Also, something else to consider… first off, let me make it clear, I don’t believe it all the game playing crap. I don’t believe in waiting X days before calling after a date or holding back info in emails in order to coax the other person into asking you out or not saying “Yes I can go out tonight” for fear of looking desperate/lonely/bored etc… It all just seems like too much work. What I have found though, is that the longer I talk to someone via email, the more I build them up in my head and the less chance they have of meeting that expectation. What I’ve tried to do is push for a meeting sooner rather then later. I don’t know how long you’ve been talking for, but when you get on the phone you may want to push to meet in person as soon as you can.
I’ve had this happen to me twice, one person never even made to it an IRL date, it’s was just that after a month of emails with “absolutely perfect girl”, I started to hate her style of writing and stopped replying. Who knows, we might have been perfect in person, but I started gnashing my teeth when I read her writing and I couldn’t get her to meet me, so I never got a chance to look past it…for those of you following along, this is the one I suspected of living with her dad.
Well I messaged her the phone number question last night. You probably right about the busy thing. She’s been on but sometimes you can read but aren’t in a place to easily reply.
The messages were these big long things. Usually 2 or 3 a day since sunday. It was really weird with her. Normally I’m super shy, but something about her made me seem to open up, and something about me made her open up!
I drove around a while and listened to music. For some reason that kind I’ll wait a bit, and if no response I’ll send her a playful message asking if she got cold feet!
I was careful not to build up her up. I’ve been around the block, and know the dangers of that, but it sure seemed like the beginning of something. I don’t know how to describe it.
I also don’t like “Gaming”. I want things to be real. Find someone who I connect with not because of mastering some primate status rules but because we connect as people. In my more cynical times I take that note people are primates.
I wonder how many filaments Edison tried that looked like the were gonna be bright right before they burned out? Too many I bet.
Give her a solid 24+hrs. She might be on the go and not be able to chit-chat. She might dig you and want to make sure she has a solid chunk of free time to chat. She might be busy all weekend until Sunday when things are a little slower, so give her till Sunday evening…NO ONE is doing anything on Sunday evenings, haha This is why I’m a fan of txting instead of talking on the phone though, she can respond whenever it’s convenient without worrying about who’s around listening to her talk to her “internet date” (she may be embarrassed about that and want to make sure she’s away from friends/family before chatting).
Trust that she likes you and relax. If she doesn’t respond to your txt don’t even acknowledge that. This happens all the time. You’re a cool guy with things to do, places to go, people to see…you’re not sitting around waiting on her txts. I mean, you might be, but that’s not the impression you want to give. You want to give the vibe that you have a life going on and if you guys click you’d like to bring her into it VS hoping she’ll provide a reason for you to put on pants in the morning because you have nothing else going on in your life.
On that note, invite her out to places you already have to go, or to do things you’d already be doing. That way if she flakes (for lame or legitimate reasons), you’re not sitting at The Keg with two empty plates wondering why she isn’t answering her phone. I invite girls to come grocery shopping with me or do activities I like and would be doing anyway (whether it’s something active like hiking/climbing or passive like watching a movie I want to see).
This is good stuff. Don’t even acknowledge whether or not she got the last txt, just go right into setting up a date. Only thing I’d change is don’t put the onus on her to call you, because girls are just as shy about calling a guy as guys are about calling a girl. Maybe something like “Hey, I’m free tonight or Tuesday after 5. Shoot me a txt if you’re free and we’ll go get something to eat!” and if she responds then you can say “I’ll call you after my shift and we’ll work out the details.” Now there’s a REASON for calling so she knows the conversation won’t be an akward “so uhhh, how’s your day going?” one…it’d be silly NOT to answer your call, you two have to work out details!
True. But it works and everyone else is doing it. Embrace it, don’t fight it, at least until you’re both actually ON your first date. Once you’re both actually out, drop all the games because then it’s all good, but to get that first meet-up there are better ways to approach it than others. ESPECIALLY with Internet girls where you’ve never actually seen eachother in person and don’t know anything about the other person (they may be a good typist but a complete creeper in real life). If you meet someone in real life first, like through your social circle or at a bar, they know “okay I know what this guy looks like and how he acts/talks/etc. so he’s not a stranger”, but over the Internet you’re a stranger even if you’ve been E-Mailing for a while because everyone knows the person they’ve met on the net isn’t always the same person that shows up to dinner.
Agreed! I’m guilty of building girls up in the past myself and that’s really not even fair to the girl…how is she supposed live up to the “perfect girl” image I’ve built up, when in reality she’s probably a normal girl who has a few flaws just like anyone else. Just live in the moment, find something to do to take your mind off visualizing how the date will go and the wedding and what your children’s names will be. This is easier said than done though!
Also agreed. Girls will rationally/logically tell you they like to have comfort and everything built up via E-Mails and over the phone before they meet up and it SOUNDS like a good idea in theory. But in execution you end up playing E-Mail tag for months until some other guy she meets at work or through friends says “We should go out sometime.” and then she vanishes with a sudden “sorry I’m seeing someone now and I don’t think it’s fair to him for us to keep in contact while we’re together” E-Mail or strings you along as backup incase that guy doesn’t work out. Meanwhile you’ve been so focused on courting her that who knows how many wonderful women you’ve missed out on meeting because you ignored them all to chase this one?
Push for the meet-up as soon as possible. I go from E-Mails right to “hey I’m on my way out but you’re fun, shoot me your number and I’ll txt you later” in the first E-Mail conversation. If she doesn’t give up the number then, that’s alright, I’ll get it eventually but at least now she knows my intentions are to be more than an E-Mail Buddy. And when I get her number, as soon as I start txting her, I’m pushing for the meet-up in the first conversation. It’s not posed as an ultimatum, but I’m not going to hide my intentions. If she’s not comfortable meeting up yet, or she’s busy this week, etc., that’s fine, I’ll still txt her and flirt it up for the week till she’s ready, but from Day1 I want her to know “I like you and if you interact with me, I AM going to try to meet up with you. I’m not going to play any beat-around-the-bush orbiter games or wait for you to make a move because I know girls generally don’t. I’m going to lead things to us meeting up, whether it’s right now or down the road, because I know we’re going to have fun. :)” Doesn’t get much more honest than that!
Case in point. If these two had met up right away, they may have worked out great. Or they may have found out they don’t click at all in person and could just become friends or go their separate ways. Either way is much better than the “E-Mail for weeks without an actual date” method.
Oh ya, give it a solid 24+ hours. It was Friday night last night, she might have had somewhere to go or friends to see. If you guys have long E-Mails she’s probably expecting that a phone call or txt session with you is going to be a long one and wants to make sure she’s not squeezing you in between running errands. I’d bet on her replying by Sunday afternoon/evening…it would be strange for her NOT to reply given how much you two have E-Mailed but Internet girls can be pretty random. You could log in tomorrow and find out her whole profile is deleted and have no idea wtf happened haha
Definately keep it playful and not all “How come you won’t txt me back??” needy haha Whatever you come up with will go over fine I’m sure, you sound like you have a good sense of humor and she likes it!
Play the games up to the first meet-up, THEN let the real stuff take over. It’s like getting your foot in the door so you have a CHANCE to connect with someone as a person, you know? Otherwise you’re stuck being this awesome guy that no one has a chance to see because you refuse to follow some really simple social guidelines for making sure you get that chance. It’s like refusing to comb your hair or take a shower and waiting for someone to just accept you that way…Take a shower and comb your hair so they get a chance to connect with the guy you are inside.
Besides there’s plenty of time to get to know a girl after you have sex, that’s what breakfast is for.
No but seriously, don’t waste time calling and E-Mailing feeling eachother out waiting for some magical connection, when you could be sitting face to face with her instead. Best-case you guys click and you’ve got yourself a girlfriend. Worst-case you meet someone new and spend the evening chatting with a cute chick and probably enjoy a good drink or food. There’s no downside to going for what you want!
haha my roommate got a number from a girl one night and after the bar he was checking his phone every 30 seconds to see if she had txted back. When we got home I waited till he was in bed and then txted him “PSYCHE!!” and heard him shout “ASSHOLE!!” through the wall haha good times.
Your next email could include something along the lines of “Hey now that I think of it, could you send me a text a little while before you call me, just so I recognize the number and can make sure I’m not in the middle of the grocery store or over at a friend’s house”
This can be your ‘reminder’ email as well as an ice breaker for her to call you. If she was nervous about making that call this might make it easier since she can first send a text that says “Hey, can I call you around 7:30 tonight” and you can reply “Yup, that’ll work out perfectly, talk to you then!”
And this way you’ll also recognize her number.
On the how much time thing - SO’s mom apparently goes several days (and vice versa) between messages with the two guys she’s chatting with. This has been going on for several weeks now. But it could be because they’re older and don’t necessarily hop on their computers every night for leisure/fun. Or perhaps because they’re many miles apart (30 or more, IIRC). Just wanted to throw her experience out there as well.
How many conversations do you keep going at any one time?
At the moment I’m getting quite a lot of messages from people who seem interesting. I’m not bragging, I’m just female and fresh meat, I think. However, I’m already talking to quite a few people. Some are just idle flirts, but some are getting more personal and might be leading to meeting up. Then there are some offline people I vaguely have an interest in too. It’s not really about time, but I just feel a bit hypocritical showing sincere interest in too many people. Then again, I have nothing definite and especially on the internet people have a habit of evaporating or things just not working in real life. In short, do you jump on everyone of interest or do you “finish” conversations before getting in touch with new people?
This situation. Pictures and profiles are nice, but not amazing. Person contacted me. I wanted to give them a chance. The chat is very nice, but is not moving me either way, i.e. he’s still nice, but not rocking my world. I like the chit chat, because I’m a talker, but to be very honest, I’m starting to doubt I’d ever want to meet up. Should I come out and say so? Let the conversation die (I feel rude)? Keep chatting? What’s the etiquette/nice thing to do?
Another person is really interesting. Good chat, compatible interests etc. But his picture is not of him, it’s a landscape. He’s beginning to move in the direction meeting up. Actually, I think we’d at least get on and would want to meet him on a friends first basis. For that reason I’m not super fussed about his good looks or lack thereof. But I still feel a bit weird meeting the invisible man. Asking for a picture is not weird here, right?
1.) I was never on a site specifically to meet people to date, but I always had a lot of conversations going when I was active.
2.) As long as you haven’t promised anything, I don’t think there’s any reason to come out and bluntly say “I never want to meet you.” Maybe he just likes chatting, too. As long as you’re just being conversational and not flirty, I don’t think you’re leading him on. If he reads too much into the discussion, that’s his problem, not yours. If he asks you out, you can politely turn him down then.
3.) Asking for a picture is not weird. Uploading a picture of a landscape, on the other hand, is underhanded (it bypasses the filter that allows people to search only for those who have a picture).
This is the exact reason (and I don’t even disagree with the logic behind it) that I stress pushing for the meetup soon as possible. If that guy asked her out she could finally say “no thanks!” and they could both move on or she may say yes out of politeness and then be wow’ed and charmed by him in person on their date where they may have more chemistry than reading E-Mails.
Instead she’ll probably keep chatting with him thinking he’s on a dating site to find chat buddies and he’ll waste a few months he could have spent dating a girl who was interested in him because he didn’t have the balls to say “I think you’re fun, let’s hang out”
(nothing against Pookah, I believe the onus is totally on the guy to make the move here. But if you’re starting to feel bad about it you can always tell him the truth that you’re not feeling a romantic connection and you dont want to lead him on but that he seems like a nice guy and you wish him good luck)
For the other 2 points don’t feel bad about chatting with a bunch of people that’s why you’re all chatting, to see where there’s chemistry, and those guys would chat with 10 girls at once if 10 girls were interested in them. Also a mountainscape is weird, totally fine to ask for a photo, say “I’m curious what the guy behind the flirting looks like :)” or “i dont meet up with guys until I’ve seen their picture because I have friends who have horror stories of online dating haha besides I’m sure you’re cute from the way you flirt” etc. I usually say “where are your pics I have to make sure you’re not 300lbs with all your front teeth missing”
Oh my god, I can’t stand it when girls write ‘haha’ in the middle of sentence. I suppose since when I read it in my head and it comes through in the same basic monotone voice as the rest of the email it makes them sound stupid, but still.
Other then that, I got nothing. Personally, I wouldn’t bother talking to someone without a picture so I’m not going to add my two cents on how to ask for one after you’ve already started talking.
haha I picked it up from chatting with a shitload of online chicks…when in Rome and all that jazz. Replace “haha” with “lol” “:)” “hee hee” or whatever else girls use when they chat online.
They’re just trying to convey emotion through monotone text, don’t read into it too much, they probably don’t talk in the monotone robot voice you’re reading their E-Mails in in your head, in real life.
I don’t think I would again. But, as I said, I’m new and he started talking to me first and has an interesting profile. And it’s one of the nicer conversations, actually.
Thanks for your advice and also the others. I am have to come back and scream for help in the near future. I feel like the new kid at school.
I just ran across a new profile. In the “Last Read” section it said “My profile, no typos here, my mom’s a school teacher…” etc…
Can I please email her and point out the many, many typos in her profile. Seriously, it’s awful. It reads like a fake profile, I assume most of us are familiar with those. It’s real, it’s just awful. I’m just amazed that someone with so many typos is so confident it’s typo-free that they would actually mention it.
wow.
Someone with a 3rd grade knowledge of English could clean this up.
-Profiles don’t describe sufficiently describe people’s attributes
-I am looking for the same charascteristics in a partner
(I’m gonna go to hell if I keep posting snippets of people’s profiles).
I have a friend that is a much more experienced net-dater than I and he fully believes that by the time email five is sent you should be talking about getting together. I guess you can’t have absolutely strict rules, but I can see a lot of sense behind it. For a start, when you are simply text on a screen it is a lot harder to think seriously about that one person. You end up chatting to loads. That person you are on email twenty to, that you think it is going brilliantly with, is probably in the process of organising a date with someone else because you never asked them out.
And that’s what I hate about online dating. Not knowing what the other person is doing. I’ve got something brilliant going on at the minute, we’re getting through 10-15 emails a day to each other (proper email now, away from the site), we’ve had date one and are getting together on tuesday (her dad’s birthday at the weekend - and yes I believe her that it is!), yet I can’t help but feel that it is all going to go wrong and she’ll turn around and say there is someone else that she’s been chatting to that she is trying it with.
I don’t see any errors in what you quoted of what **Joey **wrote–you did realize that the second sentence in what you quoted was an example of one of the errors in the profile he was mocking, right? (Which isn’t to say there aren’t thinks I could nitpick about the post, but there wasn’t anything in that particular part. :p)
I think she may have actually said “English teacher” though I could be wrong. I was trying not to quote the entire profile word for word.
I did stop back and look at it later after a bunch of pictures were added thinking maybe she submitted a bunch of changes and they hadn’t all ‘taken’ yet (Match checks any edits you make to your profile). Nope, still looked the same.
Okay, next question. Would you email someone if you’ve already been on a date with their best friend?
To be more precise…I exchanged quite a few emails and text messages with someone from Match, we went on one date, there wasn’t a spark. On top of that, she had (IMO) a lot going on her life. Two kids, full time job and plans to go back to school. I saw her look at my profile again a few days later, but that was it. No calls/emails happened after the first and only date.
At the moment, I’m hemming and hawing over emailing someone that I know to be her best friend. The reason I’m hemming and hawing has nothing to do with the date with the other girl, just general “should I or shouldn’t I” type stuff. Mostly because her profile is filled out in very jokingly way and (as shallow as this is) the few pictures she has up are making it tough for me to get a good read on her…anyways, that’s not really the question here.
I know, from her profile, that the girl I went on the previous date with is her best friend. Would you let that make a difference to you? On the one hand, I want to say it shouldn’t. It was only one date, so it really shouldn’t matter. On the other hand, it seems a bit awkward since there was no closure, no “Sorry, I just didn’t feel anything,” there was just the one date and that was it.
For the record, she’s in the “If she emails me, I’ll respond” category at the moment, pending her filling in her profile with something more serious or adding some pictures, but I don’t see that happening since her profile has been around for a long time (and I’ve known the two of them have been friends since before I met the first girl since she gave her an award so I could tell from the username). My thought is that if she emails me, I’ll respond and somewhere in the email, mention that I’ve met her friend*…or would I be better off leaving that part out, on the off chance that she emails me?
*I’m the type, and maybe this is a fault, that likes to get (the big) potential deal breaker type stuff out of the way as soon as possible. For example, I make a point of telling people I still work with my ex-wife early on. Either on the first date or on the phone if the phone calls are dragging on before meeting. I’d rather get this kind of stuff out of the way sooner rather then later. In this example, if someone has a problem with me still spending 40 hours a week with my ex-wife, I totally understand, but let’s cut it off at one date, rather then them finding out a month in.
Now that I’m safely out of the edit period, I want to add that I’m well aware that something like this, as with most things, could go either way (or somewhere in the middle).
A)“You POS, you don’t have the balls to call my best friend back and now you want a date with me, you swine”
or
B)“Yeah, she said you were really nice, but just didn’t hit it off…so do you like Led Zeppelin?”
I’m still just curious. Put yourself in someone’s shoes. Mine, hers or her friends, how would you react?
You want to give the vibe that you have a life going on and if you guys click you’d like to bring her into it VS hoping she’ll provide a reason for you to put on pants in the morning because you have nothing else going on in your life.
