, I just paid $35 for 3 months. Saved $25, not bad. For the record, I’m willing to bet that the other option would have given me the choice of re-upping with 1 month free.
So, from this point on, instead of just letting it auto renew, I’ll do this in the last week or so of my membership.
Wait, whyzat? Because it’s not separated into two names?
You left out decades younger ;). But hey, I actually do see what you’re saying. Two of my longest relationships were 3.5 years and 1.5 years and both of those were long distance. I started to get paranoid that the only guys that were interested in me were interested precisely because they didn’t have to deal with me on a regular basis.
No, I just mean because of Arrested Development any thing that would have anything to do with you would be buried so deep in the google results it would near impossible to find.
ETA, Googling Lindsaybluth, I get my first Straight Dope result on page 7. If I were looking at you on a dating site (and I know you’re not on any) or Amazon or Ebay. First off, I wouldn’t have even bothered trying to find you else where on the internet because of the name and second who makes it past the first few pages of google.
FTR, some results for Steam and zetaboards come up earlier. Is that you? In which case, ignore my first paragraph, maybe naming yourself after someone on a famous TV show doesn’t make you that much harder to find.
Good catch, I forgot about that one. “If you weren’t a decrepit fossil”, “if you had better taste in music”, “If I could stand the sight of you”. It just kinda gets old after a while, ya know?
Well it seems I might have some real thinking about what to do. I now seem to have 3 dates with 3 different women. One I’ve been out with and she seems pretty good, we text a couple of times a day. The other two I haven’t gone out with, but can’t for a couple of more weeks. What sucks is that the one I’ve been out with lives an hour away.
From no dates to three in no time. I guess I’ll have to choose soon. But I think I’ll give it a couple of more weeks.
Ahh interesting. I’m on Amazon (with name separated - feel free to enjoy my acne lotion reviews), but nope, dunno what steam and zetaboards are. But I suppose people could think it was me, which produces the same effect.
Any chance you can get that post deleted by the mods? Are you considering changing your Match/OKC username? BTW, awesome job on scoring the best deal. I would have answered honestly because I’m a moron and chosen #1. I would have thought #2 would have figured into their sabermetrics somehow that I was too poor to be a worthwhile dating partner and would have been shown the door.
First of all, I love the natural history museum. Secondly, please tell me #2 has never happened to you…
Somebody call the waaaaaaaambulance…
Just kidding. The distance thing should be taken into account. Above all, have fun!
Which posts? The ones that connected my dating profile to here? I’m still working on that. The SDMB has a cutting edge, auto updated, up to the minute archive that I was trying to make sure get’s updated as well (and it seems to, at least with normal user edits, I assume it does with mod edits to older posts as well. I’m just have to compile the post numbers. It’s only a handful of posts 3 or 4 I think. And even then, I’m hoping all all that’s necessary is to break up my username with some slashes so at least someone reading this thread can still find my profile, but someone looking at my profile can’t find this thread.