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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

#41

Post by xlii »

Passive strategy works well when men are young and/or horny. When horny phase wears off the same passiveness is a reason why marriages end.

>In the digital dating sphere, “burning the haystack” means obliterating 99 per cent of the dating field immediately so that you’re able to see the 1 per cent that might be right for you (...)

> There’s no shortage of men who want to date you, (...) the good ones are out there, though, and this method makes them more findable.

So, soft way of saying that 99% of men aren't "good". I think it's sexism and it irritates me.

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

#42

Post by TrickyRick »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #32
bjornsing wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ah you mean like most women who never write the first message to anyone?

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

#43

Post by ildon »

bjornsing wrote: post #17
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 wonder if she's ever actually sent a message to someone else. This entitlement of "entertain me peasant" is one of the reasons why I deleted these apps. I could not agree more. It’s a bit disheartening to see somebody think through online dating to this extent, write an article about it and not realize this. Before giving up on these apps I actually tried what happens to be the OP’s main recommendation: I wrote i…

The story with my wife and partner for > 9 yrs started with a simple hi, in person.

All that can I say about this is that the selection criteria works both ways.

If a person is not willing to give a chance to another person simply based on the first word that comes out of their mouth/keyboard, perhaps it's them that don't deserve a chance

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

#44

Post by mcv »

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.

Not sure why this is voted down. From my chats with women on dating sites, this is accurate. Most of them were constantly flooded with contentless messages like that, which makes it very hard to get a meaningful conversation.

Mind you, my experience is all way pre-tinder. I've never been on Tinder, and things may work differently there, because if I understand correctly, you first need both people to already be interested in each other before you can send messages, and the messages are explicitly chat, so there a "Hey" might work. But on many traditional dating sites (many of which are scams now), you search profiles and send a message before you have a match, leading many women to get inundated with low-effort "Hey" messages from men with seemingly no content or personality at all.

Maybe the Tinder approach is better.

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

#45

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

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…

> And I get the same impression as she gets about men: that they are lazy and not interested in dating.

Coming from a culture where dating doesn’t exist but has now sadly been somewhat imported by American applications, I’m still surprised that people find the idea appealing. The whole thing still somewhat baffles me. It’s like job application applied to life partner, capitalist productivism extended to relationships. That and the whole idea that people should date around and non exclusivity is the norm are probably the most repealing part of American culture to me (and there is a lot I dislike about American culture).

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

#46

Post by LtWorf »

I prefer picky rather than: "This guy is disabled, so I can't reject him or I would be a bad person… I will go out with him but act terribly, so that he will reject me instead, leaving my status as a good person intact."

Yes this has happened to me a few times. Despite my opening usually was something like "I've got this disability, if you're uncomfortable with that please just unmatch me right away".

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

#47

Post by mcv »

michaelt wrote: post #35

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…

My advice to women on such sites is to just ignore the flood of messages (would be nice if you could auto-delete any message from someone you haven't messaged before), and instead just look for interesting messages and only talk to men where you've taken the first step. Only men with an interesting profile.

Spending any attention at all on that endless flood on low-effort messages would mean you're never going to find time to actually find and date someone.

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

#48

Post by globular-toast »

What does "it worked" mean? Does it mean she has now finished "dating" because she found "the one"? Does it mean she now has more and/or better sex? Or maybe she has been able to extract more value (time/money) from men? Or is simply receiving "high quality" messages the goal?

Any dating advice seems utterly useless unless the goal is actually defined.

A lot of people on online dating platforms seem to be "lifestyle daters". It's very similar to lifestyle dieters: people who are eternally "on a diet" but never lose weight or become happy with their bodies. There's nothing wrong with it, but I think for most people online dating is a means to an end and not something they want to keep doing for its own sake.

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

#49

Post by Slow_Dog »

xlii wrote: post #41

Passive strategy works well when men are young and/or horny. When horny phase wears off the same passiveness is a reason why marriages end. >In the digital dating sphere, “burning the haystack” means obliterating 99 per cent of the dating field immediately so that you’re able to see the 1 per cent that might be right for you (...) > There’s no shortage of men who want to date you, (...) the good ones are out there, t…

It's made clear from the context that "good" is "a good match". There's nothing wrong with most of those other men, but they're not going to be people that she will want to spend the rest of her life with.

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

#50

Post by dmn322 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #32
bjornsing wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Real conversations with real strangers are tit for tat. Going overboard coming up with a bunch of catchy bs is not helpful in finding real people. The one thing that got me from almost no dates to dates all the time was just going places myself first instead of just asking girls. So instead of asking girls on a hike I’d tell them, hey I’m going on a hike want to go? And if they said no, i asked other girls and if they all said no, i went alone. The next time i had more girls wanting to hang out than i could. But the step before that was to change my mentality from one of trying to get laid to one of empathy. If i had as many options as those girls do, i would flake out too… there would be a lot of girls i want to go out with who seem cool but I’d have to prioritize them. And with limited information, that prioritization is never going to be perfect and it would make me sad to constantly have to hurt girls who are perfectly nice. But i would also have to develop a thick skin about it. Kind of like homeless people asking for money. So i started being way more understanding about them being flakey. I also realized women are skiddish. They never know what they’re going to get. So I’d try to be as wysiwyg as possible. I stopped trying to have sex on the first date, it’s too hard to get to know people, too complicated. And the people going around intensely doing hookup culture are just a subset of bratty rich kids who aren’t interested in finding or being good partners. I started trying to form genuine connections. That got me some nice convos but still didn’t work to get me dates until I did the first thing. Then i has more dates than i could handle. None of it was out of my comfort zone. None of it involved a lot of effort. It was ultimately literally just empathy.
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