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Why Online Dating Sucks for Men (2013)

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Re: Why Online Dating Sucks for Men (2013)

#71
I am an Indian man with distasteful dating experience. I am 31, above average by American means and very much in shape. I weigh 150 lbs having height of 5'7".

I think premature baldness killed it for me in my 20s. I had low confidence for a long time. I have been shaving my head for 2 yrs now. But, 9 out 10 women here in SF/Seattle/Portland prefer either white or black men.

I haven't been on a date for 2 yrs now. I think TINDER and alike hookup apps pretty much killed it for men like me. Women used to depend on men for resources. We have reverse situation now with women outnumering men in terms of employment rate and graduation rate.

What's worst, Indian women prefer white men if they are in US and master's degree and 100k or more salary is must for Indian/Asian women. I have first hand experience of Indian/Asian women telling me that if I don't have masters then don't bother talking to us.

I deleted tinder profile 3 months back. Nowadays, I spend time just by myself. I felt bad for a long time, but then I realized nobody cares. Like it or not, women care about looks, status and resources most. Miss 2 out 3 and you are done.

I used to blame myself but now I don't. I know I am a competent man, i contribute to the society in my capacity and this is only life I have. I now spend Fridays and Saturdays being very relaxed and doing nothing virtually.

Hookup culture is real. That's all I can say.

Re: Why Online Dating Sucks for Men (2013)

#72
post #3

when i was young, my female friends would say just be yourself, happy, etc and someone will just come along. i did that, failed, and i said why did it go so wrong? then i considered their world view, and i face palmed myself. same thing happens, women say try online dating, its so easy! my response rate (let alone something that leads to a rl meeting) is about 1/50. not worth it. i wonder if online dating will become…

Just wait, the dating pool for men and women flip later in life. Quality men pair off with significant stability early on, and the remaining single men have significantly larger viable age range than women can generally expect. Also: the biggest trick for being successful online is to keep your profile as brief as possible. Everything you say about yourself someone will find off-putting. You need just enough to show…

Even without pairing off, simple age dynamics skews it in favour of women first and then men. Young women statistically want to date older men (even if only by a few years) since older men are more capable, confident, and have far more resources. Men want to date younger women (usually again by only a few years).The end result is that men have a much tougher time competing up until mid-20s, and then roles suddenly reverse and women in their late 20s and beyond are left wondering 'where all the men went'.

Re: Why Online Dating Sucks for Men (2013)

#73
post #3

when i was young, my female friends would say just be yourself, happy, etc and someone will just come along. i did that, failed, and i said why did it go so wrong? then i considered their world view, and i face palmed myself. same thing happens, women say try online dating, its so easy! my response rate (let alone something that leads to a rl meeting) is about 1/50. not worth it. i wonder if online dating will become…

Don't bother with online dating. First of all the quality of women is much lower than any you'd meet IRL. Secondly, they purposefully set absurdly high standards. Thirdly, if physical looks aren't your strong point, you cannot really make a good impression because that is what they are going to be judging you on. What you write in your profile is close to useless If you have trouble finding women, move to a big city…

Yea, none of this true. The best application of the numbers game is to message a dozen girls a day online, and it works.

Re: Why Online Dating Sucks for Men (2013)

#74
post #3

when i was young, my female friends would say just be yourself, happy, etc and someone will just come along. i did that, failed, and i said why did it go so wrong? then i considered their world view, and i face palmed myself. same thing happens, women say try online dating, its so easy! my response rate (let alone something that leads to a rl meeting) is about 1/50. not worth it. i wonder if online dating will become…

"Be yourself" is absolutely the worst dating advice a man can ever receive. Seriously, don't take dating advice from women. They give you bad advice not because they don't care for you (they genuinely do want to help and their intentions are good and pure), but their advice is bad because they don't understand what it's actually like to date women. It's not their fault either. Before everyone jumps on me for hating women, I don't. I love the women, they're wonderful. I'm not making a moral judgment, just stating a practical fact.

To see why this is bad advice, consider if you weren't very good at basketball and asked a friend on how to improve. If they said "be yourself", that would be crazy. Clearly, whatever you've been doing hasn't been working, so doing more of that isn't going to improve anything.

If you actually want tips to meaningfully improve your dating life, feel free to email me (email in profile). Happy to chat more offline.

Re: Why Online Dating Sucks for Men (2013)

#75
It sucks for everyone. For women, it sucks because they're being bombarded and spammed. For men, it sucks because it can be nearly impossible to break through the noise.

I'm a guy. I'm extraordinarily serious about relationships. I never spam women because I'd hate to have it done to me, and I hate anything that makes humans dread talking to each other, anything that degrades the glue that allows humans to get along with empathy. Before I write to anyone, I've read everything they provided, and genuinely think we could get along.

But writing to women is an absolute tightrope. Do too much to demonstrate literacy and general quality as a human being, and the message may come off as weird or boring. The vast majority of the time, you won't receive feedback of any kind, so you tend to start trying to anticipate their reservations -- but if you write anything about your guesses as to why they might not be interested, you start sounding weird. And you get one chance per person. Writing again would be weird.

Get nothing back ten times? Twenty? Fifty? You can never ever let it get to you. You can never get a chip on your shoulder or allow any resentment to show through.

I accept a lot of this as just The Way It Is. The one thing I would hope to change in the minds of women, the one memo to women I would send, if I could, is: we have the internet and airplanes. Please don't write me off because I don't happen to be in the same city right now! A lot of women seem to want to cripple OKCupid to be, e.g., OKCupid NYC.

In my last successful relationship, we met on OKC, talked there, and then on another online chatting thing, and then in calls and texts and emails, and then I drove several hundred miles to see her. We knew we loved each other before I left. We were together for a few years. We have internet and airplanes! This could be a good thing for women.

Every time I disable my OKC account, I feel like it's for the last time, and the amount of time before I try again gets longer and longer. I feel like I'm being trained in a bad way.

I'm OK with how things are, but I wish things were better, because the world would be better if it were filled with people in healthy relationships that allow them to love and be loved.

Re: Why Online Dating Sucks for Men (2013)

#77

I don't really agree with this article. I gave up on online dating a few years back, but as a guy I don't think it was all that bad. Someone said 1/50... I think it was closer to 1/5 women would respond. And look... if they don't respond, that's fine... it's nothing personal at that point. Women have to sift through the messages very quickly. Anyway my advice for making it not suck so much for guys: 1) Find a girl fr…

She really didn't get it. I"ve seen plenty of young men spend swiping through dating apps and messaging girls for hours, because it works and works well.

Re: Why Online Dating Sucks for Men (2013)

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My responses were generally about 1 in 15. but the rest is generally good advice... that said, I can pick out my own clothes... some things I just like more than others... I was an artist/designer before a programmer, though it was a long time ago.

Fair... most guys don't know anything about clothing. I didn't until I lived with a woman for a bit. There's a science to picking the right clothing that flatters your body, matches your skin tone... all that... it was like calculus to hear someone try and explain it. I didn't have enough interest to learn it, so I just let someone else do it for me.

LOL, true enough, and even then... I have a button-down shirt, my only pattern shirt (other than stitch patterns) with cars on it... no woman I've dated likes that shirt. So taste will still account for a lot.

Also, if you're a bigger guy, spring for at least getting a collar lift (assuming you don't have a matching big neck), makes all the difference in the world but does about double the price of a button down shirt, and will piss you off when you have to get a new tailor, or one gets messed up.... I've had mostly good luck, one mess up out of the last 6-7 I've had done. Also, don't let dun-lap happen, just buy the right sized pants to cover your actual stomach up to near (just below) your belly button, and wear a shirt that covers it. Nothing looks worse than ill-fitting clothes when you're a big guy. A little loose is okay, but don't go for a tent either.

Re: Why Online Dating Sucks for Men (2013)

#79

Male here. I did online dating for a couple of years. Based on my narrow experience, it seems the odds are indeed dramatically stacked against men—I ended up generally not expecting a response from anyone. When I changed my profile to “bisexual” (which I am), I saw one reason why—scads of creepy, low-effort messages from men, sometimes with their profile set to “female” to attract more responses. The imbalance leads…

OKCupid's match percentage is highly gameable. You've got two kinds of people - those that might work out, and the "oh hell no". Answer anything that has an obvious answer for the first kind as highly important, decline to answer questions with high variance, repeat until enough people have high enough percentages.

Re: Why Online Dating Sucks for Men (2013)

#80

Someone needs to combine Vine with Tinder. A 2 second video of you saying hello, and you can only record via the app. This wouldn't change the general imbalance of dating, but it would help narrow down choices really quickly and maybe clear the backlog for women a bit.

That exists (or at least it did). I think the name of the app is Flutter, I know Jason Calcanis invested in it and they presented at Launch Fest last year.
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