Venturing into Online Dating

A few months back I decided to give the online dating world a shot.  Why not, right?

A few of my friends have tried it and are those success stories.  Others had fun with it.  So I guess it couldn't hurt to try.  Besides, I felt I needed to expand and get out of my circle of friends and acquaintances and hopefully be fairly anonymous to a potential date.  As I've said in earlier posts, I wanted to meet someone who wanted to go out with me, not the "sex toy lady", because there can be some misconceptions that go along with what I do for a living. 

The online dating world seemed to be the best way for me to go.

Yes, the sex toy lady went online. 

In a college town, it can be a little tough to meet someone around my age.  And as many of the single ladies my age will agree, when it comes to men our age, there are so many here with a major case of "Peter Pan Syndrome".  I want someone who has their shit together, who can still have fun, but doesn't feel the need to get hammered every time he goes out.  If you're not in college anymore, it's really sad if you're binge drinking every weekend.  Sorry, it is.  It's not my job to play your designated driver all the damn time. (am I bitter much? maybe.) 

And as I've said in a prior post, I want to meet someone who's not intimidated by what I do.  Insecure men need not apply because I've dealt with that before and it's not fun trying to boost someone else's self-esteem when it's only them who can do it.  Nor is it fun dealing with someone who puts you down so they can feel better about themselves.  That's not how any kind of relationship should be.  If you've ever been thru that, you know what I mean.

So this online dating experience has been an experiment.

I had to decide which service I wanted to go with... eHarmony?  OKCupid? Match.com?  Plenty Of Fish?  That one that's been advertised on television using people who weren't accepted by the tradition Match and/or eHarmony?

Narrowing it down, I had to decide if I wanted to go with a paid service.  Did I really want to pay to meet people?  What was the reputation of the sites?  Do I know success stories?  I'd heard plentyoffish.com was where everyone went if they just wanted to hook up.  I really wasn't looking for that.  I actually did want to date.

Once I chose the site I'd go with, it was time to set up my profile.  Was I really in the mood to answer a bunch of questions about myself?  It just took so long.  I didn't post a picture right away because I know some guys are stalking those sites for newest additions and I suspected if I posted a picture of me, an Asian woman, the guys with "yellow fever" would be all over that and I'd get annoyed.  Though, I'd already been warned to expect a ton of e-mails in the beginning since I was fresh meat.  I couldn't believe that I was going to do it.  But still, that didn't mean I necessarily had to actually go out with any of the guys who contacted me. At least I had that safety net.

I trudged thru the questions.  Answering them the best I could until I answered what I thought would be enough to get me a match of some kind.  I liked that the site lets you know how much of a match someone is if/when you look at their profile.  Pretty cool.  I didn't want to waste anyone's time by going out with someone who wasn't remotely a match.  I'd have to be able to get along with him on some level.

Oh, the e-mails started coming in.  Oy... what do I do?  I didn't know if I should be polite and respond back to the guys who took the time to e-mail me, even though I wasn't interested.  I could also see who was checking out my profile.

Here's what got me... each profile has a "what I'm looking for" type section where you enter the type of people you're looking for like age range, distance from you, etc.  I had dudes that were way out of the age range I was looking for checking out my profile and e-mailing me.  Really?  No offense to the older men reading this, I'm not interested in a man in his 50's nor does my profile say that I am.

One cool thing about seeing who my matches are is that there are some familiar faces in there.  Actually, I was surprised to see these guys on the site.  It made sense that we were matched in the first place because we are friends after all, so we have things in common.  Unfortunately, some of the other familiar faces belong to guys I would never want to go out with because I just don't like them.  Maybe somewhere there are matches within our personality questions, but in person, those few guys are dicks.  I just hope they never see that I'm matched with them.  Ugh.  So there's the good and the bad with that.

And what do you do if you happen to come across a match while you're out and about, especially if you never contacted them and you know they've scoped out your profile?  Awkward...

Then we have those e-mails that said stuff like "hey" or "ur sexy".  Written exactly like that.  I'm not a friend you're texting.  I'm a woman you're writing to in hopes you'll get a response.  Take the time to actually write out a proper sentence.  Sorry.  Those guys couldn't take the time to write to me properly, so I couldn't take the time to respond.

I decided to be nice and respond to a few e-mails to be friendly.  Oh, big mistake.  Some of those guys just kept e-mailing me.  A couple keep coming back to my profile on a regular basis.  Nothing's really changed, buddy.  I'm not interested.  That's why you haven't heard from me.  I've even had one guy get super creepy. He knew who I was but never mentioned how I might know him and kept sending me e-mails about my pictures.  Creeper.... :-/

And then along come those guys who e-mail me even though our match rating is less than 20%.  Ummm... is your idea of a good date fighting the whole time?  Not mine.

I've had one guy ask me to meet up with him after just three very short e-mails.  Seriously, our e-mails were very short -- two sentences at most -- and he wanted to meet up when he lives over an hour away?  Excuse me?  I wasn't comfortable to meet in person at that point.

This online dating this was not going well. But then again, I wasn't really letting it happen.

I did end up going on at least two dates.  The one went fairly well, but I wasn't feeling it even though our e-mails were great.  The other, I thought he was a nice guy, but he was more than 10 years younger than me and I probably would've strangled him at one point.  Ugh.  Yeah, I'm a tad cynical.

A few tips for this online dating thing, especially if you want a response from a woman:

• I know it's a "put your best face forward" sort of thing when you're posting pictures to your profile, but make sure that picture looks like YOU.  Present day you.  Not 5 years ago you.  Some of the guys I met in person did NOT look like the photos they posted.  Come on.  I couldn't recognize the one when we were meeting up for our date.  My photo is from January of this year.  I'm smiling. I look like most of my candid pictures.  And POST A PHOTO.  Profiles without photos don't get a second thought from me.
  
• When it comes to your profile picture, SMILE.  You want to look approachable, don't you?  I've seen too many where the guy just looks like a child molester or potential stalker.  Goofy photos are fine in my book cuz it looks like you know how to have a good time.  That scowling glare you're giving the camera (you might think it's sexy, but it doesn't look sexy to me) or the really bad webcam photo isn't doing you justice.  It's online dating... photos are a big part of your profile.  I admit that I look at a profile's photo first and then read the info.  I have to be attracted in some way to someone if I'm going to date them.  That's just how it is.  But, I've spotted some really good-looking men on the site, checked out their profiles and passed on them because we were in no way a match.
  
• Another photo thing... Do NOT have a picture of you and some woman getting really cozy.  You're on the site to meet a woman, right?  That woman is most likely looking for a man who's single and available.  A photo of you and some chick kissing you, in bed with you, snuggling up to you, or whatever is NOT attractive.  It makes you look like you're a player.  If that's what you're trying to go for, make sure you're contacting a woman who's looking for the same.
• Contact a woman who has similar interests as you and has similar "looking for" stats.  My profile says I don't want kids.  I just don't.  And I have dudes with kids e-mailing me?  I don't want kids of my own, and right now, I don't want anyone else's either.  That's too much to take on for me right now.  Sorry.
• Take into consideration the username you select.  Names like "Doctor69" or "CougarChaser" are... I'll just leave it at that.  And I've come across too many "HotWhatHisNames" that weren't hot in my book.  Hopefully they're hot to someone else.
• When you're entering info into your profile, I've found that if you write something like "I'm not looking for... ", if your site sends you potential matches, it's going to send you what you said you didn't want.  Weird, huh?  Kind of like how the Law Of Attraction works: if you focus on what you don't want, it's going to give you more of that because it doesn't recognize the "don't", it just hears the object that you didn't want.  Apparently, dating websites work that way, too.
• When you're e-mailing a woman, take the time to actually write out proper sentences.  You don't need to have your Master's or anything, I just hate those damn text-like messages.  I've said it already and I'll say it again, test-like messages don't get my time because they couldn't take the time to actually write.  And please write more than just "Hey" or "What's up".  Really?  Are we back in junior high?
• If a woman hasn't contacted you in weeks/months, you can probably take that as she's not interested.  Repeatedly going back to check out her profile only makes you look like a creeper if she can see that you've been looking.  I know it sounds mean, but whenever I see that on my profile from a couple of the same dudes, my eyes roll. 

The tips above can also be totally applied to women.  Ladies, we are not exempt.

I know dating can be a daunting thing, especially if you haven't been in the world for a while and I give props to the men who reach out and make contact first.  It takes balls.  We're still wired to think that it's the guy's job to make first contact.  We're just so used to it.  So when men take the initiative, they take that risk that they could be rejected.  That's probably why I haven't outright told a guy on the site that he didn't have a chance in the world.  But then again, I tried to be nice by responding and all it got me was hangers-on.

I initially wanted to blog about the entire experience, but since I didn't give it a go like I hoped I would, I can't.

I've come to realize that I don't really feel like dating.  If I happen upon a man who sparks my interest, then maybe... Sounds a lot like how I ended my other post about being set up by my friend, huh?