Thinking about online dating

[lifestream]

Any updates on this, Katerina?

 

[Katerina]

Any updates on this, Katerina?

Not yet, I might have been stalling a little as I tend to overthink and overplan things. So I want to get a few photos sorted out first then I'll go ahead and make a profile. I should sort something out this week though

 

[lifestream]

Fantastic.

 

[TheLonelyNomad]

Doesn't mean that it won't work for the OP - just because you had bad experiences. How do you know that your ideal partner wasn't a click away before throwing in the towel?

Point is, you only get out of web dating what you put into it. Yes there are users who may not have the best intentions, but there are thousands more that do just want to meet people in the hope that one might be a potential partner. Just see it as a fun way of meeting people.

@ Hedonist. I know we all have different experiences with online dating. Factors that determine our success in online dating is our messages, descriptions posted on the dating website's profile section, our race or ethnicity, your job or income level (yes, some people can be ubber materialistic!), and your physical looks.

For me, I am just an average joe. Nobody has complimented me on being handsome, except for my parents,...when I was a kid. Other than that, not girls have approached me in school.

The same could be said of me while I was experimenting with online dating. The profile pictures of the girl were usually fake. I have met up with one girl six years ago, whom I have met via online dating (I will withhold the name of the website). Only to find out that she's overweight, and looks completely different from the photos she has uploaded onto her dating profile.

My advice is to either have your parents help you find a date or a potential significant other.

My dad is not an outgoing person, so he's not too helpful in finding me a girlfriend, and I don't think he cares about my marital future.

However, my mom was very nice and keen in finding me my current GF, whom I see on and off, once a week due to our busy hectic work schedule.

So it's either your parents, friends, or even a match making agency who are bound to be more successful in finding you a potential partner, versus finding some random weirdo from the internet dating pool.

 

[Morse Code]

I've heard that people have had good experiences with it, but it didn't work for me personally and I've tried it a few times now. I always get frustrated and leave. For one thing I look horrible in pictures, and the few messages I ever get say "hi" or "wanna hook up". The couple of dates I've ever gotten out of it were total bombs so...no more for me.

 

[looking glass]

Any updates on this, Katerina?

Not yet, I might have been stalling a little as I tend to overthink and overplan things. So I want to get a few photos sorted out first then I'll go ahead and make a profile. I should sort something out this week though

Haha yeah, I hear you. Getting good photos was difficult for me, too.

Anyway, I wish you the best of luck in your endeavour!

 

[h3donist]

Doesn't mean that it won't work for the OP - just because you had bad experiences. How do you know that your ideal partner wasn't a click away before throwing in the towel?

Point is, you only get out of web dating what you put into it. Yes there are users who may not have the best intentions, but there are thousands more that do just want to meet people in the hope that one might be a potential partner. Just see it as a fun way of meeting people.

@ Hedonist. I know we all have different experiences with online dating. Factors that determine our success in online dating is our messages, descriptions posted on the dating website's profile section, our race or ethnicity, your job or income level (yes, some people can be ubber materialistic!), and your physical looks.

For me, I am just an average joe. Nobody has complimented me on being handsome, except for my parents,...when I was a kid. Other than that, not girls have approached me in school.

The same could be said of me while I was experimenting with online dating. The profile pictures of the girl were usually fake. I have met up with one girl six years ago, whom I have met via online dating (I will withhold the name of the website). Only to find out that she's overweight, and looks completely different from the photos she has uploaded onto her dating profile.

My advice is to either have your parents help you find a date or a potential significant other.

My dad is not an outgoing person, so he's not too helpful in finding me a girlfriend, and I don't think he cares about my marital future.

However, my mom was very nice and keen in finding me my current GF, whom I see on and off, once a week due to our busy hectic work schedule.

So it's either your parents, friends, or even a match making agency who are bound to be more successful in finding you a potential partner, versus finding some random weirdo from the internet dating pool.

Each to their own but frankly the idea of expecting my parents to find me a partner fills me with horror! They'd probably set me up with some Cromwell-esque Bearded Puritan who hasn't cracked a smile in her life, yet knows a good savings account when she sees one!

Seriously though, it's like you aren't taking responsibility for your own life. What happens if the person your mum sets you up with turns out to be a complete nightmare? Will you say "it's my mum's fault for setting me up with the wrong partner"?

Also the "random internet dating weirdos" you mention often turn out to be the kindest, funniest, most interesting people you'll ever meet in your life. They just get left on the shelf for whatever reason so they turn to webdating in the hope of meeting somebody to make them happy.

 

[RainbowWalker]

I can't give advice on where to go online or what site to use, but I wanna say that I have met my best friends in life online but also my girlfriend of 6 years. We'd split up last year for several reasons but not primarily because of the long-distance relationship. I met her in a forum about "The Lost World" (the TV series) in 2008 and soon started to write us long emails everyday. We then wrote IM's on MSN (WLM) and eventually used video chat to talk every single day. We talked about just anything under the sun from all things daily life and also about politics, literature, arts and whatever else. I can honestly say we never ran out of topics. Sometimes we even played games through MSN (Bowling etc.) or I played songs for her just with an acoustic guitar and my voice. My experience was that we enjoyed our time together everyday much more consciously than most "normal" couples probably do. Just because we knew that the time is precious. Needless to say that there were also drawbacks, major drawbacks. One of them is the inability to take someone in your arm in a very moment, especially when the other person would terribly need it. The only way of trying to compensate this is to try to visit each other as often and as much as possible. I had to learn this the hard way too. In the first 3 years we didn't visit each other often enough which almost destroyed the relationship, no matter how much love and understanding there is. Later we learned from our mistake and managed it to see us every 4 weeks for a couple of days. Of course, it was never enough, this is clear.
These are just my personal experiences in a nutshell, without trying to to speak pro or con about it. It CAN work, yes, but it requires tons of work, effort, understanding and yes, love, to make it work in the long run.

 

[African_weasel]

I've heard that people have had good experiences with it, but it didn't work for me personally and I've tried it a few times now. I always get frustrated and leave. For one thing I look horrible in pictures, and the few messages I ever get say "hi" or "wanna hook up". The couple of dates I've ever gotten out of it were total bombs so...no more for me.

you should try to take some better pictures. If you have a friend that is a photography nut then you're in luck. If not then look for somebody that is just starting out and looking for pocket change for about $100-$200. Don't you have to use the paid stuff in order to communicate? To me I think it makes since to do that so it will keep the people who are just on there to get the quote hottest person on the site or try to limit them.

 

[Katerina]

I can't give advice on where to go online or what site to use, but I wanna say that I have met my best friends in life online but also my girlfriend of 6 years. We'd split up last year for several reasons but not primarily because of the long-distance relationship. I met her in a forum about "The Lost World" (the TV series) in 2008 and soon started to write us long emails everyday. We then wrote IM's on MSN (WLM) and eventually used video chat to talk every single day. We talked about just anything under the sun from all things daily life and also about politics, literature, arts and whatever else. I can honestly say we never ran out of topics. Sometimes we even played games through MSN (Bowling etc.) or I played songs for her just with an acoustic guitar and my voice. My experience was that we enjoyed our time together everyday much more consciously than most "normal" couples probably do. Just because we knew that the time is precious. Needless to say that there were also drawbacks, major drawbacks. One of them is the inability to take someone in your arm in a very moment, especially when the other person would terribly need it. The only way of trying to compensate this is to try to visit each other as often and as much as possible. I had to learn this the hard way too. In the first 3 years we didn't visit each other often enough which almost destroyed the relationship, no matter how much love and understanding there is. Later we learned from our mistake and managed it to see us every 4 weeks for a couple of days. Of course, it was never enough, this is clear.
These are just my personal experiences in a nutshell, without trying to to speak pro or con about it. It CAN work, yes, but it requires tons of work, effort, understanding and yes, love, to make it work in the long run.

Thank you for telling me your story of how meeting someone online went for you RainbowWalker.

 

[RainbowWalker]

You are so very welcome, my friend. Have a nice Sunday!

 

[TheWalkingDead]

I'll give my take on this as a man in his 40s who has used dating sites for 10 years, and used to use more traditional penpal type services before the advent of the internet. This is all based on my own experiences and observations and conclusions and is not necessarily a fact or the whole picture.

First off, I have to acknowledge that online methods of meeting people can work - I know one couple who were in different countries and met online, and are now married, and I found my previous 2 relationships via online sites, though I guess they were more mutual interest sites with a dating component rather than pure dating sites.

First, I did manage to meet quite a number of people through the penpal things, but I was a lot younger then, none of the people worked out, but then that's life! At least I was out there and meeting new people who were at least willing to explore the possibility of a relationship with me. I had some success in the early days of online sites, but this has steadily diminished over the years until now, when I have decided to give up.

Since my last relationship ended in 2011, I have had no success at all on these sites. In the last 3 years I have met one person and arranged to meet another. The person I met spent all day with me, had plenty of opportunities to disappear but kept agreeing to go to different places. Then as soon as we parted company ignored me completely and blocked my profile and phone number. The person(s) I arranged to meet was actually playing a game, I figured out eventually, getting me to the point of meeting up before simply vanishing without explanation. I say possible persons because there was a picture of 3 "flatmates" in one of the pictures and various clues made me think they were just luring in lonely guys to then just drop them in some kind of game and basically humiliate someone. There is a cruel game people play in nightclubs to see who can sleep with the least unattractive person then dump them, and I believe this sort of thing happens on dating sites too.

In the last 18 months, I haven't even had a single response to 30-40 messages. Not so much as a "no thanks". Just point blank silence. These were messages to carefully selected profiles with someone I might have something in common with, and polite, respectful, interesting etc - you can probably tell by this post that I don't struggle to express myself in writing. In the end I actually asked what was wrong with my profile as part of my profile, and then did get a couple of messages expressing interest, or saying I actually sounds like a great guy, unfortunately from people over 2000 miles away. It was basically a case of "Ah, maybe I would have been interested had we lived in the same city, alas!" That maybe takes the sting out of it a little, but then where are the ones in the 3 million people who live within an hour of my location? It's not like I'm out in the sticks with few people around. I've heard the term "rejection mill" for these sites, and from reading around forums this is pretty much how it has become for the average guy on dating sites. If you don't fulfil certain fairy tale criteria, you are unceremoniously discarded. I've heard this time and time again, from men who send respectful, well thought out messages, and are just ignored. I think it just started to get more and more superficial at some point and some of the criteria women put on their profiles are a tad excessive. I thought I might click with one person but she didn't want anyone younger than her - not even by a year, not even by a month, no exceptions (I was one year younger!) - another one who started off her profile saying that for her intelligence was the most important thing, and ended up saying that she was only interested in men above a certain height (so for the sake of 3 inches those 2 ships never get to pass in the night to even see if those 3 inches actual matter). I appreciate some things are very important - but seriously, people think they are going to find other people in the top 10% of everything in the limited pool of a dating site? It smacks to me of "always something better around the corner" so good people just face endless rejection for no other reason than they don't have such a glossy exterior.

The end result as I see it is women populate their profiles with questions like "where are the good men" and "where have all the decent honest men gone" and "fed up of players" but most of the good men, unless they happen to also be in the top 5 to 10% of physical attractiveness, have long given up, as writing endless messages without even a response is soul destroying and for men such as myself just turns the whole thing into a rejection mill. Yes the person of your dreams may be that next click away - but after 18 months without a single response, who in their right mind is going to continue investing their time and effort? I once knew a bloke in his 60s who was on his 10th novel and had a 1000 rejection slips, he was still convinced his life as a star writer was just one submission away - maybe it was, but there wasn't really the evidence for that and when I check, none of his books are on Amazon.

So you are left with the pickup artists, fakes, players, and stalkers. They don't care if they only get 1 reply because they have copy pasted a 100 messages and one bite is enough to start playing.

A lot of men think women have it easy on dating sites, but they don't - sure they get way more messages than men, but those messages are usually intrusively sexual from the outset, copy pasted, or inane and useless (eg Hi Babe). But then when reasonable guys write reasonable messages, they just get ignored, so it seems a lose lose situation on the whole for both men and women.

I've read about the fake profiles people have made to try to get a sense of just what people are looking for on these sites and I wasn't convinced, so I briefly made a fake profile with a male model pic, and a vacuous, subtly misogynistic and boorish profile. I had more messages from women in 2 hours than I'd had in 2 years with my real profile. I didn't even have to message anyone as they were messaging me. I quickly deleted the profile and my genuine one as well, because if I am clearly THAT unattractive to women (at least on dating sites) there is no point bothering. Of course, this highlights another problem, in that people with less morals than myself will take that kind of game to a whole new level and string people along with their fake persona. I felt horrible doing this but I just wanted to test it for myself and then deleted the profile as the slim hope I had left just about died in me at that point.

In some ways I am lucky, in that I do have some very valuable friendships with women, and maybe if fireworks were going off physically that would not have happened. I really value my platonic relationships with people who happen to be women, but I felt my continued rejection on dating sites was starting to create a bad taste in my mouth and as much as I rationalised against it, I couldn't avoid feeling rejected by women as a whole which certainly isn't true, but that's how constant, repeated rejection on dating sites starts to make you feel and I'm not surprised that a lot of men have become really disillusioned. We've basically given up.

It's worse than ever now with Tinder, which horrifies me to be honest. I used to hate the idea of meeting someone in a nightclub, I wanted to find somewhere to meet people on a deeper level - unfortunately, my observation is that on the whole dating sites have become the online version of going to clubs. If you're very attractive physically you will probably end up having sex with someone, but a deeper relationship will probably be elusive. If you're not that attractive physically, you'll end up standing in the corner and go home alone, no matter that you have a lot else to offer.

I've decided to invest my energy more into friendships and as a result am going out to Meetups with varying levels of success. Maybe I'll meet someone I click with as more than friends, but if that happens it'll be a bonus, in the meantime I'll be meeting some other people in the same boat as me and at least not confining myself to the 4 walls of my house every weekend!

TL;DR: Anyway, just my views and experience, it may be different for other people, but for me online dating is just about dead and done.

 

[Triple Bogey]

I'll give my take on this as a man in his 40s who has used dating sites for 10 years, and used to use more traditional penpal type services before the advent of the internet. This is all based on my own experiences and observations and conclusions and is not necessarily a fact or the whole picture.

First off, I have to acknowledge that online methods of meeting people can work - I know one couple who were in different countries and met online, and are now married, and I found my previous 2 relationships via online sites, though I guess they were more mutual interest sites with a dating component rather than pure dating sites.

First, I did manage to meet quite a number of people through the penpal things, but I was a lot younger then, none of the people worked out, but then that's life! At least I was out there and meeting new people who were at least willing to explore the possibility of a relationship with me. I had some success in the early days of online sites, but this has steadily diminished over the years until now, when I have decided to give up.

Since my last relationship ended in 2011, I have had no success at all on these sites. In the last 3 years I have met one person and arranged to meet another. The person I met spent all day with me, had plenty of opportunities to disappear but kept agreeing to go to different places. Then as soon as we parted company ignored me completely and blocked my profile and phone number. The person(s) I arranged to meet was actually playing a game, I figured out eventually, getting me to the point of meeting up before simply vanishing without explanation. I say possible persons because there was a picture of 3 "flatmates" in one of the pictures and various clues made me think they were just luring in lonely guys to then just drop them in some kind of game and basically humiliate someone. There is a cruel game people play in nightclubs to see who can sleep with the least unattractive person then dump them, and I believe this sort of thing happens on dating sites too.

In the last 18 months, I haven't even had a single response to 30-40 messages. Not so much as a "no thanks". Just point blank silence. These were messages to carefully selected profiles with someone I might have something in common with, and polite, respectful, interesting etc - you can probably tell by this post that I don't struggle to express myself in writing. In the end I actually asked what was wrong with my profile as part of my profile, and then did get a couple of messages expressing interest, or saying I actually sounds like a great guy, unfortunately from people over 2000 miles away. It was basically a case of "Ah, maybe I would have been interested had we lived in the same city, alas!" That maybe takes the sting out of it a little, but then where are the ones in the 3 million people who live within an hour of my location? It's not like I'm out in the sticks with few people around. I've heard the term "rejection mill" for these sites, and from reading around forums this is pretty much how it has become for the average guy on dating sites. If you don't fulfil certain fairy tale criteria, you are unceremoniously discarded. I've heard this time and time again, from men who send respectful, well thought out messages, and are just ignored. I think it just started to get more and more superficial at some point and some of the criteria women put on their profiles are a tad excessive. I thought I might click with one person but she didn't want anyone younger than her - not even by a year, not even by a month, no exceptions (I was one year younger!) - another one who started off her profile saying that for her intelligence was the most important thing, and ended up saying that she was only interested in men above a certain height (so for the sake of 3 inches those 2 ships never get to pass in the night to even see if those 3 inches actual matter). I appreciate some things are very important - but seriously, people think they are going to find other people in the top 10% of everything in the limited pool of a dating site? It smacks to me of "always something better around the corner" so good people just face endless rejection for no other reason than they don't have such a glossy exterior.

The end result as I see it is women populate their profiles with questions like "where are the good men" and "where have all the decent honest men gone" and "fed up of players" but most of the good men, unless they happen to also be in the top 5 to 10% of physical attractiveness, have long given up, as writing endless messages without even a response is soul destroying and for men such as myself just turns the whole thing into a rejection mill. Yes the person of your dreams may be that next click away - but after 18 months without a single response, who in their right mind is going to continue investing their time and effort? I once knew a bloke in his 60s who was on his 10th novel and had a 1000 rejection slips, he was still convinced his life as a star writer was just one submission away - maybe it was, but there wasn't really the evidence for that and when I check, none of his books are on Amazon.

So you are left with the pickup artists, fakes, players, and stalkers. They don't care if they only get 1 reply because they have copy pasted a 100 messages and one bite is enough to start playing.

A lot of men think women have it easy on dating sites, but they don't - sure they get way more messages than men, but those messages are usually intrusively sexual from the outset, copy pasted, or inane and useless (eg Hi Babe). But then when reasonable guys write reasonable messages, they just get ignored, so it seems a lose lose situation on the whole for both men and women.

I've read about the fake profiles people have made to try to get a sense of just what people are looking for on these sites and I wasn't convinced, so I briefly made a fake profile with a male model pic, and a vacuous, subtly misogynistic and boorish profile. I had more messages from women in 2 hours than I'd had in 2 years with my real profile. I didn't even have to message anyone as they were messaging me. I quickly deleted the profile and my genuine one as well, because if I am clearly THAT unattractive to women (at least on dating sites) there is no point bothering. Of course, this highlights another problem, in that people with less morals than myself will take that kind of game to a whole new level and string people along with their fake persona. I felt horrible doing this but I just wanted to test it for myself and then deleted the profile as the slim hope I had left just about died in me at that point.

In some ways I am lucky, in that I do have some very valuable friendships with women, and maybe if fireworks were going off physically that would not have happened. I really value my platonic relationships with people who happen to be women, but I felt my continued rejection on dating sites was starting to create a bad taste in my mouth and as much as I rationalised against it, I couldn't avoid feeling rejected by women as a whole which certainly isn't true, but that's how constant, repeated rejection on dating sites starts to make you feel and I'm not surprised that a lot of men have become really disillusioned. We've basically given up.

It's worse than ever now with Tinder, which horrifies me to be honest. I used to hate the idea of meeting someone in a nightclub, I wanted to find somewhere to meet people on a deeper level - unfortunately, my observation is that on the whole dating sites have become the online version of going to clubs. If you're very attractive physically you will probably end up having sex with someone, but a deeper relationship will probably be elusive. If you're not that attractive physically, you'll end up standing in the corner and go home alone, no matter that you have a lot else to offer.

I've decided to invest my energy more into friendships and as a result am going out to Meetups with varying levels of success. Maybe I'll meet someone I click with as more than friends, but if that happens it'll be a bonus, in the meantime I'll be meeting some other people in the same boat as me and at least not confining myself to the 4 walls of my house every weekend!

TL;DR: Anyway, just my views and experience, it may be different for other people, but for me online dating is just about dead and done.

the post of the year so far !

 

[blackdot]

I have found that the best way to get contacted by people on pay sites like Match is to let your account expire. Out of the blue people will start trying to contact you.

Just don't pay to re-join to see who they were. Most are fake accounts.

Match used to have a loophole in their system where you could figure out who mailed you even if you no longer had a pay account. I would get these mails and I would check who wrote it. In most cases it was someone whose account vanished after 1 day. Other times it was someone that had no single similarity to me.
Once you pay to get an account again, no more messages come your way.

 

[TheWalkingDead]

the post of the year so far !

Lol not sure about that, but thanks!

I have found that the best way to get contacted by people on pay sites like Match is to let your account expire. Out of the blue people will start trying to contact you.

Just don't pay to re-join to see who they were. Most are fake accounts.

Match used to have a loophole in their system where you could figure out who mailed you even if you no longer had a pay account. I would get these mails and I would check who wrote it. In most cases it was someone whose account vanished after 1 day. Other times it was someone that had no single similarity to me.
Once you pay to get an account again, no more messages come your way.

Ah, Match is supposedly one of the more legit sites according to reviews, but as soon as I created a free account there I was getting winked at and messaged galore. Thankfully I had the sense to use a disposable email address, as it's just typical cynical fakery trying to exploit lonely people for expensive fees.

I tried eHarmony as it was supposed to have more going for it than other sites, before I joined I had to answer all these questions, even then it managed to only find 6 matches within 50 miles, and reading the profiles of my matches just made me laugh they were so obviously incompatible with my values. Glad I didn't pay the £180 for 6 months it tried to get out of me!

 

[blackdot]

I've tried:
Chemistry.com: Horrible site.
eHarmony: horrible site
Match: really good site. I got a lot of last dates on there.
POF: really good site. I got a lot of last dates on there too.
okcupid: it's good but slightly lower than Match and POF. Haven't been on it long but have gotten one last date there.

 

[TheWalkingDead]

What's a last date?

OKC - nothing, POF nothing, niche sites nothing....

You evidently have something going for you blackdot. I didn't even get a reply in 18 months, never mind a date. Evidently I am completely and utterly unattractive to women, or at least the ones on any of these sites.

It would easier if I knew I was just completely unattractive altogether as I could just give up knowing that, but I have met women who find me attractive and have had relationships in the past. I just cannot seem to find them anymore!

 

[Triple Bogey]

the post of the year so far !

Lol not sure about that, but thanks!

I have found that the best way to get contacted by people on pay sites like Match is to let your account expire. Out of the blue people will start trying to contact you.

Just don't pay to re-join to see who they were. Most are fake accounts.

Match used to have a loophole in their system where you could figure out who mailed you even if you no longer had a pay account. I would get these mails and I would check who wrote it. In most cases it was someone whose account vanished after 1 day. Other times it was someone that had no single similarity to me.
Once you pay to get an account again, no more messages come your way.

Ah, Match is supposedly one of the more legit sites according to reviews, but as soon as I created a free account there I was getting winked at and messaged galore. Thankfully I had the sense to use a disposable email address, as it's just typical cynical fakery trying to exploit lonely people for expensive fees.

I tried eHarmony as it was supposed to have more going for it than other sites, before I joined I had to answer all these questions, even then it managed to only find 6 matches within 50 miles, and reading the profiles of my matches just made me laugh they were so obviously incompatible with my values. Glad I didn't pay the £180 for 6 months it tried to get out of me!

Exactly !

Dating sites are one big rip off. I have made a profile and not put anything except my name and got messages, winks and interest. Of course I couldn't see them until I paid money.

---

What's a last date?

OKC - nothing, POF nothing, niche sites nothing....

You evidently have something going for you blackdot. I didn't even get a reply in 18 months, never mind a date. Evidently I am completely and utterly unattractive to women, or at least the ones on any of these sites.

It would easier if I knew I was just completely unattractive altogether as I could just give up knowing that, but I have met women who find me attractive and have had relationships in the past. I just cannot seem to find them anymore!

Dating sites are just for attractive people. If you are not then forget it, save your money.

 

[blackdot]

What's a last date?

A last date is what most people call a first date except there is no second date after the first date.

 

[TheWalkingDead]

What's a last date?

A last date is what most people call a first date except there is no second date after the first date.

OIC, thanks!