Ten words – “If you aren’t going to answer, don’t place an ad.”
I’m relativesly shy when it comes to meeting women. Not socially inept, not ugly, not otherwise undatable … just shy. Therefore, I often use online personal ads as a way of meeting women. I figure “if she’s got an ad up, she’s looking to meet someone.”
I don’t answer every ad out there, nor do I limit my responses to those whose profiles show pictures of attractive women. I don’t answer ads where it’s obvious a woman is seeking someone who’s not like me (i.e. six digit income, six pack abs, six feet tall). Maybe one a week, maybe every other week tops. I don’t send out generic form letters – I spend about 30 to 45 minutes sending off a witty, spell-checked response, describing what I saw in the ad that interested me, and telling a little bit about myself. No me, me, me; no perverted talk; no romantic cliches – just what I liked about her, why I think we’re a good match, a bit about me, and a somewhat flattering picture of me with my adorable dog.
Do I get any responses to the letters I send out? Nope. The evidence of my wordsmithing ends up in the bit bucket, unceremoniously made a victim of a button showing an icon that looks like a trash can.
I know women get lots of responses to their ads, sometimes hundreds. Why is it that my time is seen as expendable – that I’m not worthy of the minute or two it takes to write a short message to say “no thanks?” With all the six digit income earning, six pack ab posessing guys out there, is there hope for a normal guy like me without resorting to sending off an e-mail to Svetlana from Minsk? Why do women bother placing personals if they aren’t even going to read them, not even going to respond to them?
Not intending to be an apologist, but do you have any idea of the number of responses women get to those ads? If there’s an attractive picture, it’s likely to be well over a hundred, easily.
I too am shy and try to use the personals to meet women. But I realise they have no responsibility to respond to me.
However, if we’ve started a conversation, I do expect some notification that it’s ended. In almost every single exchange, the girl will eventually just not write again. I’d really appreciate being told, “I’m sorry, I don’t think we’re right for each other”, if indeed that’s the case.
Of course, I know why it happens. It’s not easy to say that. I’ve noticed it myself when I feel that sentiment. But I try to write back and say something rather than keep them wondering. Even if it is a lie like “I met someone.”
So Ruth, Romy, Randi, Erica, Erica, Erica, Meredith, and Elizabeth, thanks for nothing.
Leslie and Michelle, I really had hopes. C’est la vie.
Strange as it may seem, go to the Yahoo chat rooms. The fact that they are full of dickheads can be used to your advantage.
RealLiveWoman: Hi room. HotDick4UpussyEaterSexGodEtcEtc: Wanna fuck, ho? elmwood: Hello RealLiveWoman. How are you? RealLiveWoman: Oh elmwood. You can string two words together and you didn’t mention your penis. MARRY ME!
Trust TheLoadedDog on this one. I leave my AIM and ICQ public in the hopes that the random pervs online will occasionally be interesting and reasonably intellegent.
RandomPerv1: HIIIIIIIIIIII!!!
<ignore>
RP2: WANNA SUCK MY DICK HO?
<ignore>
RP3: hi is lokkin for to chat som one you be frend fr me?
<ignore>
The ones that get responces are the ones who put a couple of decent sentences together.
I do have an alternate explination for the no responce stuff though. Depending on how long ago they placed the ad, they could be using an different e-mail addy.
Sorry people are rude and incosistant. They also may not be serious, I have an ad up somewhere on the 'net that I put up over a year ago on one of those 4am whims. I should really remember where it is and go kill it if its still there, but I haven’t gotten a responce in a while, so that’s hopeful. (And I was a sweetie and wrote all of them back.)
Ahh, Iv’e been having this same problem. Thought mabey it was me.
Also, on a side note, don’t you just hate those Fake personal ads that you respond to and five mins later you get a response from a porn site. Argh! Fuck you fake ass porn site personal ads!
Makes sense though, about the women getting hundreds of ads… Oh well.
I met my current girlfriend through an online personal a long, long, long while back. It took me a while until dense lil’ me realized that we were no longer just hanging out as friends every few days.
I suppose I should ask her why she picked me over all of the other submissions (and I’m sure she had them). Knowing my luck, though, I imagine it as something like Jessica Rabbit saying very dryly, “He makes me laugh.”
Neither posting an ad nor common courtesy requires you to answer those who write you.
By posting the ads, replying to people, you are taking a risk, putting yourself into the meat market, and setting yourself up for possible rejection. So yes, some women get tons of responses. Something in your profile makes the woman say “eh…”. You aren’t as funny and cool as you think you are. So she doesn’t write back. B.F.D. Fuck, if she can’t reject someone at this never-even-looked-at-you-or-thought-about-you-outside-of-two-dimensions stage, when can she?
Writing back, while nice and polite, only makes the whole thing harder. You would really rather get a “Hi, thanks for your note. Um, based on your ad, I don’t think I like you. Sorry. Good luck and all!” than no response at all? Then the woman risks a pathetic “But whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy don’t you like me?” response. No one needs that.
Also, some men take ANY response, even a negative one, as meaning that there is possibility there. Responding, opening up a dialogue, just makes it more awkward down the road. Not responding at all sends a clear and unambiguous message.
So don’t be so thin-skinned. It’s nothing, you know, personal.
I hate that too! I use personal ads from time to time and look for penpals and in the personals, the responses vary from a letter or two, to nothing. No, ‘sorry I’m not gonna talk to you anymore’ or anything.
In the pen pals, especially those over seas, I’ll get a couple of great responses, and will be starting a great dialogue about each others lands and poof!, no further contact. I like pen pals who are willing to really exchange long letters, keep it up for ages, mail little packages of goodies to each other, like photographs, VCR tapes of around towns, different brands of cigarettes, or even small bottles of jam not found here or there but no one writes long enough anymore.
I think the art of letter writing is dying out. Though I will say that Japanese pen pals try very hard to send letter with proper English and spelling.
You have to watch those pictures in the personals because I’ve written to a couple of attractive girls, started a dialogue and got recent pictures of them and found it necessary to terminate any plans of meeting them. Most showed pictures of how they looked 10 years ago! The current pictures showed them having gained a substantial amount of weight and cropped their hair real short. One looked like my late grandmother! Some lost teeth!
The genuine cuties seem to have a pile of handsome guys waiting to meet them, so average fellers like me don’t last long in the que. Tho, there is a particular cutie who keeps popping back up on AOL personals, and I do wonder why.
Personal ad are very impersonal. There is no glance across, little smiles, eye contact, to tell a man he should make a move. Is this why you try to meet women online? IRL, you can see that a woman is interested. Or not. But you know right away. If you invest written words and feel you are being cheated of a response after all your typing efforts, make it easier on yourself. Go out into the world and smile at women.
Go to the library. I was hit on twice tonight at the library.
"I know men and women are different because I read the personal ads in gay papers. The men’s ads are so out there. They’re really graphic. Big, hairy, and hung, seeks smelly caveman for serious spanking, jackoff, and uncut action!! Oh… my… god!!! Even if that’s exactly what I wanted, I wouldn’t have the nerve to respond to an ad like that!
“Of course, the women’s ads are nothing like that. Oh no no no no no. The women’s ads are all… Sincere, caring, sensitive, seeks careta - um, companion, for long talks over tea. Do you like to read in bed? So pathetic!!! Isn’t there something in the middle for gay people by now? Oh, with my luck, it would go like this: Big, hairysensitive lesbian butch, seeks partner for readingand jacking offin bed. Smelly… OK.”
a lesbian comedian whose name escapes me at the moment
PS, Elmwood: If in some alternative universe you responded to my personal ad with something other than an uncapitalized string of self-congratulatory adjectives, I’d be all over you like creepy on Stockwell Day.
Have you thought about maybe posting a personal ad yourself and seeing what responses you get? Or better yet, instead of using the online ads, try your local paper, either the regular one or an alternative one if there is one in your city. Women do respond to personal ads men submit. I met my husband through a personal ad he put in a city magazine. He was in the Navy, stuck on a ship in the South China Sea, and he just wanted women from his home town to write to him. We wrote for two years, then he came back to the US, we met each other, and things went on from there.
For what it’s worth, if wasn’t married and had an ad out there you responded to, I’d write ya back. Putting a dog in your picture is a nice touch.
Another comedian I once saw pointed out a big difference between men & women, that follows along the same idea…
Men can pull up to a stoplight, look in the rearview mirror, see the woman driving the car behind them, think, “whoa, she’s hot,” figure out what she looks like from the neck down, guess her name, ask her out, get married, have three kids and grow old together, all in the time it takes the light to turn green.
Women need to know more personal information about the guys they get involved with, like, say, their names.
Hey, TheNerd… got a thing for women named Erica or what?
Back in my single days I responded to personal ads. I also placed my own. I HARDLY GOT ANY RESPONSES IN EITHER CASE. A week or two after I placed and responded to ads in one upstate NY paper the local news ran a series about personals, and the number of ads bloomed from a mere column to an entire page. But I still got NO responses to my own ad, or to the responses I sent in. The same thing happened to me in two more cities as I moved around the US. In desperation I finally placed an ad in the form of a cryptogram – I figured that it would catch the eye, and if they went to all the trouble of deciphering it they’d be interested enough to contact me. No such luck. I got three calls – all from people who like to solve cryptograms. Two were guys. The woman didn’t want a date. (None of them tumbled to the second cryptogram hidden inside the first one, giving my name).
My ads were straightforward, decent, respectable, and not bland. So were my responses to women’s ads. Yet I hardly ever got any sort of response, and the responses I got were very weird or negative. So I sympathize. I eventually met Pepper Mill face-to-face, not through ads or services. Shared interests.
I wanted to use the personals, but they all seem to be really expensive. On line services will almost always let you read for free but no response allowed without 30 bucks. I like the yahoo personals. I also meet people in chat rooms that are specifically about something I am interested in. Try the yahoo personals, respond to a bunch of ads and see what happens. In one month I’ve only gotten three responses but they’re all very close to what I’m looking for. If you’re not getting a lot of responses, beleive me its for the better. Good luck. If you find my personal and write me, I’ll definitely write you back!
ethilrist, it would seem I do have a thing for girls named Erica, except that I didn’t like two of them very much once we actually met (the other was just not my type), and I didn’t know their names when I responded to their ads.
SueFriendly, I’ve scanned the Yahoo personals. They’re at least 70% fake ads put up by porn sites. I tried putting an ad up there once, and got one response. Which was one more than I got when I put one up on Excite. Excite personals are pretty good, compared to the rest. Free too.
AOL’s Love@aol ads are actually pretty good too, and free, but you run the risk of a population almost totally aolers.
My husband says he tried personal ads, but they didn’t really work. I think the problem is that many single people are a little unrealistic in what they want. i.e. they want someone better looking, thinner, richer, etc. than them. This problem is compounded in personal ads because it’s harder to assess the “intangibles” and so people put more emphasis on the superficial.
For what it’s worth, my husband and I met in a college class. Now he uses ME to meet girls, which is much more effective, but that’s another story . . .
I’ve got an ad up on match.com – if you’re a member, y’all can see it under the same nick I use here. Since I moved to Orlando two months ago, I’ve only gotten one unsolicited response – from a woman about 150 miles away. (We’re corresponding, but there has to be a lot of chemistry, if we do meet, to overcome the distance thing.)
When I lived in Denver, I probably got a letter every month or so. I thought that to be strange, considering that I’m not a the goateed uberjock with a black Lab, a set of $800 Volants, and a Nissan Pathfinder that many seem to seek.
