when you hit on a girl in the real world...at worst, you are competing with the 10-15 other guys who've had the guts to talk to her in the past week.
with online, you are competing with pretty much every guy within 100-150 miles...and since most play the numbers game...you are just one of the hundreds who've messaged her.
The way to do it is to let them come to you. I've never initiated any conversation on OKCupid and I've been on dates with about 50 women from that site. They have always contacted me first. In mid september of this year I had 15 different women contact me in one week, resulting in 10 dates, which was the record. The key is to just have a few decent photos and be funny. It's very surprising how most people can't even be bothered to get a decent photo of themselves, or figure out anything clever to say in their profile.
Also, NYC has proven to be 5 times better than SF in terms of both quantity and quality. More dates and cool women with interesting jobs, etc. SF women are generally easier and put out on the first date, but are also much crazier. If at all possible, don't let them know your phone number. Make sure you can easily get a prescription for antibiotics.
Women tend to approach men less than the reverse, I presume that if you approached more then you'd end up with higher values in the qualities you care about.
It's also only important to note you are not just "competing" with the other guys she saw this week, but the whole online/offline pool of available males attractive females invariably have. It's about leveraging the speed of the internet to find another human being that is ACTUALLY a good match, so one would expect to beat out other people to get to a 1 in 100 match.
> SF women are generally easier and put out on the first date, but are also much crazier...
wow at this whole set of sentences... I rarely care but this kind of misogynistic, antiquated nonsense is mildly offensive even to me. I personally try not to treat other human beings like disposable hump dolls and look for some kind of a real connection, but maybe I'm just some kind of crazy hippie. To avoid the apparent but incorrect inference, I am not into monogamy now either.
so like, you had these bad experiences after just letting the stereotypically passive sex chase you, maybe use a bit more selection and go after the really interesting ones and you'll have better experience
I mean if you put yourself in list for casual sex then yeah, you need to be super careful about the people that contact you because typically attractive sexually liberated females get enough attention they don't have to pursue males
Yeah, that's true. I've talked to girls on the site that didn't even know it had a search. How do they think they get all those messages? It's bizarre.
Also, my understanding is that using two condoms increases risk of breakage.
> put out on the first date [...] Make sure you can easily get a prescription for antibiotics.
you mean "don't bother practising safe sex", then are you nuts or am I missing something? Some STIs are for life and antibiotics aren't gonna cut it.
Actually, I found it to be completely the opposite. Most of the guys messaging the girls either (sorted by frequency):
1) Send a picture of their privates
2) Send something incoherent e.g., "GURL UR SO HOT"
3) Send a long, creepy essay
4) Have zero compatibility with her, haven't read her profile (past the picture), etc... and are sending something generic.
So if you actually read their profile and send intelligent messages selectively, you'll get responses.
In a dream world. I've done that on OKC and have gotten zero responses.
A lot of my good friends are photographers so most of my portraits are taken from them. Thus, I think my photos are well executed compared to self portraits taken via mirrors/cellphones.
My profile is pretty genuine. I don't aim to be pretentious or egotistical.
When I contact people, I usually start up with something that's related to their profile or something that's in common as to help talk about something interesting. Thus, no disrespectful pick-up lines or gratuitous photos.
Contacted about... 21 people over six months (people of different levels of attractiveness)? Received like... 1 reply.
So, congratulations on the site working very well for you. Really. But, not everyone has such fortunate results despite doing things that are civil and respectful. So when people say, "so if you actually read their profile and send intelligent messages selectively, you'll get responses" well I can say it doesn't always work.
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/online-dating-advice-exact... may be relevant to your interests as well.
In a fit of experimentation, I created a female profile using a random photo from flickr (sorry, whoever you were).
As a female user you get a LOT of messages - no private parts yet, but most of the male messages are exactly as the parent post describes: pretty dumb, explicit and anonymous/generic.
It's reassuring for me. I know that I stand out from this crowd.
I am not sure it's a reason to be reassured. You're standing out from "population of men actively looking for a mate online", not from "population of men in general".
It's not all that different from the programming job interview situation. Amongst candidates that are actively on the market, there's a percentage that are _always_ on the market because they are either horrible or have unrealistic expectations.
Hence, if you're looking for an intelligent woman who wants a monogamous relationship, she'll be looking for a good individual match with a guy who has time for her, and she'll be looking for ways around the numbers problem. That means playing up what makes you different, and being good at targeting yourself to the right women. I'm not a catch by any means, but I had a pretty good response rate on Match.com, to the point where I worried that I wasn't casting a wide enough net. I think one of the reasons I've been successful is that I'm very honest and try to communicate as much of my personality as possible through my ad, even the aspects of my personality that aren't universally liked. That's how you hook into women's individual taste and how you help them solve the numbers problem. (That's not the same as putting your worst foot forward; I don't advertise things about myself that nobody would like.)
I used to take both approaches, but met more women when they came to me rather than the other way around. Make sure you have a great profile and a nice picture. SMILE!! LOOK HAPPY!!!
Of course one will have more success if women come to them, but I think it only works if you have the natural looks to pull it off. Some people, even when they're not ugly, don't have the looks required to entice women to message them no matter how they dress, pose, or how much they go to the gym.
Sounds obvious, but I used to check out men's ads just to see what I was up against, and I was definitely not impressed!
I know it's a stereotype of the marriage-obsessed woman, but my only concrete model for this fear is a woman I know whose husband feigned a lot of interests and personal characteristics that he dropped within a month of getting married, not to mention that he suddenly started nagging her to change a bunch of things about herself that he never seemed to mind before. So it's a fear I would expect women to have, too. It surprises me that anyone is on eHarmony at all!