This Is WEIRD (dating-related)

A couple of months ago, I started online dating again after a break of about a year or so. I’ve met 3 men so far, and this is how they break down:

Man #1 and I IM’d and emailed for a month or so. We became kind of emotionally involved, and it seemed perfect. Then I met him, and he wasn’t nearly as attractive in person as he was in his photos. And by “nearly as attractive”, I mean beaten savagely by the proverbial ugly stick. I’m not that picky about looks, personality is more important, blah blah blah, but you do need to be able to look at someone. I had to break his heart and everything and I resolved to not IM very much before meeting, just meet and get it over with ASAP. The point is that he became very emotionally attached to me, and was ready to go get married and that’s not much of an exaggeration.
Man #2 I met 2 days after beginning correspondence, so that part was good. He was attractive, that was good. The meeting went very well and I felt good about it. Then the next day he started IMing me every couple of hours with grand statements of intense devotion to me. Hmm, I thought, that’s weird. How can he like me so much after just barely meeting me? So I took that as a warning sign- nobody can be that into you right after meeting unless they have some serious issues with boundaries and neediness. So I dumped him.
Man #3 I met fairly soon after beginning correspondence. We met Monday night and hit it off well. He’s very attractive, employed, funny, smart, in short everything I could ever want in a man. But now he’s starting with the proclamations of intense like, so dramatic and everything. Wants us to be exclusive, his told his mother about me, I’m so great, yadda yadda. He is so seemingly perfect (I have yet to figure out what could possibly be wrong with him, that’s how perfect he seems), that I don’t believe he could just be that lonely- he probably has women falling all over him. I’m getting suspicious.
What is up with these men?? Sure, I have an excellent personality (I am a Doper, after all)- I’m intelligent, funny, well-read, opinioned, etc. But, come on, I’m not that great. But all three of these men have acted like I was Scarlett Johansson, Madame Curie, Mother Theresa, and the Virgin Mary all rolled up into one. Their responses to me have been so over-the-top as to arouse my suspicion. I’m not rich. I’m not ugly, but I’m not gorgeous or thin (shapely I am). I am a lower-middle-class single mother with plenty of baggage. Why all the worshipping lately?

Do some men just act like this? It’s not like I haven’t dated before, I’ve known lots of men. I’ve found the majority of them are as cautious as I am when first getting to know someone, until now. Should I stay away from Man #3 even though I really, really don’t want to?
My instincts tell me that an intense early courtship usually (I’m inclined to say always) signals a potentially abusive relationship down the road. I’ve learned to trust my instincts, but then I was thinking that maybe some men really are just quick to think they like someone right away, maybe some men are very emotionally available and ready to commit and maybe it’s not so abnormal.

Any thoughts?

On second thought, maybe this belongs in IMHO. If you think it does, please report it.

Marry me! :wink:

(The straight line aside)

Most likely you just got a bad run of luck. Or, to speculate, perhaps the service you’re using to meet people has a really poor male-to-female ratio, so they’ve been moldering (agitating?) too long. I can say that for certain, men can have a biological clock that starts ticking as well.

Maybe you’re right. They don’t seem to have had much luck with the online dating, so maybe they are just really lonely. (Or I really am just that great.) Should I give guy #3 a chance or run away fast?

I tend to come on too strong when I finally meet someone I’m interested in. Although instant exclusivity and telling my Mom about someone right away is not something I’ve done. Perhaps the 3rd guy was so overcome with relief at meeting someone he likes that he completely shut down his ability to play it cool. Perhaps you could just tell him to take it slow for a while and see how things develop before he continues the play by play to his Mom. Then again I completely suck at dating and any advice from me has a high probability of being wrong.

A couple of thoughts:

  1. Maybe it just says something about the demographics of guys who use online dating - they are done with the club-scene and the pub-scene and all the other ways of casually meeting a women and are focussed on finding ‘the one’.

  2. I do think the nature of IM-ing tends to lead to those ‘deep and meaningful’ conversations that you would generally take more time to get into with someone you meet on a night out (which tend to be more the ‘drunken deep and meaningful’ conversation which is quite different). So the time it takes to get to know someone is lessened.

Having said that, I also think this can result in a false sense of ‘really knowing someone’ because you are having to take them at their word rather than learn about them through observing their behaviours and reactions to stuff and shared experiences over time.

Well. I just got done talking on the phone to Man #3.

Holy crap. I am… He’s… just… sigh. He’s awesome.

It’s like someone found out exactly what I want in a man and is setting me up- I asked him who he was working for. :stuck_out_tongue: He’s a little too perfect.

It’s pretty rare that I decide to abandon my instincts and tell my inner voice that keeps me safe to shut the hell up, but I’m going to keep seeing him. Advise him to slow down a little, but, oh yeah, it’s on.

Hopefully I won’t be posting six months from now about what a psycho he was.

Give him a chance. Bet he’s posting on some message board going, “Wow, I can’t believe this woman is interested. She’s just sooooo perfect and dreamy, and those are some nice cans…”

Part of the “dating” thing is making yourself as attracttive as possible. Now, take a look at movie relationships: how many movies about people meeting and taking half a year to figure out “gee, (s)he’s nice”? Nah, what you get is whirlwhind romances and over-the-top promises.

So, same as us girls get from movies the notion that “you have to be stick-thin to be thought gorgeous”, guys get the notion that “grand declarations are a must”. OTOH, while the icing is overdone, that don’t mean the cake ain’t true, hmmm?

You have a thing for older men, you’re radioactive, short, and you sleep around?

I think it would be fair to say that men can commit really fast - I’m not sure if it’s healthy. From a generalised biological perspective, we could (probably quite inaccurately) say that the male’s approach to a relationship includes the (socially-moderated) desire to inseminate, and for the male, there simply isn’t any such thing as ‘too soon’ for that.
Of course it’s far more complicated than that, but I’m pretty sure it plays a part in there somewhere.

So I think it may very well be the case that many men who are apparently happy to let things proceed at a moderate pace are just better at exercising restraint - underneath, they may still be feeling the urge to get serious. In any case, if immediate intensity freaks you out, you’ve got to trust your own reaction.

I don’t think this is necessarily true. You are obviously on the lookout for signs of controlling behavior; I don’t think you’ll miss them. Men don’t go from Mr. Perfect to abusive psychopath without some warning signs.

Sometimes it’s just the right person and you feel that strongly. You seem to feel pretty strongly about him, he seems to really like you…this is a good thing, no? Go with it.

I was going to chime in with words of warning and support for you taking it slow, but then I remembered that Mr. Lisa and I were living together and engaged to be married within a month of starting to date. To be fair, we had known each other as coworkers for several months prior to that, and we did wait a year to actually GET married. But hell, sometimes it’s just right and why wait.

Our seventh anniversary is December 10th.

Bingo!
Male here,
In other words, the guy wants to get in your pants - like right now. 'Cept the more savy character will play it cool till you start doing the coming-on. Maybe this guy is great and wants to get in your pants. Good. But play it slow, don’t get too romantic till you’ve figured out what his intentions are.
Good luck with #3, but take it slow. If he’s that great then he’ll be patient and you guys can consumate when you’re both ready. Waiting is hard but it’s awesome. The chase is better than the kill, always.

Chalk me up as being on the “Maybe he’s just so excited to have finally met someone he likes that he’s going a little nuts with it” side.

Internet dating is a tricky thing - it can be wonderful, but it can also be supremely frustrating (ask any number of Dopers who post on the subject). Maybe his going over the top a little is a reaction to having all the frustration finally pay off.

My brother claims to have known he wanted to marry Her half an hour after they met. The wedding happened 7 years later. If he’s any kind of abuser I’ll be very, very, very surprised to find out.

Since she’d also made it very clear that she wasn’t interested in any kind of boyfriend before finishing college (and they were both in 12th grade when they met), Bro also exerted a lot of restraint upon himself. But if she’d been “looking” and he’d had any money, he would have rented a freaking Mack truck to cart over the load of red-heart-shaped “I love you” candy.

Maybe you’re worth it?

I’m actually a bit like this myself; what I said above shouldn’t be taken to mean that immediate attraction is never genuine, but restraint is very often appropriate.

My now-wife and I got pretty serious right away, in terms of exclusivity and spending all our time together. We did wait almost a year before talking seriously about marriage, and another three years before actually getting married, though it may well have happened a lot faster if we had been at a different point in life. (We were still in college when we met and both felt it was important to graduate and live independently for at least a year before getting married.) I found out later that she called her mom right after our first date and said, “Now I understand why people get married to someone they just met.”

I guess the point of this story is just that sometimes, you really can know/decide right away that this person is the one, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. If your feelings are in line with his, then just go with it and see where it leads.