Just when you thought it was safe - OK CUPID PART 3: The Return of the WOO!

some people invite YOU out and then flake or phantom.

yes this is the lamest

I wonder if it's worth noting that I've met quite a lot of my partners via the internet - but not a single one by overt Internet Dating.

Most of them were as follows:

- chat on IRC room, start chatting in private chat, get on well, arrange to meet up, date
- chat on Usenet group, start emailing about something or other, get on well, meet up, date
- see friend of a friend post on friend's LJ post/FB post, start talking to them directly, find out you get on well, meet up, date.

Rinse lather repeat for any forum, tbh. Even ILX would apply, if only all the mongrel lads weren't so useless lolol j/k guys <3

I just jump at/start talking to all people who interest me looks/common interests wise, and let it flow, and it works better than you'd think.

Nice OKC guy turned out to be a bit of a perv after only 2 nights chat before Ive even met him, ugh.

Not creepy, still nice, but way way way too foward.

just had a pretty kickass friday night with a girl i met on here. she's new to town so i showed her my fave spots and we hit the one she'd visited on a previous trip. i will prob give her a ride back to her car sometime tomorrow. lol.

kinda shocked at how sober i am given 8 whiskey & cokes + a beer

8!

Asked the question. Response was 'I should really disable that'. I made it clear (nicely) that I wouldn't be happy if it stayed up. Now to see if he takes it down. I'll give him a week.

OK, I don't know where else to put this.

About two months ago, just after I registered, a woman in here in Northampton, MA asked me out and I politely declined. But she persisted in a friendly way and we ended up corresponding regularly (2- 3x week?) about separation & single parenting (both of which are new to me this summer), but also creative process (she painted) and increasingly & in a jokey way why we hadn't yet met in person... She became as close a friend as one can have w/o meeting IRL, was she was endlessly supportive and projected a positivity I sorely needed. We exchanged short pieces of fiction as recently as last week, and in my last missive (Thurs. 8/19) I asked what her weekend plans were and whether or not she was free for a coffee or beer.

I didn't hear back form her all weekend which seemed kinda weird but we'd had gaps of several days before so I figured she was wither sick or busy with her daughter (who goes to the same school as mine.) On Wednesday I received a bulk email from that school informing us she had passed away. I somehow knew immediately that she'd killed herself, a fear realized by the dozens or hundreds of condolences on her Facebook page a few clicks away.

I knew she had struggled w/ depression but had no idea despite how much we shared that she was in such terrible pain. I am so fucking ripped up and sick inside and confused about this new world where we can know each other so well and at the same time not at all.

You must be in terrible pain yourself. I'm so sorry. You did know her, and the fact it was incomplete doesn't detract from the good things you got from one another. You can know people very incompletely in real life as well as online.

Never mind the internet, I imagine there are a lot of people right now feeling that they knew her well and at the same time not at all.

Do you have anyone you knew in common who you can talk to, e.g. other parents at the school you know well?

Yeah...we had only one mutual friend on FB (which surprised me) and I'm beginning to get dribs and drabs from some friends of friends. I went to the sort of improvised memorial the other night and ended up kind of lurking on the periphery, unsure how to deal or interact with people mourning her so much more profoundly. I learned she had addictions, I don;t know what to or how many or how long...beyond that it's maddeningly opaque.

Not trying to make lemonade here but maybe your interactions kept her afloat a little longer. However short, there's more meaning in a friendship like the one you had with her than maybe you know. You gave her a small part of yourself, and no matter the ending, she, and you are better for knowing each other.

But whatever the case, I do feel for you. Hang in there.

Than you both...I'm able to convince myself of that every now and then, but the one thing that's keeping me up at night is our last exchange had to do w/ a story I sent her which was so nihilistic and kind of determinedly unsentimental...and she wanted to know why it was like that, and I answered her but I have no idea whether or not she got that message. It was the day she left.

Dude took his profile down. Thanks rogermexico for sanity-restoring advice, and zorn for reassuring me that I am not the only one who feels like a rabbit in headlights in these situations!

now you have to find his match.com profile

(good luck with the doctor's appointment, hope yr skin situation is rectified forthwith!)

Ha, he already admitted to a nerve.com one but that was taken down a while back apparently when they started charging for a bunch of new things. I had a nerve.com account back in 2000! I think that makes me an early adopter. or early giver-upper on meeting people in real life.

xpost Hadrian, I wonder if it would be good to talk to people on some of the depression-related threads here? I don't know which are the best and most recent, maybe others can point to some?

Why o why did I sign up for this?

I'm feeling a bit... overwhelmed, already. Probably just because I'm new and in a few days I will go back to feeling like an unattractive lump of putty again when men stop sending me winks and things.

I'm not sure I like this thing where they let men guess if you give them high stars. I am going to stop giving out stars perhaps. Eep. How long before I get freaked out and delete my profile?

A couple of things...

1) Men of OKC. Why, if a woman has on her profile "please do not message me if you believe in nonsense like X or Y" do you then really think it's appropriate to message her and try to start a conversation asking her if she believes in Y?

2) ARGH ARGH ON NOES PANICK ARGH someone just popped up in my quickmatch who is someone from the London indie scene that I have had a crush on for over ten years (in fact, I think I have talked about crushing on them on ILX several times before and had to have it googleproofed) and I accidentally clicked 5 stars before I realised it WAS ACTUALLY HIM and then I accidentally SENT HIM A MESSAGE and argh now he is going to know and I will be able to speak to him even less IRL and die from embarrassment and shame and collapse in giggles like I have done EVERY TIME HE HAS TRIED TO TALK TO ME FOR THE PAST 12 YEARS.

::runs away and hides and considers deleting the account before he sees any of this::

hopefully you will now accidentally have a fun romance with him.

Yeah, if this were a Romantic Comedy, I would end up accidentally meeting him for coffee, and accidentally shagging like demented rabbits under the table.

Unfortunately, this is my life, and he will end up accidentally deleting the message without reading it, or accidentally calling the cops to keep that mad woman at least 500 yards away from him. :-/

<3

ljubljana, i'm so glad it's going well, and i'm beyond humbled that you found any value in my pov. love is so hard.

The problem is, I *care* too much, and I get too caught up in it, and start to take it personally if people don't write back, and get over-invested in one person, as opposed to talking to a variety and then it stops being fun, and just starts being stressful.

I know one shouldn't but I can't help but also take it personally when people don't reply. You're certainly not alone there Karen.

I suppose I need to think about the reasons that I don't write back, when I don't write back to someone, and they usually are fairly reasonable.

Also, the intersection of IRL and OKC is just awkward, I suppose. I cannot be surprised if someone who was not interested in me when I was young and fairly conventionally attractive remains uninterested in me now I am old and hideous. Sigh. Also, must remind myself I can be as shallow as the behaviour I decry.

Well, this is turning into quite the little saga: lots of little things added up to one big lightbulb last night, which I then checked online. Dude lied about his age on OKC. Only by 5 years. But he lied, and hasn't corrected it in the 4 months I've known him. Not sure I can be with a liar. I guess we'll wait for the explanation, though. Seeing him tonight.

:/

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/07/500x_photoageuserage_01.jpg

Heh, that's not such a problem unless you're dragging the correspondence out. I mean, you get to meet them in person and judge for yourself whether you're attracted to them in person, rather than to an out of date photo. Actually lying about your age is a different kettle of fish.

And there I was putting the baggy neck down to a lot of booze and ciggies. I do find him attractive. But re the lying, :/ is the only response I have right now too, but it doesn't do justice to the horrible feeling in my stomach.

I love OKCupid's totally stats geek blog. Often very interesting.

I wish you all the best ljubljana, however it may turn out.

thanks k. I hope that OKC, or life, turns up something worthwhile and fulfilling for you soon.

Wow, I thought women were supposed to be the vain gender.

ljubljana, you seem quite uncomfortable about a lot of things about this relationship. I don't know if this is because you you have a gut instinct that something is off, or if you are perhaps not as good at addressing in person things which you concerning your instincts, which would be resolved with better communication.

I wish I could find a "relax and not worry about it" button on the site. I think I'm overanalysing everything at the moment. I wish I could find where my self esteem went, but it seems like being on this site is a downward spiral of self esteem shredding where everyone loses.

I've been having some very good conversations, but I feel like I'm going to have to draw a line and say "this is great, but I joined this site to *meet* people, not spend even *more* time on the internets."

However, it feels so lopsided. The person who has already expressed interest in me, I look at his answering pattern and there's so much lifestyle stuff there that we fundamentally disagree on - which is probably why talking is fun, but a relationship would be problematic. The other person, all the lifestyle question stuff is almost scarily similar, we have a lot of agreement in our conversations (which I'm scared will make them less interesting as we haven't disagreed on anything yet) but then I'm stupid and I look at the sex questions and it's all "I prefer slim/slender women" and "looks are very important to me" and I just die a little inside, knowing it doesn't matter how well we get on, my ugliness is going to be a deal breaker. And that makes me feel insecure, and insecure is just SOOO nagl.

It's a nice ideal to try to remind yourself that someone out there will accept the whole package, but the pragmatic side of my nature is just convinced that it's a losing endgame because I'm starting to believe the anti-woman, anti-age, anti-fat propaganda - and more importantly, I'm increasingly convinced that *others* do.

(Then again, lying about one's age means almost nothing to me, as I've been lying about my age on a regular basis since I was about 16. I do think that our society's obsession with age is pretty ridiculous, and if someone wants to subvert that, you know, fair play. I recognise this may not be the case, and it may be indicative of a generally mendacious personality, but I think age is one of those protected areas where normal logic does not always apply, so long as they do come clean when confronted on it)

I can possibly see lying about one's age when asked, so that it's a lie that just kind of dissipates and can be colored in later with a wink or whatever, but actually filling out a form that people are using to determine whether or not they want to know you just seems totally out-of-bounds to me.

Also, must remind myself I can be as shallow as the behaviour I decry. < Anyway, this. I know.

I can sympathise with the subverting of ageism and I can even see how one *might* justify outright lying on the site to get dates, as long as you then come clean about it very, very quickly with your date if it goes somewhere. That didn't happen.

Snipping or adding a year, especially with the aim of putting yourself definitely in the category you would like to be searched on (such as saying you are 40 when you are 39 or 29 when you are 30) I really don't see as a big deal at all.

Removing 5 years from your age is really kind of questionable, but it would really depend if other things are lied about. For example, I think lying about whether you have children or not (or indeed want children or not) is far more despicable than lying about your age.

I got taken to task in chat recently for "looking for" women 25-45. (I'm 40.) To think that I could have just called myself 35! But how do you walk something like that back? Just "heh heh nope I lied"?

OK, let me rephrase that. If you're deducting a large age gap (large meaning more than 2 years) from your age with the specific point of dating people much younger than you, that's just kind of creepy.

But even thinking about this kind of thing kind of makes me hate humanity.

ljubljana, what's the actual age gap between you, and what's his stated age gap? This has actually put kind of a skeevy slant on it. Because I was thinking it was more along the lines of saying you're younger than you are in order to appeal to people actually the same age as you.

Kate, you change your age to a younger one, right? You are the first woman under 60 I've met that does that.

I had a patient once that had added FIFTEEN YEARS to her age to minimize the age gap between her and her husband. She'd actually managed to get the false age onto her driver's license and into her medical records--I called my agency soon afterward so that they could get the right age into her file. (She was born after 1933, so she would have had a birth certificate. However, her false birthdate was earlier than that, so she could have lied and said that she didn't have one when she got her driver's license.)

I am just going to rewrite my profile to say I'm only looking for pointy nosed ginger dudes who have their own oscillators.

(However, I have found only one guy who met those criteria - he was friendly, but then I read the small print and saw he was poly. Um, no thanks.)

When I have lied in the past about my age, I have always lied for biographical purposes, not relationship purposes. I've always come clean on the second date, if the bloke seems decent enough to see a second time.

And I dunno. It seems to have been hugely common in my social scene, but that might just be because the music industry is so insane about ages. I've known a lot of women, usually in their 30s, who have lied to make themselves a year or two younger. (Or lied to make themselves a decade younger for bio purposes - this is totally standard practice)

It was actually quite funny, I knew a family of 3 sisters, and the oldest started lying about her age, saying she was the same age as the middle sister, so the middle sister had to start to lie - and would usually ask people "how old did my sister tell you she was?" before revealing her own age because otherwise they would have had to pretend to be twins. It was kind of hilarious.

But then again, I was 22 for 11 years which is also hilarious.

OK, let me rephrase that. If you're deducting a large age gap (large meaning more than 2 years) from your age with the specific point of dating people much younger than you, that's just kind of creepy.

Kate, to you, how much of an age gap between a couple can there be before it starts being "creepy"?

And I dunno. It seems to have been hugely common in my social scene,

It's always seemed to me to be one of those old-fashioned Woman Things, like faking orgasms and wearing false eyelashes to bed. But we do run around in different social circles.

It's not the age gap that's creepy. It's *lying* about it that's creepy.

But, you know, after you've been in close relationships with some people that have lied about pretty important aspects which would have changed your decisions about them had you had full knowledge, your creep detector gets set more sensitively. I rarely trust what anyone says they are any more, on the internet.

Kate, I'm 38. He said he was 43 and is actually 48. I think he's been out with much younger women than me in the past. I don't have a problem with that, I have a problem with the lying.

At least one of the relationships with a much younger woman (I now think it must have been nearly a 20 year age gap) was a committed one lasting 3 or 4 years, and I believe she ended it.

Hadrian, I will report back on how you walk back knocking off 5 years after this evening. If it's anything other than an earnest entreaty for forgiveness, I dunno.

That's just a bit weird, to me. Like, what difference would it make to someone in their late 30s if their partner were in the mid 40s or late 40s? Lying with no reason to lie is, well... I was gonna say weird, but it's not so much weird as a caution flag. I have had some real problems with habitual liars, and one of the signs of habitual liars is that they lie over stuff which they have no reason to lie over - *and* the big stuff.

I thought it was pretty obvious why I have a problem with people lying about large age gaps. When I was 27, a boy lied and told me he was 24 in order to get in a relationship with me when he was 17. He also turned out to have lied, in that he was still sleeping with (and impregnated) his 15 year old ex.

So, you know, there is *no* problem whatsoever with a 5, 10, 20, whatever year age difference if both parties are aware of it and consent to it. Whatever makes you happy. But I *do* think it is suspicious and kinda creepy if someone is significantly altering their age in order to deceive people of that age group into dating them. It is both the deceit and the intent.

Just as some examples:

25 y.o. and 45 y.o. dating with full knowledge of each other's ages - FINE
45 y.o. saying is 35 to date 25 y.o. - NOT FINE
39 y.o. saying is 37 to date other 39 y.o. - questionable but fine if they come clean if it goes anywhere
17 y.o. saying is 24 to date 27 y.o. - REALLY NOT FINE AND POSSIBLY ILLEGAL

Draw your own conclusions on what the pattern is. And where "30 y.o. saying is 22 in order to get record contact and laughing self sick at record company not noticing that they were 22 in 1999 and still 22 in 2001" falls on that scale.