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

how can anyone hate the the, like, fuck

wttf (what the the fuck)

like like the the the fuck

I do, like, like the "the the" fuck

death

I was talking to a female friend of mine who uses OKC as well, expressing my frustrations at the lack of replies to messages I send, let alone anyone messaging me first, and at conversations that start promisingly and then die suddenly in a deafening silence for no fathomable reason. Her tales of what it was like from the perspective of a good looking, intelligent, decent sounding woman on there (being swamped with messages and IMs and a lot of them from perfectly nice looking and seeming guys rather than all-out weirdos) just made me despair even more. The odds one has to fight against. The spark of hope is still there, but it's struggling pretty hard...

PURGE IT FROM YOUR LIFE

I'm really glad that the "horrifying stereotype test" told me I am a bull dyke.

Can't purge! Still hope!

I'm thinking of trying to end my era of procrastination. I have tended to delay, delay, delay getting in touch with people, seemingly interminably, especially those that I find most interesting or attractive, precisely because of that, waiting for some kind of perfect inspiration or moment to strike my message writing skills, which never materialises.

Instead I'm thinking of trying an "act now or not at all" policy, i.e. when I look at a profile I either find them attractive and send a message or I don't and move on. No more of this saving profiles and endlessly revisiting without doing anything.

anyone else get a fucktonne of flash errors on this site? the damn thing is unusable even with flashblock

I think it's about time to delete my profile after seeing firshand what the "attractiveness" does... Not to be shallow or looksist or whatever (beggars can't be choosers, I know) but having the pool of visible users suddenly and drastically drop kind of does a number on the old self-worth. Couldn't they have just given me an email notification reading DAMN BOY YOU UGLY or something instead of being so coy and inoffensive about it?

Being off work last week and in fitting with my abovementioned pro-active plan, I sent a lot of messages compared to my previous usual behaviour. Replies.... zero. Sadness inside... palpable.

I'm aware of the possibility that sending more messages might come hand-in-hand with putting less effort into them and hence them being less likely to garner a reply, but by a lot I mean about one a day, still individually hand-crafted and laboured over.

I find it very frustrating, but I'm loathe to give up, as I've already spent 29 years of my life meeting precisely no-one in Real Life.

None of it does anything to help with the long-standing feeling that in some basic underlying way I am just not made for other people. Fuck this shit.

RENOUNCE INTERNET DATING SRSLY

Waiting for the girl of my dreams to simply drop out of the sky at my feet really wasn't working out though.

I don't know if that's the only other option tbh

a g00d profile strategy is humour and showing that you don't really take the site too seriously. so if yr answering the questions with paragraphs you should probably just tone those down and add a little mystery to em

yet again, I joined okcupid in a burst of enthusiasm and ended up deleting my profile after a couple of weeks. as before, I started off thinking hey this is fun, I'll set up some dates and do some flirting and boost my self-esteem, with no intention of looking for a serious relationship. then, not having enough else to occupy my time, I started to spend too much time thinking about things like how I'm presenting myself, what sort of person I'm looking for and how frustrating it is that I find so very, very few people attractive enough to even give a chance. which triggered an unsettling crisis of confidence and removed all fun from the experience.

krakow, have you thought about branching out to other sites? guardian soulmates seems to have more people looking for relationships as opposed to just casual dating/internet timewasting. the same with any other sites with fees, I suppose.

@darraghmac I am definitely open to other options. I certainly don't seem to meet many people in my life as is though. I'm not a social animal.

@LOLK Wise advice. I do have a propensity for over-elaboration and taking things too seriously. There are some wee jabs of humour in my profile, but I'll bear your thinking in mind, thank you.

@cocotte I thought about the Guardian site, but it seemed really rather expensive, which in my horribly poor state is quite off putting.

A friend of mine did really well with casual dating on the Guardian site, but she’d only signed up in order to compete with a male friend who was pulling hotties. Got to #1 user-ranked and then got bored, or something.

friend and i just had a little chat. she says:

people are just pretty meh about online dating
i think that's the issue
we're all sort of like eh might as well get started on this so i have a backup
but no one our age WANTS to meet on the internet
am i right?

(we're 23)

anyone else feel this way?

hai!

(also 23)

i'm 25 and i'd rather meet someone on the internet than at a bar.

29, so already past it.

ask a 23-year-old, they might say it's alright for people your age

why has no one started "dial a date" where you call a number, input your post code and age, what gender you are and what gender you're looking for, and are then connected within 5 seconds to someone to talk to? no fuss no muss

they advertise that stuff on late night tellie here all the time

looks horrible

tracer hand that sounds like the worst, most esteem-wrenching idea ever

well you'd know a hell of a lot quicker if you have any chemistry with the person

or do people actually enjoy the interminable, days-and-weeks long volleys of email exchanges that even then fail to give you much of a picture of what the person is actually like

I used to - no idea what I want these days though! I guess to begin with, my ideal for of dating would be to loosely socialise in a non-forced paradigm, but that's hard to come across.

maybe it's like narnia, if you expect it then it doesn't happen

^

Why are people so against meeting on line as opposed to anywhere else? It's merely a vehicle for starting something. It is no diff to meeting someone in a bar or party. You just have that extra initial step of chatting without the face to face - and I think for a lot of people that really helps (it does me).

I'm not embarrased that Ive dated ppl I first met online.

That was my philosophy too when I spent a whole year not dating people from real life! Which seems to be extending, but with no dates at all!

well if it's on a dating site then - as expressed above - there's an expectation hanging over everything. i think some people feel like they need to "perform", or walk this kind of tightrope in just the right way. if you meet somebody through friends or hanging out or a dinner party or whatever that expectation isn't there so it can feel like less pressure (and unexpected sparks can be more exciting)

What happened was that while there was SOME connection, I frequently rushed into things with the expectation that we'd instantly click IRL - this happened NOT JUST with dating websites, but with meeting people I'd been flirting with from regular messageboards (not ILX) - and what invariably happened was that there wasn't the same chemistry or heart-thumping drive, leading to either some fooling around and then some emptiness, or straight to the emptiness (although not as empty in the latter case).

Hence, now I would have no problem meeting someone from the internet but only in a realm where there's no pressure to date - it's a sort of catch-22. Tracer's last post is OTM - to start with the IRL spark is better than to start with the 'hey we share cultural ground and both write well' because that last thing is a lot of people and that first thing a few.

I'm not ruling anything out, but I don't really want to use a dating SITE - feels a bit forced.

That said, yesterday I refurbished my OKCupid profile because I was coming off as a bit hangdog and contentious. I'm still only going there when I'm messaged, and only replying if the message is DARN persuasive.

I've had nothing but good fortune with OKC. Just gotta not hang too much on it and see what unfolds. I strongly recommend not letting correspondence go too long before taking it to the real world. A couple of messages back and forth is enough.

Getting any reply at all is the problem. I feel dead in the water on there right now. Does wonders for one's self-confidence.

please, all of you, go out and meet people in real life

People in real life actually suck even worse than the ones on the internet.

ime that is not really true, they're usually just about as bad.

@sarahel I hadn't thought of that.

No, they are worse because they are enmeshed in your life in a way that is much harder and/or more painful to detach when they do suck, than people who simply exist at the end of the screen.

(But I shouldn't really be on this thread as it was a platonic relationship that has just crashed and burned, not a romantic one. I just come and browse this thread whenever I'm even tempted to try internet dating again, to remind myself how awful it all is.)

I started using OKC because I was out of school and not meeting people as easily, because the only people I ever did meet were couples or ladies in relationships (Chicago is still the Midwest, AKA the settling down capital of the country), and because I'm essentially an introvert and pretty lacking in the energy and wherewithal to meet & greet a bunch of new people. I went through a lot of dry spells and met a lot of duds (and some nice folks, as well) and I quit OKC more times than I even remember, but I'm now seven months into a wonderful relationship with a wonderful lady that I never would've met without OKC. I would be loathe to completely shut off any possible avenues. You really never know by what road an awesome person will come into your life.

FYI: my profile was pure anti-bullshit. I was very blunt about the fact that I wasn't looking for a relationship (my SO and I were both generally perfectly content to stay single rather than hitching ourselves to a subpar relationship), my flaws as I perceive them, stuff I can't deal with from other people, etc. But I also tried to avoid looking humorless and didactic. I did tend to get a lot of messages about how refreshingly up-front my profile was, so laying it all on the line might not be a bad strategy.

OK help pls what is the story here?, this has happened w/ two different girls in the 1.5 mos. since I registered:.

1) I initiate contact w/ cutie having noted she's made repeated visits to my profile

2) w/o excessive back and forth (3-4 messages each?), she responds enthusiastically ("ready to start planning immediately!," "I will be back in town next week")to date proposal (in one case a SPECIFIC CALENDAR date/event about ten days out, plus a briefer get-to-know-you drink at some undetermined interim point...AND she gave me her #)

3) And...nothing...no message, no return call.

Is this normal? Cuz I am just trying to get my sea legs after years of marriage & am not sure I have emotional fortitude for more of these...

/end pity

It's certainly very similar to a number of my experiences. As I think I've posted about above, I've had a few conversations that seem to be going really well and then just suddenly die, sometimes at the mention of real-life meeting, sometimes out of nowhere.

yeah but this is AFTER real-life meeting has been all set up and with there being no possibility of me having said anything stupid that could have messed it up....wtf

I mean I get that this is all just kind of feeling around in the dark and things come up and no one's beholden (thankfully) but it seems like there should be some kind of minimal explanation standards for just vanishing?

That wasn't a real question obv.

Whatever someone said upthread about people sucking IRL or otherwise....that.

they forgot about it or something else came up or are busy or decided against it and haven't bothered to let you know