Sorry, that was the joke - I got sent to my own profile. Hence why we look so similar and have the same interests 
Oh, and I’m a guy, sorry! 
Oh, I know. I figured it out. Good one!
I checked you out and thought it was nice. If I was single and in your area, I would have winked 
I saw that wink button. I am afraid to use it. Is it just a way to say “hey, I think you are sorta cute” without having to type a message?
Yea - it’s like an online version of a friendly nod/smile across the bar at someone to let them know you are interested. It gives them a heads up that they’d like you to check them out in return and see if you are compatible. If you wink back, they might say hello.
Where I’m an “acquired taste” - I often wink before I message someone. If they view my profile and don’t wink or message me, I assume something about me was unappealing and move on.
On some paid sites, people will wink or flirt because it’s the only way they can communicate with you for free. I know one website I was on, a paid member can contact you and then you can reply, but a non-paid member can’t initiate emails. Some sites won’t let you communicate at all without playing - so then people will be (not so) creative in conveying their email address in their profiles.
Don’t be afraid to wink
Thanks for the explanation. From now on, I won’t be, although I usually just send messages to people I think are attractive/interesting. I am currently talking to a woman across the river in Kentucky. We’ll see where it goes. I think the fact that I included the information that I am separated and not yet legally divorced in my profile is possibly turning some women away. It can’t be my nose! It can’t be!
I had good luck adding something along the lines of “don’t worry about the ‘currently separated’ thing, the divorce will be final in [month]”
In fact, the only person that sent me a “no thank you” after I sent her an email (instead of not replying at all) actually ended up replying to me after I added that line. She even mentioned that it was the ‘currently separated’ part that turned her off at first.
Re-reading this from an outsider looking in point of view reveals us to be a desperate lot of Dopers.
Looking for love in all the wrong places,
Looking for love in too many faces…
Seriously though…does going onto the internet in order to try to facilitate a date seem a little…strange, or disconnected somehow to you? It does to me. I feel like a stalker when I visit some woman’s profile more than once…because I soon realized that everyone knows when everyone else is “checking them out”.
On OKC you can browse while logged out or anonymously. If you browse anonymously though you can’t see whose looked at you.
Going to the Internet to get a date is not strange or desperate. Internet dating is mainstream; it’s the future. You just got out of a marriage and you’re in your early forties. It probably was just becoming acceptable right after you got married.
That being said, I agree with you about the stalking bit. If you check out a woman’s profile too many times, especially if you don’t message her, it can make you look creepy.
Sometimes it seems like I’ve checked out all the most interesting women in my area already, and I don’t live in a small town or something like that. I’m getting less visitors now too. Sometimes I check out a woman’s profile without realizing I’ve already checked it out.
That’s where I am. I feel like I’ve officially emailed all the girls I have any interest in (that have been on in the past few months). At this point I feel like I’m just keeping my eyes open for new members or old members coming back online. I keep telling myself I should just shut down my profiles for a few months so that when I come back it’ll be all new people. Having said that, there’s always hope that one of the people I’ve emailed will ‘come around’ and reply to me, even if it’s months later.
I just favorited all the Dopers I recognized from my visitors on OKC so I can keep track of y’all. I hope that doesn’t come across as creepy. I’ve gotten some strange visitors lately that I think must be Dopers, but I’m not sure: a 24 year old male from San Diego, a 27 year old male from San Francisco, a 27 year old female from Australia, a 37 year old male from Philadelphia, a 37 year old from Maryland, a 22 year old from Illinois. I can’t think of any other reason I’d be getting dudes looking at me, especially from far away.
I disabled my account in early November and reenabled it only a couple of months ago. It wasn’t all new people when I came back. I can’t hold it against them because I’m still on it too. Before I disabled my account, one of my top matches deleted hers. When I got back on, she had a new name/main pic. I recognized her from a secondary pic, plus her new name is similar to her old. We’re still a 95% match.
I should have worded it differently. Between Match and OKC, there’s probably (within my default search specs) about, oh let’s say, 10-20 new users per week. Of those 10-20 maybe 1-2 will ping my radar and I’ll keep an eye on them as they develop their profiles and add pictures. All in all, I probably initiate contact 2 or 3 girls a month* and rarely hear back and when I do it fizzles out. What I was saying above is that if I were to leave for a few months, I could come back to maybe 30 or so new people that I would consider emailing. More then anything it would just be so I wouldn’t be sitting in front of my laptop refreshing the home page 20 times a night wondering if anyone looked at my page.
*I should clarify that I email 2 or 3 new people a month now as I said a few posts ago, I’m at the point where everyone that I have any interest in that’s been on for any length of time I’ve already emailed.
No, it doesn’t necessarily mean you did anything wrong. Most guys on dating sites don’t get a ton of replies from what I hear from my male friends. You don’t need to get a ton of replies to be successful. You just need one. Just keep trying and sooner or later you will meet the right person.
If there is anything to try to change in your profile, I’d say remember to try to portray confidence and respect for yourself. People will take a cue from you in how they treat you. If you portray yourself like you think you’re a good person with something to offer others that is how they will respond to you. If you act like you think of yourself as a sad sack (which is kind of how your post here comes across honestly), then that will likely turn off the emotionally healthy women out there.
I want someone who’s as much of a geek as I am.
I want someone who enjoys playing MMOs.
I want someone who knows what Memebase is, or would find it funny.
Where am I going to have better luck? Online or at a bar?
Yes, yes, I know they’re not the only two choices. The general point holds, though.
Okay, and I’m not doing this specifically to pick on you but it encapsulates an example of what I’m thinking - this attitude bugs the SHIT out of me.
Online dating is not a magical panacea. It’s not going to throw thousands of girls who are perfect for you right in your lap immediately. It’s going to take more than a month, more than two months - hell, sometimes it might take a few years. And it takes WORK. It’s very much feast or famine. Sometimes you’ve got NOBODY interested in you, despite people eyeing up your profile every few minutes. Then suddenly you might get a dozen contacts in a short period of time. But none of them pan out, and you’re back to famine again.
But mein gott in himmell - when I see a post like this, on here, or on the dating sites, in journals or in blogs, hell, even in their profiles sometimes (yes, I’ve seen it), I want to get all up and slap the guy. It is so self-pitying, and absolutely reeks of fishing for validation and compliments - “Oh, I don’t know why I bother. Nobody wants to contact me. Other guys have it, I guess I just don’t” mope mope mope.
I get it’s frustrating. I’ve been factually separated for just under 9 months, and in reality my husband and I have not been “together” for nearly a year. In that time I’ve had approximately 6 dates. That’s less than one date a month. And I’m a chick with active profiles on five sites and dormant profiles on another two. Women are supposed to be flooded with offers, apparently. Well it depends on what you mean by “flooded”. Often times it’s just guys fishing for anything they can get. The actual proportion of guys I want to get to know better because their profiles indicate we have something (anything!) in common is abyssmally low.
But the thing is that the attitude of “Oh I give up, there’s no hope for me” comes through in your interactions with members of the opposite sex. If you’re ALWAYS waiting for the other shoe to drop, because oh it’s all too hard and she can’t really want to speak to me, and oh those other guys are more attractive and so on, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And when I come across a guy who’s got that “aura” around him, no matter how perfect things seem to be in every other way, I find myself shying away because I don’t feel like dealing with propping up someone else’s ego when I’m too busy trying to sort out my own.
I’ve found once I accepted that there’s going to be times when it feels like nobody in the world wants to even look at me, let alone date me, but that IN TIME they’ll be balanced by periods where I’m so busy I won’t even have time to scratch myself and I stopped obsessively watching my hits and inbox, that things started flowing a bit more. I got more confident about contacting people, and accepting sometimes my contact will fall on deaf ears or I’ll be rejected outright. And it’s becoming easier every day.
Well, it’s a good attitude you have, but when you’re in the “famine” phase, it seems puzzling and I think Tony’s just trying to figure it out. It’s especially puzzling at the outset, but there’s always something odd about online dating in that you can contact twelve people in a row whose profiles seem custom-made for you and get zero response–the rational thing is to wonder “Am I doing anything wrong here?” and the super-rational reponse is to realize that there IS no reason sometimes. Sometimes they’ve just found someone to date. Sometimes they’ve got back with their ex-. Sometimes they’ve gotten cold feet on the online-dating thing. Sometimes you’ve got something innocuous and necessary in your profile, like you’ve got pets the person is allergic to–and the way it’s set up, you’ll never know what went wrong. So you soldier on, but one does get discouraged from time to time. BTW, I mis-read “I stopped obsessively watching my hits and inbox” at first.
Or she doesn’t have the courage to deal with a dozen questions a day about where she adopted her kids from, and she thinks racist jokes are funny because of what they reveal about racist attitudes.
Or, yeah, the first time she took you home you’d find a sheet hanging in her closet.
I’ve never posted it here; I’ll PM you. (That goes for anyone else who wants to know, too–just ask.)
I respond to everyone whose PMs to me have more substance than “lolsup,” even if they don’t look interesting. Even if it’s just to politely decline their attentions because they tripped my Douchebag Sense. (I should post here the hilarious exchange I had with one of those a couple of weeks ago.)
Hunan is a type of Chinese food, stereotypically misspelled on Chinese restaurant menus as “Human.”
MAKE OUT GOGOGO
When you view your own profile, the link doesn’t include the username. That means that it’s directing to the profile of whoever is logged in at the time. The “rookie move” was viewing your own profile and then simply cutting and pasting the URL instead of reading what it said first.
No. Makes just as much sense, if not more, than randomly meeting people through some other activity. This is just more efficient.
Unless you’re so awesome that your mere existence is enough to warp the sexual preferences of men within a radius that extends for thousands of miles.
This is a lot more bluntly than I would have put it in this thread (shocking, I know), but this times a thousand. A month? A month is fucking nothing. And yes, that defeatist attitude is going to come across in everything you say. If *you *don’t think you’re worth dating, nobody *else *is going to, either. Sure, there are some people who want someone they can walk all over, or who they can be miserable together with, but IME what most people are looking for is someone else who thinks they themselves are a pretty nifty person to be with.
A couple of boyfriends ago, when I broke up with the guy, he stormed out fuming that he “always knew he wasn’t good enough for me.” And that was one of the the biggest reasons I broke up with him: not that he *wasn’t *good enough for me, but that he always, and obviously, *felt *that he wasn’t, and nothing I could say or do was going to change that.
To add to what Sierra and SFG said, I’ll relay my own history.
Broke up with my boyfriend two (yes, 2) years ago (we are still close friends, and in fact, ended our relationship to save the friendship*). I took a couple-few months to recenter myself and reactivated my OKC profile and rejoined EH (where I met the ex). Up until this week, I’ve gone on exactly 3 dates, maybe 4. I’ve had contact through the sites with maybe 3 times the number of dates, but nothing panned out (either on my end, or his).
Sure, I would get frustrated and take a short break here and there, but overall, I just continued on continuing on. Met a (potentially) very nice guy on Tuesday (after a couple emails) and we are going out again this Sunday. Will it go past that? Who knows. And that’s alright because sooner or later, the planets will align again.
My point in that was you really can’t “complain” about nothing happening after one month when it’s taken two years to find anyone even slightly promising. If I didn’t become bitter and discouraged and all “woe is me”, then you definitely shouldn’t! Learn to cultivate a little patience, don’t want it too much, and things will happen when they should happen.
*Different story for a different thread.