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

a paper airplane's not comparable to an ultralight but you could build both w/ time and effort and i bet you'd be proud

I think that was kind of poetic

it didn't rhyme

xp I'm fully convinced "staying together for the kids" is the worst thing you could do for your kids. I could write a book about what it's like growing up between warring parents

xp also i stole it from gene wolfe's "shadow of the torturer"

I think "staying together for the kids" is one of those "well, I have this thing going, nothing else seems that great, this relationship blows, eh let's ride it out" things half the time

I actually convinced my dad not to leave my mom when I was 10. I regret it horribly, and I think about it at least once a week.

tbf, he had such strong feelings about it that he was able to be swayed and thought a 10 year old knew better than him, so I really don't think you were to blame

if a 10 year old, even if it was your kid, told you to jump off a bridge...

In my folks' case it was more staying together due to inertia and fear/dislike of being alone etc. than staying together for the kids. But yeah, my life would have been so much better had my parents divorced when I was 8.

xxp you know he could have decided for himself while you were talking to him, i wouldn't be so quick to judge yourself!

if you stay together for the kids and do the same shit different day that's evil

if you stay together for the kids and work hard on your issues for the kids and maybe negotiate a civilized separation w/ maturity for the kids that's commendable if not always successful

that sounds awful lee!

What I'm trying to say is, itt sure, we're talking about what we want out of relationships.

But if you are going to be dating someone with kids, it is actually quite important what those kids want. Not only what you want.

I'm going to stop trying to explain this now.

I don't think you have to explain it, I think that's clear?

I know a woman who just got engaged to someone with 5 kinds and a crazy ex-wise. He has custody of all 5. Nuts, huh? Works for her but I can't even imagine walking into that much baggage.

ex-wife, obv

i'm seeing the girl i met on here for the 6th time on friday. it's going pretty well i think!

I can talk about moai some more if the kids thing is getting problematic.

oh no i see what you mean, sorry

if you stay together for the kids and work hard on your issues for the kids and maybe negotiate a civilized separation w/ maturity for the kids that's commendable if not always successful

Agreed. The key here is that your idea of "staying together for the kids" is civilized separation, whereas for some, it's staying married and trying to shield from the kid(s) that things are amiss and pretending that everything's fine. That never works - kids invariably will pick up on their parents' distress, and will learn at home all sorts of damaging ideas about relationships.

that sounds awful lee!

It's even worse than you think, which is why I feel so strongly about parents who don't get along not staying together for the kids. I'd like to relate my story at some point - it would explaing many things i've posted elsewhere - but this isn't the thread to do it and I don't want to make it about me.

i have strong feelings about this because my uncle has two kids and his new wife has two kids and they have a new kid together and they're a beautiful family, much happier now than before

but i don't want to project my experience on anybody and i hope not to respect that w/ this lady too

er i hope to respect that

i have no maternal instinct or desire and mentally ill but for the grace of medication so i'm just not ever having kids of my own. i could see dating someone with kids if i never had to be around them, but not now, maybe in 20 years or something. hopefully that person's theoretical kids will be grown up by then though.

When I was in communion class when I was a high schooler, the instructor speculated that a parental death is less emotionally damaging for the kid than divorce because at least they knew their parents still loved each other. Fucking Catholics.

I know many people, some whose parents were married, whose parents never loved each other. Some turned out great nonetheless.

So, uh... if someone blocks you, does it look to you just like their account no longer exists? As if they deleted it?

Which would mean there's no way of knowing if a certain person has bailed from okc, or blocked one?

no, because i've blocked people and had them show up on my visitors list, like way too frequently

so they could still see that yr profile exists, then? huh, whats the point in that.

Someone I know's profile disappeared a while ago, I was curious as to wether theyd deleted it or something else. GUess they just deleted it.

blocking must just stop ppl from messaging, i guess.

(thanksfully Ive never had to deploy it!)

this is somewhat overwhelming. then again I am drunk.

Drunkenness and sending messages on OKC is a bad combination, in my experience.

Hello to anyone who checked out my profile, not surprisingly a couple of you had higher match percentages than most of the people in my area.

C'est la vie, I guess.

I hate the way the British class system infects everything, even dating. Well, not really, I'm being facetious, but the two-tier freemium model, where some users pay, and therefore can contact one another freely, and others do not pay and can send no messages. Like, why do that? I understand that it's comparatively expensive to take that chance on a stranger. But why put yourself out there if you're not willing to engage fully? I guess if there's not many people you're interested in immediately apparent, it's a stupid thing to spend money on in the hopes of sending one message a month or something. It makes me feel even less like sending messages to strangers, which is hard enough to do to start with, knowing full well that many of them won't even be able to respond.

The way i saw that was it allowed me to keep a profile when i'm not actively looking - like the best things come sometimes when you aren't looking and are busy with other things, might not have looked for months then it sends a mail saying you got a message. can log in and read it, then if it seems interesting can pay for a month and then reply (this can also explain time lag with initial response imo)

I think a lot of non-payers have usernames you can google and then find on places like lastfm or flickr - some profiles more or less state this tho i think you're not supposed to be too overt about circumventing the paying any cash aspect!

like you could look today but there arent any interesting people, keep looking right through your months payment, still nothing, get bored of it and quit - but interesting or suitable people might not appear until you've lost interest

if your profile is still there, they can message and you'll get a mail and go oh yea forgot about that lemme go look

I was thinking of sending some terrible doggerel poetry that formed an acrostic with my email address but then what if the doggerel was taken as evidence of me being into poetry (I hate poetry!) rather than cryptography?

Also, it's very expensive for a sort of one-time thing. It seems like it would be better if someone could buy a day pass to respond to an interesting bite without having to commit to a full subscription again.

while this is true, its cheaper to pay one month at beginning then as and when if necessary, than to pay every month regardless!

But I would imagine that it creates this unnecessary monetisation of the decision to response, as in "is this person really worth paying £30 to continue conversing with?" Which is a ridiculous decision. Because who is? Or, rather, who can you tell who would be worth splashing out for, based on a profile and a facetious opening message?

(Good god, now I've had a good opening message and a frankly terrible one, I'm starting to put more importance on writing a good first line.)

I should stop overthinking this.

well yes it can lead down that road, but it actually didnt work out that way - i was interested in very few, so the ones that did seem worthwhile really stood out (caveat: i have unrealistic expectations about all aspects of life)

good first line is important! tenor is difficult, what is good for person A not necessarily for person B!), personal opinion is opening message should be on the short side, just enough to open a door - and the shorter the message the more that opening line is going to stand out

I googled this person and found their Facebook. Which is almost meaningless if you do not have one yourself, as it's just a list of... stuff. Liking Philip Glass, Excalibur, Carl Sagan, Tesla, Moore & Morrison etc. etc yes you have impeccable taste my friend but you also don't have a single woman in sight. Which is always a worrying sign to me. And a Facebook page looks even more impersonal and sterile than a dating site and contains even less information about what a person is like.

Stop pursuing the Impossible Thing because it's impossible, WCC. This way lies trouble.

The opening line is important, but what is most important is that it should be tailored to the individual, and show that you have read their profile carefully and noted something personal about them, but also express yourself. Impossible, if someone has a dull or tedious or impersonal profile, in other words.

I guess one lesson to learn, yet again, is that most people are unbearably boring. (And yes, I include myself in that observation.)

Not that I'm down on stuff, stuff is important. But lists of ~stuff~ say nothing about a person's emotional life. Except that they like stuff, and, well, who doesn't like stuff of one kind or another? I think less and less of taste in ~stuff~ as meaning anything any more.

hmm, im not a fan of the fb route - flickr (or similar) seems a lot more appropriate/suitable (but obv only if they have one)

lots of people are boring

but lots of other people only appear to be boring because they don't know how to present themselves to strangers - the 'list of stuff' thing is a case in point, and the longer the list the more impersonal it gets! keep that list shit short or say something about it imo!

I don't think that is the fault of a person on Facebook. I think it's the way that Facebook presents itself to non-members because they, too, want you to sign up for their services to find out anything about a person.

A Flickr is much better at getting across how a person sees the world and/or themselves. I've just been v v careful not to give anything too searchable on this site because, well, personal safety.

You're probably right about people appearing boring because they don't know how to present themselves, that's a very salient point. Perhaps writing an interesting profile shows only the skill of being an engaging *writer* rather than an interesting person. Because let's face it, being the former is not guarantee of being the latter.

Also some people appear to be boring until you get to know them, people can be slow burners too

By that time, they will be bored with me. I'm very shallow, remember. ;-)

FB is a different case imo as I see it as essentially for people that have already met and there is no necessary reason to present anything about self - sites like flickr have a presentational aspect, whatever that might be, in that there it is implicitly going to be looked at by strangers

I kinda forgot that Flickr shows your favourite photos to the world on your profile, but not your own.

So I just had to take a moment to clear a slightly embarrassing amount of photos of Thom Yorke out of my favourites so that it showed the normal photos of Cornish coastline, Wheals and purple paisleys to the world again.

This has probably been a very boring diversion for this thread to take. I do apologise. But it's good for me to learn things about how people perceive you/how you perceive others based on web presence as well as dating sites.