I hate to be a spoil sport, but I have to lead with my strengths.
With all the eharmony ads and such roaming around, it is easy to get “worked up” over the thought of meeting your soul-mate on something as impersonal as an online dating thingy. I knew a couple that had an online relationship for YEARS, they met frequently, but when one actually moved across the country, their relationship fell apart. Then again, I met my husband online a million years ago. We met on a local BBS. However, we took our relationship OFFLINE very quickly and I do think that contributed to us lasting. 13 years and still going.
My real caution for you is that there are guys out there who KNOW you are looking for the ONE. They have been online long enough to know the drill. Heck, before I met my husband, I went out/talked to a guy who had his schtick down pat. Be wary of too much too soon because it may just be a line. The perception is still that online dating=desperation and therefore, you are an easy target.
Then again, most men know the M/F ratio on those sites is abysmal. So maybe they are just leading with their big guns blazing.
Sorry to double post, but something else I wanted to respond to. You don’t mention your age, and suggest you might have some baggage and what-not. I am 38, recently had my first child, and am rapidly going grey. I am also way too underweight. The thing is, at an age where I thought I would be my LEAST attractive to men, seems to be a rockin’ age for me. I now have a joke that my target age seems to be men below 25 and over 80. I get hit on ALL the time. I’m not sure why it is. I have a theory though, don’t we all?
I think the shiny pretty things that were around when we are younger, aren’t so shiny or pretty. Those that depended on tits and ass, don’t have much left to offer since most guys look for a bit more than that long-term. That is where the stock in women who have brains come in. We CAN take care of ourselves, we CAN have conversations, we have kept ourselves up reasonably, we have come out the other side.
I’ve had a really neat lesson in this where I work. We have a new girl named, you guessed it, Heather. Who is blonde, voluptuous, money-grubbing and as dumb as the day is long. There is a guy who is very handsome who she flirts with incessantly, the funny thing? He’d rather TALK to me that deal with her tittering about, she annoys the piss out of him. Then again, he is a grown up.
Don’t sell yourself short. Look around. You are standing in some pretty high cotton.
Maybe, for the sake of all of these men you should cut them all loose and find someone who is equally emotionally distant. Seems like you are too much of a cynic and pragmatist and will not allow yourself romance or a shot at happieness.
I can relate to these men, I too fall hard and eagerly. It hasn’t served me well, my eagerness and hard falling ways usually lead to similar weirded reations from women. It turns into a vicious cycle as I become more love starved and eager. You all claim you want romance and devotion and yet when it comes naturally you hold it against us.
I’d just like to chime in and say keep dating #3. Keep the lines of communication open and let him know you want to take things slow. Don’t analyze it too much but keep anntenae up and have fun!
If his experience was anything like mine, back when I was actively doing such a thing, then just getting a bite–especially from someone intelligent and articluate, never mind how insanely gorgeous you are ;)–might me making his hormones run like a 14-year-old.
Internet dating has exposed the true gap between men and women; I can’t count the number of women who complain about the mass of unsolicited messages they get and how they have to delete or ignore most of them, versus the number of guys who send out dozens of messages with no response whatsoever. Based on the numbers, I figure there must be approximately 1 appealing woman per 319.4 men. So, you have another 300 or so guys to meet before you have even hit your quota. Get busy!
But seriously, jumping in after the first meeting with just-short-of-marriage-proposal vows of affection and telling Mom that you’ve found the Perfect Woman is, if not actually creepy, hugely deperate. Even if I met the befreckled, red-haired, hips-like-a-lyre Dream Girl while she was reading Blake and sipping an Irish whiskey in the back room of my favorite tavern as a break from solving second order diffential equations in her head, I think I’d hold off on the pronouncements of Everlasting Love[sup]TM[/sup] 'til, like, at least the fourth date.
Mr. Stuff wanted to marry me after about our second date. He didn’t tell me then, but it wasn’t too long afterward that he made it clear he was interested in marryine. Yeah, it kind of freaked me out. I told him, very nicely, that I needed him to back off a little. He complied, displaying what a friend of mine called “controlled eagerness.”
In his case, he was a little older and had never been married, mostly because he lived in a rural area with a sparse population, and worked a solitary job (farming). He didn’t date in high school, which is where most people get paired off around here, and since then, the women he had gone out with were nice enough, but vapid. He wanted to get married, but was unwilling to marry someone he didn’t even find interesting for two dates in a row.
So when he met me (or re-met - our families have known each other since time immemorial, but I’d been living out of state), and I had a brain and opinions and didn’t look like a troll, he was pretty excited, and it showed. He was serious enough about it to take it easy, as I asked, until I was ready for more. He certainly has not turned out to be abusive in any way; in fact, I don’t think he’s even ever raised his voice to me.
If you aren’t getting abusive/weird vibes otherwise, I’d go with the “excited to meet a nice woman” camp. Tell him you want to take it very slow, and if he’s really head over heels for you, he’ll be willing. If he’s NOT willing to take it slow at your request, I’d be more worried.
Sometimes you just know, and it’s exciting. I met my wife online… she was from upstate NY and flew down here for a weekend to meet me. The next time we met she flew down with 3 suitcases, we moved in together, were married a year later and next year will be our 9th anniversary. We knew the first day we were together we would be married. Don’t dump the guy just because he can’t or won’t play it cool, give him a chance.
As somebody who has occasionally tried Internet dating, I’m not sure what you’re hoping for. Surely it would be worse to have the perfect man show up and say nothing, and fail to make it sufficiently clear that he wants you? How much “I want to be with you” is too much, and how much is not enough?
Frequently, women in the online dating scene simply stop talking to me. They never explain why. Did I say too much, was I too reserved? I never know.
The very least you can do, if you give him the brushoff, is tell him what he did wrong for you.
My husband and I knew we were going to get married within a few weeks of our first date. We’ve been married for over three years now and it’s as close to perfect as we could hope for. I never would have thought it was possible until it happened to me; it was intensely romantic but completely rational and practical at the same time. Obviously you want to go in with your eyes open and be careful, but in some cases it just clicks. Good luck!
Thanks for all the responses! devilsnew, I understand that my feelings may make it seem like I’m emotionally distant, don’t want romance, etc. That’s not true, though- what I do want is for someone to take the time to get to know me and then decide that I’m the one for them. Immediate proclamations of devotion sound insincere to me and scare me.
I’m 38, and have a lot of dating experience, having been divorced for over 10 years now, and I definitely have come across men that were so incredibly charming and sweet at first and then turned out to be psychos. Surely those experiences are coloring my perceptions now, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong.
Having said that, I’m really liking Man #3, and so far have not noticed any other warning signs, so like I said, I’m going for it. I will be more reserved than he for now, because that’s my nature, but in my head, I’m making plans for him. Mwaahahaha!
Well, when you signed up for the on-line dating thing, you were hoping to meet someone like Man#3, right? Proceed with reasonable caution, but my thought is that you should proceed.
