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Online Dating: The only real incentive is Efficiency
JWFokker
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Inspired by Dating: The only real incentive is Good Food, this thread is dedicated to the discussion of online dating only, for those of us who are into that sort of thing. Post your experiences and any advice to nubs to the online dating scene.
I did search for other threads on Dating via the Internets, but all I came up with was SE++ crap, and there's just too much off-topic bullshit in those threads to wade through all 500+ pages. For reference, here they are if you're curious or have an inhuman amount of patience. Someone industrious might want to cull the pertinent information and collect it all in one place. That person isn't me.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=50315
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=50935
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=51104
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=65950
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=74331
I did search for other threads on Dating via the Internets, but all I came up with was SE++ crap, and there's just too much off-topic bullshit in those threads to wade through all 500+ pages. For reference, here they are if you're curious or have an inhuman amount of patience. Someone industrious might want to cull the pertinent information and collect it all in one place. That person isn't me.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=50315
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=50935
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=51104
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=65950
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=74331
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I'd never met a single woman like her before, and I realize now that it will take me a very long time to find another woman even remotely like her without the ability to meet/browse through people in a more efficient manner. And thus I developed my recent interest in online dating. The concept of browsing through an Internet catalog of people coupled with a recommendation engine à la Netflix or Amazon seems very, very useful to me and probably the best way to find someone who might be compatible with my unconventional personality and sense of humor.
Seems like the online dating scene is about as active as Twitter.. half (or so) the accounts inactive? :P
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
My personal experience is, I used to be pretty hesitant at the idea of joining online dating sites. In retrospect I realize that was a stupid attitude, given that I hate the bar scene and I'm much more comfortable online.
One day finally I joined OKCupid, which is a pretty fun site. I had fun answering questions and quizzes, and I met quite a few nice girls in person, hung out with some of them, went on a couple of dates. Then I moves to my current city, and the OKCupid population is much, much more limited, so I moved to PlentyOfFish. That's where I met my current girlfriend. We met, it got pretty serious by the second date, she moved into my place after two months of dating, and another month later we're planning our marriage, kids and family budgets with spreadsheets and everything.
But seriously, I wouldn't pay for a dating website. My friends in Québec use a site that's free for women while men can send messages for free but have to pay to read messages they receive; they get around it by sneaking their hotmail addresses in the messages they send out. I've only used OKCupid and PlentyOfFish, completely free websites.
I'm pretty sure you can tell when someone has last logged in on most dating sites, so I don't know if this guy's suit is going to have much of any merit.
I know for a fact that you can restrict searches and matches with OkCupid by the length of time from the last login.
I realize I can't judge internet dating by one bad experience, but it's the first thing that comes to mind whenever I think about it.
On the black screen
Personally, I ended up with a date once through a social network site here in Japan. Didn't even mean to, as I joined to just meet Japanese people, and ended up chatting with one girl a lot. Nothing ended up happening beyond the one date, though, as I had/still have little confidence in my Japanese ability, and she spoke no English at all.
Just a little hint for people who are having a hard time: send messages to people who don't have profile photos, but are active. They most often reply, and often enough they don't have profile photos up because of all the idiots who cruise the personals just to get laid sending "ur hott" messages.
In fact, the biggest complaint I have about online dating in general is what applies the most to places like Craigslist: people think that posting a blurry small-res picture, one sentence about yourself, and the phrase "looking for something real" makes a good personals ad. If you're good looking, you'll get retards replying to you, and if you're not, you won't get anything.
Also, crazy people with fucked up expectations. The chicks on craigslist saying things like "BBW (more often than not it's just BW) princess wants to be spoiled by guy with stable income; also, I have two kids" are a prime example. Damaged goods.
2nd experience: Still new to the internet, I was fooled by a picture from beneath the face and had a short in person chat with a girl weighing well over two hundred pounds.
3rd experience: My fuck awesome wife. Totally worth it.
fourth time was sthe charm for me
My ex (we dated for 6 months, but eventually discovered that we didn't have enough in common. Neither of us has any sort of bad feelings over it, and we still talk all the time) was that way, yeah, though she contacted me. She was very good looking, and specifically cited it being enough of a pain to navigate dozens of "ur hott" emails that she avoided posting her photo. After a brief conversation, she sent me photos (mine were on the site, so no need to trade). I'd be suspicious if someone didn't want to send photos before you meet in person, though.
However it is a little long...
(he did not know i was a girl, and i did not know he was a boy, lol shemale night elf)
We played together for about a year, did the 40 mans and such. One day, our casual guild decided to try out vent for ZG or AQ, (I don't remember anymore) After the raid, he moved down a chan and i followed.
We just got married this past March, moved to his home town of Baton Rouge, and continue to stay inside killing things on the inter-web.
My family still to this day does not understand, when my gal pals at work ask me about it i just say "We met on-line" and they assume the E-I'mSoRonely site so i just go with that.
probably this thing called communication
Guild before that had two people that, last I heard, ended up with the guy moving from the UK to Sweden to marry her. Several other couples in the guild.
It's not really that big of a deal, really. Just another medium for meeting people.
I was just commenting on the fact that there was a large gap in the timeline of the story.
Here's some advice: don't rely too much on their percentages. One of my real life friends made a profile once and we ended up with over a 50% enemies match and this is a dude I lived with for nearly 2 years without any serious problems.
That and the fact that I contacted him first instead of just slapping a picture up and waiting for the boys to come to me
One thing I noticed when I had my ad up was how guys would just send me a message with a "hi, here's my phone number" and I'd look at their profile and we had NOTHING in common, or they were 20 years older than me (not a bad thing in and of itself, just not for me), or lived 60 miles away (again, not a disqualifier exactly, but I need some incentive!), or something. And I bet they wonder why girls don't write back?
Edit: I had a pretty bad experience on eHarmony a few years prior, though... they have a thing where they don't let you see photos of one another until you've done their 5-step compatibility questionnaires to see how well you match up. And, well... I agree with their point that you shouldn't let looks get in the way of a strong relationship, but it's not like I felt I knew the guy well enough after five fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice questions, so when I finally got to see him.... he was several times my size outward. I hesitated a few days in responding, while freaking out to myself, and he deleted me from his contact list. Unpleasantness all around.
Prior to plunging into OKCupid last year, I considered online dating to be a vast wasteland of rejects and rejection.
From 1997 to 2007, despite having profiles on multiple sites, I met a grand total of three girls online, and only one of them turned into a relationship. The other two were one-date-wonders.
From 2008 until now, I've met six girls on OKC, and that's me being selective - there are so many potentially interesting and compatible profiles on OKCupid that I have the luxury of only pursuing the most promising.
Out of those six, two blossomed into full relationships (including my current one), two others I dated seriously for a couple of months each, and two simply didn't click.
My current girlfriend found me on OKC and she rocks my world. I'm not dating anybody else right this second, I'm taking some time off so I can focus on her and on taking care of myself. But when I'm interested in finding another girlfriend (or boyfriend) I'm going right back into OKC, because the ratio of benefits recieved to time invested is vastly superior to any other single method of meeting people I've tried.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
On the black screen
That website is supposed to branch out to other ventures, like hanging out or making friends, but the first two people I met were just horny bastards.
Also, yeah, the photos in online portfolios are incredibly deceptive. Every trick in the book is used here; face shots, top down/angled photos, to pictures taken during different periods of their life. The girl on my second meet-up looked to be in pretty good shape, but when I met up with her she looked to be in the 160-180 weight range.
I actually just got back from my third meet-up, and although this girl was a normal human being she was a bit full of herself and her career, so i'm gonna pass on that one.
The funny thing is that the relationship was the one I met online in 1998.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Plentyoffish turned me off real fast. The website looked awful and every other day or so it'd spam me with useless e-mails that also contained my username AND password. I don't know what people see in that.
The women on that website, however, get dozens upon dozens of e-mails daily from every guy in the tri-state area it seems.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The funny thing: she'd never sent me pics before the first meetup (as friends). When we started to like each other a little after the first visit, though, she started to. Not nude pics or anything, but definitely pics that she was trying to look good in. Anyway the thing is she sent me MySpace kind of pics! You know, the funny angles, the right light to cancel out blemishes, etc. I wasn't too bothered- self-esteem issues suck, I'm sure, and she just wanted to look her best when she was sending me pics- but I'd met her before! It was almost like she forgot that we'd hung out for a few days.
Anyway that's my funny story about online sexual tension.
Every e-mail! For a full week! Hey, marsorfurther, remember your password is ______--and these were e-mails like "Congratulations for hanging around for 3 days! You might have matches!"
I nearly tried geek2geek too but for some reason the starting survey didn't go through on the first try and I didn't feel like taking a full psych profile again.
When I was in Toronto I could open up a conversation with a complete stranger on a bus, and quite a few times that stranger would end up becoming a really good friend of mine. Even snagged a couple of dates that way.
In Houston it's a different story. I've noticed that if you're going to get any attention as a guy you need to be tall and husky; not even in shape, just a big guy. I got the tall part down, but I will never be a husky guy thanks to my black hole metabolism. Again, not a problem in Toronto but down here it's murder.
I will never forget the girl who thought she could try to cyber with me during a chat by randomly starting to pretend to be Smurfette. Um, okay. (In the middle of a convo that had nothing to do with Smurfs, saturday morning cartoons, or the color blue, for that matter.) I think the only way she could have come off as less sexy is if she had started trying to roleplay as Dick Cheney.
Or the first time I actually got as far as taking someone out, after several "meh" attempts with other people online (including Smurfette). We'd had some good chats and e-mail exchanges, so I figured, why not go for it? We went, had drinks, had a really good conversation about all the things we liked, and then she ended it by shaking my hand (thanks for letting me know I suck in the most impersonal way possible!
Here's another good one. In my first chat with another girl, she first told me that she'd been date raped, then that I'd need to learn to bite and tie her up with scarves. Except that also does not come off as sexy after you've told someone about being date raped. I made up some lame excuse about having met someone at a party the next time she buzzed me over AIM. This probably makes me an asshole but I don't really want to get into a deep relationship with someone who seems that damaged.
More recently (2004ish) there was the one who had just been in an abusive relationship with some S & M guy who beat her for kicks outside of the bedroom and owned a gun. I backed out of that one because I frankly did not want to get shot by some crazy ex-boyfriend.
Briefer encounters included the very heavy girl who wanted to convert me to some form of evangelical Christianity (she was almost painfully nice, but, uh, no, I'm not religious), the woman who got into a screaming match with me over a Monty Python DVD she thought I would want to buy (I don't remember how that one got started, especially since I kinda like Monty Python), the 40-year-old who was determined to get me in the sack when I was half that age (and she had two kids, one only six years younger than me... yeah, that would have worked)....
Anyway, I've pretty much given up on online dating. I've never had a really good relationship come out of it (the longest one lasted about three months) and since I'm a fat bastard with almost no money right now I doubt I'd be anyone's idea of a great match anymore anyway. Also I'm apparently terrible at choosing mates to begin with or I wouldn't have had quite so many problems. I wouldn't have kept trying so many times except that I hate the bar scene and I don't date coworkers (too problematic).
Hm, I didn't think about suing for that. I subscribed for a month to one of those sites, because it said a user that I was quite interested in was online. As soon as the sub went through, he was offline. He remained offline every day until my sub ran out.
Those fuckers.
8 years later I guess that was pretty fucked up, huh?
At the moment I'm using dating websites to complement my real life date-looking-forness (is there an actual word for this?). It's not really working, but at the moment I'm not really trying too hard because my plans for the next year are kind of up in the air. The last time I made a conscious effort to send girls personal, polite messages which talked about their profile and all that jazz, I met my last girlfriend, and we lasted almost three years.
So yeah, it works, but as with all things, you need to be proactive.
How depressing.