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I tried an alternative way to date – and it worked

independent.co.uk

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Re: I tried an alternative way to date – and it worked

#31

Post by seba_dos1 »

twelve40 wrote: post #18
seba_dos1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not that hard, you just talk like, you know, humans Sounds like you take your skills for granted.

Sorry, I'm really not claiming any skills. I've had good experience with the apps, my only takeaway is, if you reasonably loosen up and talk normal, and it doesn't work, then we click next, because no amount of pretend will work in the long run.

You absolutely are. "Loosening up and talking normal" in presence of a stranger is a skill. Some people acquired it naturally while growing up, some had to put conscious effort to learn it, some never managed to learn it. For some people it was easy to learn, others find it hard. Some people manage to do it, but find it exhausting. Some people have to play on hard mode all the time due to conditions like RSD.

Sounds like it's something that came easy to you - I'm just pointing out that it's not an universal experience.

Re: I tried an alternative way to date – and it worked

#32

Post by Brian_K_White »

bjornsing wrote: post #29
Brian_K_White wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never sent a "hey" or wink in my life. This is not some unreasonable bar. Every time I see my female friends inboxes I gag all over agaon. Dudes are pathetic.

> Every time I see my female friends inboxes I gag all over agaon. Dudes are pathetic. I was about to write something about everybody’s time on this planet being limited and how there’s actually a human being on the other side of that chat window. But… an appeal to human decency feels pretty pointless here.

Tell me more about the human decency of saying nothing at all to someone end expecting anything at all from them.

Re: I tried an alternative way to date – and it worked

#34

Post by Brian_K_White »

raverbashing wrote: post #25
Brian_K_White wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never sent a "hey" or wink in my life. This is not some unreasonable bar. Every time I see my female friends inboxes I gag all over agaon. Dudes are pathetic.

Men send "Hey" to weed the bots and fake profiles. It's that simple And even then, "hey" is a correct way of starting a conversation. Sure it can be improved, using something about their profile works better. Though to be honest, women who start with the "entertain me" mentality, that's a good hint that she's not going to work out.

The fact that anyone tries to call this "entertain me" proves my point.

There are such women of course, but this tiny trivial level of effort and sincerity is not that.

This is exactly what I mean by pathetic.

Re: I tried an alternative way to date – and it worked

#35

Post by michaelt »

I'd encourage anyone who wants to have an informed opinion on this stuff to try creating an account with the opposite gender on a dating website.

I did this about a decade ago (before the rise of tinder and suchlike) and the difference in experience for men and women is huge. I made an extremely basic female profile, with a photo that didn't even show a face and barely any other details - and I was immediately buried in a completely unmanagable landslide of messages.

And none of them were from people who'd read the profile and considered details like personality, interests, values or compatibility - I hadn't provided anything! These people must have been purely playing a numbers game, copy-pasting the same message to dozens of women a day with barely a glance at their profile.

That gave me an appreciation for the fact that women on these website have to get through their messages fast and even if my messages were nuggets of gold, they were buried in a dung pile of other messages.

Re: I tried an alternative way to date – and it worked

#36

Post by barry-cotter »

postsantum wrote: post #15

This is just an advertisement of her "consulting". As for the "innovation", that reminds me of "Ask HN: I’m 41 and still unmarried – what should I do?" where OP went on dates with 120 men and rejected every single one

I didn’t believe that was real so I searched for it. Very sad.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31961992

Re: I tried an alternative way to date – and it worked

#37

Post by pixelpoet »

pizza234 wrote: post #12

This is the perspective of a woman. Personal experience as a man: > present yourself exactly as you are > be picky with this approach, I'd get exactly zero attractions, to put it in her terms, which doesn't reflect my real world dynamics.

That's what I do and I'm single for 3-4-5 years between (long term) relationships, for a grand total of 5 at nearly 40. A lot of people have zero concept of how it is out there for us not-first-pick guys in online dating... and I guess it could be worse (just in a new relationship now), but yeah, it's pretty grim.

Re: I tried an alternative way to date – and it worked

#38

Post by bruce343434 »

postsantum wrote: post #15

This is just an advertisement of her "consulting". As for the "innovation", that reminds me of "Ask HN: I’m 41 and still unmarried – what should I do?" where OP went on dates with 120 men and rejected every single one

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31961992

721 comments

Re: I tried an alternative way to date – and it worked

#39

Post by mcv »

jeltz wrote: post #14
erklik wrote: post #8

> One: present yourself exactly as you are. In fact, the fewer men you appeal to, the better. Two: be picky. Give almost no one a chance. Isn't this literally what already occurs? From the other side, it seems like this is exactly how most women are doing it? I don't see a lot of my female friends going on dates with every guy they match with (which is usually >200 so pretty hard to date 200 people), so they're rathe…

From my experience from using Tinder: no, most women try to appeal as broadly as possible and have low effort profiles and make low effort in general. It is possible that men are the same but I do not date men. And I get the same impression as she gets about men: that they are lazy and not interested in dating. > I wonder if she's ever actually sent a message to someone else. This entitlement of "entertain me peasant…

Exactly. Of course you shouldn't be so picky that no mortal is going to meet your unrealistic standards, but you should definitely be picky enough to separate the wheat from the chaff. Appealing to everybody when you're really just looking for one person means you're taking on a lot of pointless work. Let people select themselves: make sure your profile is specifically about you, and not some generic person of your gender. Don't be afraid to be off-putting to people you don't want to date. Don't claim to love partying if you don't. If you've got a weird hobby that would put a lot of people off but that you want your match to accept, definitely put it in. If you're looking for a long term relationship, put it in.

Some people just aren't interested in that stuff, so why waste time on trying to date them?

And as far as I'm concerned, this goes equally for both men and women. From my chats with women on dating sites, the behaviour of a lot of men is totally irrational to me: they just message every woman. Lots of women are inundated by messages from men who didn't even read their profile. This makes the dating experience for women extremely frustrating, as there's piles and piles of crap to wade through. So they end up ignoring most messages, which makes the experience also frustrating for men.

My advice to women on dating sites is to just ignore the flood of incoming messages from men you didn't contact, and instead look for interesting profiles and contacting them. I think that massively improves the experience for both men and women.

Re: I tried an alternative way to date – and it worked

#40

Post by dmn322 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #11
erklik wrote: post #8

> One: present yourself exactly as you are. In fact, the fewer men you appeal to, the better. Two: be picky. Give almost no one a chance. Isn't this literally what already occurs? From the other side, it seems like this is exactly how most women are doing it? I don't see a lot of my female friends going on dates with every guy they match with (which is usually >200 so pretty hard to date 200 people), so they're rathe…

I never sent a "hey" or wink in my life. This is not some unreasonable bar. Every time I see my female friends inboxes I gag all over agaon. Dudes are pathetic.

I said hey all the time when I was on the apps. It’s a perfectly normal way to start a conversation with a stranger in any other context, and plenty of girls don’t mind. There’s like an 80% chance of rejection anyway, I’m not coming up with some sales pitch just to get a slightly better response rate from ditzy self centered sociopaths whose idea of a man is a husk of a person just desperately performing gender roles.
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