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

I know this isn't how it works! but my first cynical thought about dating someone bisexual is "I'm already competing with all the women in the world, now I have to compete with all the men, too?"

i had a great night in last night reading octavia butler and listening to the cure and cooking dinner. i sometimes forget how much i like hanging out with myself.

and yeah i'm a little intimidated by bi guys, mostly because of how easy it is for men to find other men to have sex with (grindr, etc) and it seems like their dance card would be full.

whaaaat? I would love to date a bisexual man!!

I'm trying to think of how to iterate what I find appealing about it and it mostly comes down to us being pervs together.

I dunno, I feel like if you're bi you should put that you're bi, but I guess if Josiah is only looking for girls then it doesn't really matter.

I think your profile is pretty good, JA, but I might suggest changing the main profile picture to one of the clearer/lighter ones? For one thing, you can't really see your eyes in the main profile pic, and people like to see eyes (even if they are over-imbued with mystical significance at times).

Ironically, someone in my twitter feed just posted this, which feels apt for the turn this thread has taken...

https://twitter.com/Izaakson/status/228147257738948608/photo/1

chiming in a bit late -- i def prefer guys who identify as bi, all other things being equal of course. the most decent of the slew of menfolk i've met on okc was a guy who identified as bi

whooo got a date

i should be more open-minded i guess. i definitely don't have a problem with it conceptually or morally (or even consider myself rigidly heterosexual...though i actively am only trying to date men). i think with online dating though it's just another minor personal detail like "favorite band is coldplay" or "dislikes cats" that will give me pause when replying.

kind of wish I could see profiles of past exes that I really hit it off with, for comparison's sake. also, like 90% of my top matches have kids. don't know about this.

People with kids are a whole other basket of I don't know what to do about.

yeah, for real. i've never even gone on a date with a child-haver.

People who want kids are a whole other basket of I don't know what to do about.

ok this thread prompted me to reply to a couple of messages i let pile up, since i've been feeling fairly negatively about OKC. if only there were a similar thread for job hunting, since that is what i should really be doing instead...

or maybe i'll just update my profile...

my date has two little kids but i think parenting is hot and she's a hot parent and i work with kids so i figure it's something i can get by, besides since we're both divorced we got stuff to talk about

i went on a date with a child-haver a while ago -- she was pretty great, but it was fairly obvious that we were 'in different places' so to speak

In ten or fifteen years, my husband will be dead. Pretty much all of the people I date then will have teenage or older children. I'm not looking forward to having to deal with that.

what's wrong with kids? if kids didn't exist we wouldn't be here

tbh dealing with kids, or your ability to deal with kids, is a pretty good indicator of how you'd do in life's trying moments for some people.

i was the last good kid

Nothing's wrong with kids, I just don't really want to have to live around someone else's? And I want my own!

Shoot, when I say "live around" I mean "plan around and take into account in all/most parts of my life" not, like, live NEAR them.

wouldn't you have to do that with your own?

I don't have anything against kids per se, but they would almost certainly clash with my lifestyle i.e. being a lush. Presumably the people with kids have strategies for this.

World would be a lot better without people, if you ask me.

And to be honest, it's not actually kids I have a problem with. Most kids are fine. Their parents, however, are completely another story.

However, I don't think it's unreasonable to post: there is a huge gulf between people who have kids and people who don't have kids, in terms of expectations, priorities, all that kind of thing. (Or, rather if a person is a parent and those things haven't changed, they're probably a bad parent.) It's kind of a Catch 22, if parenthood hasn't changed them, I think there's probably something wrong with them. (It might be a sign that they are too selfish to change, in which case they would not make good relationship material anyway.) But since I have not had kids, I have not been changed in that way. So our heads are just not going to align.

This may not be theoretical much longer. I have agreed to meet a person who has kids. It used to be weird. Now it seems difficult to find people "my age" who do not have children.

I like children, but I prefer it when their families can take them home at the end of the day.

And I deal with "life's trying moments" by putting my head down and going into autopilot, which has fucked my life up something awful.

Yeah but they'd be mine--I would be at least 50% entitled to make decisions about parenting and stuff. Also I just have personal issues about someone putting their kids, who were born to another woman, first, before me. Even though I know parents are supposed to put their kids first, it's their job, it wouldn't be worth it to me to come second all the time. Everybody needs something different out of relationships, and that is what I need.

xp haha f hazel otm, although raising someone else's kids is a plausible way for me never to have to quit my vices for the time it takes to conceive, gestate, and lactate.

it wouldn't be worth it to me to come second all the time

you know this is going to happen to you when you have kids, right? part of having kids. a close friend of mine who has three kids said something like "having kids is basically sacrificing your life to make new ones"

It's also, like... I have come to term with the idea that I'm never going to have children. Someone else's kids might be the closest I get.

But I'm also an awkward child of a parent who acquired a new partner and had that person thrust into my life in the most awkward of ways, and I would not really want to do that to a small person.

tbh dealing with kids, or your ability to deal with kids, is a pretty good indicator of how you'd do in life's trying moments for some people.

For me, it's just that kids remind me of when I was that age and is thus uncomfortable and triggering. I'm fine with teenagers though.

Laurel, do you not want to live around someone else's kids who aren't yours (i'm assuming young ones) because you don't want their mom (oftencase his ex) around frequently, or merely because they're not yours? That is, if you were dating a guy you were really into who had full custody of a 3- or 4-year-old kid whose mother was completely out of the picture, would you have a problem with being a stepmom to a child who probably doesn't remember anyone before you?

xp I'm the awkward child of parents who were together for 60 years and should have split up after 15-20, and I wouldn't want to do that to a kid, either.

are you saying you'd rather not exist than be christine green leafy dragon indigo?!? :-(

i am always always afraid of turning out like my dad cause lord knows he made some big parenting mistakes but then i remember that i love my dad and he's my hero

warts and all

Yes but they'd be part of me, too! And I would have the same desire, presumably, to care for them at all costs. Someone else's? I kind of think they're always going to be a nuisance, if my reaction to my nephew and cousin's kid is anything to go by.

'presumably'?

I only have one close irl friend with kids and I have to stuff my irritation down when she cancels events or can't do things because of them. Doesn't bode well.

xp Oh who knows.

tbf I have friends who are overly involved in different sorts of organizations (publications, arts boards, public roles) outside of their careers and they're as apt to cancel or delay plans due to meetings running long or some sort of immediate issue popping up. It's really no different than friends with kids.

It's hard to say, like with a lot of dating stuff, bc you don't know what you can deal with until you find someone who makes dealing worthwhile.

Someone I know has been casually dating someone w 3 kids and a separated/ex wife still in the picture. It hasn't been going that well with cancellations and him trying to plan only at the last minute and not being there for her as much as she would like/needs, but all of those things could also be him being a bad person/date/boyfriend.

I'm the awkward child of parents who were together for 60 years and should have split up after 15-20, and I wouldn't want to do that to a kid, either.

Me too, and most of those 15-20 years were before I was born.

My feelings are nothing to do with whether my parents should or shouldn't have been together or should or shouldn't have separated - it's purely down to the idea that I think kids should have some choice in deciding when, where, how and how much they interact with their parents' new partners. And how quickly. Maybe this is down to my father's partner having extremely poor boundaries and massive control issues or my father having social ~issues~ but it makes me nervous about how I'd go about interacting with a potential partner's kids.

Hello, Jeremy Deller, why are you in my top matches?

This is just ultimately depressing because it's just like looking at this menu of all these amazing people who would never in a million years date you.

you know i feel weird saying this but i get extremely and parental, all the time! like even w/ random kids and shit, if someone is lost at the grocery store i'm on like orange alert

if the kid has one quality parent ... my ex-wife's dad married a single mom. he was from the middle east and she was from texas, he was a phd nuclear physicist (didn't want to get blown up by zionists) and she was an orphaned waitress who had left an abusive guy. he calls him dad, and people often think that he *is* his dad, because they have developed the same mannerisms and stuff. did he go through a crazy rebellious phase between, uh, 15-35? yeah, but kids do that w/ their biological parents too. i'm going to go out on a limb w/ science here but that connection is as much about time and proximity and groping towards "family" as it is genetics

That's exactly how I feel (xx-post).

obviously if the kids are shitty because the parents are shitty and that's the vibe then run like hell

Feeling protective of lost kids is the easiest part of that. I play with kids on the subways and give them my jewelry so they don't cry and make finger puppets at them and return lost ones on the beach to their parents, and take care of my neighbor kid when she's locked out and wrestle with toddlers and read to babies and stuff. I don't think it's comparable to raising them, though.

xp Yes, I'd rather not exist than have had my parents stay together as long as they did. They pretty much stayed together just because of me, and I've really done nothing in my life to justify my existence. (Actually, 15-20 years would have been enough to produce me. They were married in 1954, and I was born in 1970--16 years later.)