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

very easy to reject a profile when there are so many others to keep clicking through.

that person could have been your spouse~~~

i mean if you were chatting with them a party, would you really care about most of the crap in their profile? doubtful

you care the next morning when you find out atlas shrugged is their favorite book

Well I mean you would when you got around to discussing how much they like Family Guy or something.

xp looool see??

I don't think you realize how bad these profiles are, bnw.

I am not talking mild offenses like slightly questionable taste. I am talking FULL ON ACTUAL LOSER-SEEMING, FREAK SEEMING GUYS HUGGING PUMPKINS IN THEIR MAIN PHOTO

Someone else I know said the same thing about OKC men in Chicago, that the algorithmic matches were completely untenable. So I believe you.

you care the next morning when you find out atlas shrugged is their favorite book

― 乒乓, Friday, December 14, 2012 12:20 PM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

or you go to their bathroom and they have a five foot tall harry potter poster on the wall you did not previously see

I'm down with that, I put on my robe and wizard hat

what does hugging pumpkins mean?

I was unprepared, left those at home :(

I'm honestly scratching my head at some of y'alls distaste over mr interpreter Italian. that seemed like a perfectly friendly innocuous thing to say!

I think it scans a little weird, but yeah, it's not far off from things I've said on OKC to get the conversation going (nb I may be socially inept). Opening messages are hard.

like, literally...hugging a giant pumpkin in a field.

online dating is so weird, how many people are out there with whom you would have gotten along perferctly okay with and maybe even had a meaningful relationship with but didn't because they put that they liked mitch albom in their profile or w/e

This is so OTM. It's hard not to, but I at least make an effort to avoid judging on the basis of stuff like that. My tastes are often wildly discrepant from thos of some of my favorite people in the world.

Yeah, most of the (Chicago) ladies on OKC seem fine to me (the ones with whom I have higher match percentages, anyway). I feel like I'm maybe just not a particularly great fit with very many of them. Many of them apparently agree since I only get a response to, like, two out of every fifteen messages sent. And those two will send another message or two before losing interest. Most of the messages I get are from people who neither have much in common with me nor seem to have looked at anything beyond my pictures (full text of a recent message: "nice glasses"). But it's cool since I've been meeting more people lately in the Real World. I always have an easier time connecting with people face-to-face. But I think maybe I've filled my quota on cool girls who seem interested but are already dating people, Universe, so we could probably curb that now, thanks.

Trayce and f. hazel, It's just that I've had several messages recently from men whose opening gambit is 'look how cultured and intellectual I am' and/or 'look how quirky I am'. Maybe they don't mean to come across this way, but... OTOH I answered 'yes, a lot' to the question about whether intelligence is a turn-on for me - by all means be smart, just please don't feel you have to trumpet the fact.

But of course, the risk is that with any one person, they've just been inept on paper and in reality they're fine. I shouldn't have mocked that one particular guy.

that was to Vinnie too, sorry.

yeah low response rate is pretty frustrating ? think it's because a lot of ppl are in between things or are starting things xp

I totally get the people who don't respond at all. I just take that as an unspoken "not interested", which is fair enough (I kinda wish there was some "not interested" button, as it would save a lot of time and guesswork). It's the people who have clearly read your profile, respond thoughtfully to your messages, and then drop off the face of the earth that confound me. I feel like people are doing excessive pre-screening or something and missing the whole point of going on an actual date. Hint: you're probably never gonna get that clear a sense of who I am from words on a screen (as any ILXor could probably tell you).

I feel I get a p good sense of who ppl are from words on a screen

Yeah, figure with the people who drop off after a few messages that either life gets too busy, or they started dating someone else. Or maybe there's a bunch of 13-year-olds creating fake profiles to mess with people.

What I want to say to so many men on okc: Maybe if you cut all your hair off--in fact just go ahead and shave it--and never grew a beard again then we could talk.

tsk

So many beards. I'm just fed up with all thr beards. Theyre NAGL on the vast majority of you!

And that goes double if every pic of you, youre wearing sunglasses! FFS are you the unabomber?

I have no beef with beards but grave difficulty with soul patches, hipster hats, exclusively travel-based photos, exclusively snowboarding-based photos, and not bothering to crop photos to remove people who might prefer not to be in your OKC photo.

For the last, especially if it appears to be a date/ex gf! I mean!

And yeah if every photo of a guy shows he's been on a hike/been on a long bike ride/travelling in SE Asia, I'm just... no, sorry. Youre not for me.

Also frustrated by finding nice profiles with "and I plan to move to Europe shortly" in them. ARGH.

Got a message that included the line "I love the fact that you speak Serbian and Russian (albeit, not fluently). Where are you from originally? I was born in Italy, by the way, and I work as an Italian interpreter and translator."

I do not award points for languages either to myself or others, BY THE WAY

idk but my first reading of this i understood the guy to be saying "hey i think it's really cool/interesting that you speak other languages, i also speak other languages so we have that in common". also he is italian so english tones might not be his strong suit.

At one point I said "if all you want to talk about is travel then don't bother with me." I removed that line and the next person who hit me up was/is obsessed with Paris. Ugh. Luckily she's fairly interesting otherwise.

man, i had seen my husband's profile on a dating website while browsing, i would never in a million years have bothered contacting him - really into hiking, backpacking, mountainbiking (i'm lazy as shit), punk music (ughhhhh), vegan (this sounds about as fun as dating a xtian), well-travelled (i've never been anywhere), comp-lit grad school dropout (omg i'm too dumb to talk to this person). like, there is NOTHING there that would make me talk to him. and yet absolutely none of that stuff has been any kind of issue.

not to sound all braggin '12, just more like, don't despair.

J, I know, you're right. I dated a great guy from OKC for a year, but met him initially very much against my better judgement based on his profile. (he had many drawbacks, but for sure not the ones that I inferred from the profile). If I had a lot of spare time I'd meet a wider range of people from here. But a night not studying is currently a luxury and can screw up the whole week. Hoping this will change next semester.

Re the Italian guy, I know. I'm sure he's ok. But it's the tone. 'Albeit not fluently'?! 'By the way'? I get from that 'the most important thing to me is accomplishments but I'm not doing a great job of being subtle about it'. His English is perfect and I think he's likely first generation Canadian, not Italian.

I think I'd do better with bloody speed dating!

ahh i thought the "albeit not fluently" might have been repeating something from your own profile.

vegan (this sounds about as fun as dating a xtian)

at least if you date a christian you might get to have that egg casserole they have at fellowship time after worship

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Unabomber-sketch.png

hey baby . . . wanna see my loft?

xp to self: that's supposed to read "IF i had seen my husband's profile on a dating site"

xp to J - in the language section you tick a box to say whether you speak 'ok' or 'fluently' or 'poorly' or something like that. But the word 'albeit' is all his!

Man...all the nitpickery on display here and on OKC is kinda depressing. I'd primarily just like to meet someone who's kind and who I connect with and who can adapt as a relationship adapts. The rest is mostly so much unimportant decoration.

yeah, I think I'm just gonna close my OKC account if this current thing doesn't work out

Eh the "nitpickery" is really about signs that indicate who you're going to "connect with" imo. Apart from mine, which is about how much I hate facial hair.

The biggest problem I have with OKC is the large % of men that I'm sure are just fine but I'm not like DRIVEN to respond to their profiles by any very strong feeling, it's kind of a "Huh yeah, okay" generally positive but I don't engage. I should make a project of writing to like 5 ppl at once that I'm not sure about but are probably nice and normal enough.

I've seen both male and female ilxor OKC profiles that are intelligent but aren't at all pretentious, so I know it's possible. I'm just fed up with seeing people ramp up the pretension in ways that seem deliberate. I wish I felt differently about it, but I don't think of it as nitpicking. It's just a huge turn-off for me.

how do you feel about facial hair

I have no beef with beards but grave difficulty with soul patches, hipster hats, exclusively travel-based photos, exclusively snowboarding-based photos, and not bothering to crop photos to remove people who might prefer not to be in your OKC photo.

if I could grow facial hair I would have a photo displaying it proudly

Did I mention that the guy's profile name had the word 'Witty' in it? Anyway, I'll shut up now, because I can only imagine the number of ways in which my profile pisses off guys...

Haha yeah I didnt mean to come over as nitpicky either, i was just riffing on things, maybe out of despair more than anything.

i am trying to adapt to the browsing aspect of those website and it's been really hard.

I disabled my acct today, felt like a great burden had been lifted off my shoulders - guess I didn't realize what it had been doing to my self esteem?