Online Dating for Scientists
dating.newscientist.com
dating.newscientist.com
Also: shared interest forums are a great place to meet people. My wife and I posted on the same law forum before we ran into each other in person.
Also, and this is unrelated but I have to share since I'm too married for it to be useful to me: if you're in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art on their gallery nights.
Women sign up, immediately get hundreds of messages - choose one and go on a date. Men sign up, send out a few messages and nothing happens.
Cultivate interests that appeal to women, write an interesting profile, and put up a nice photo and the women will come to you. (I'm no Calvin Klein model, by the way.)
Of course, it's not going to work if you end up having no real interest in these things, but if you do, then you might take these interests off of the back burner.
Another common fallacy is that you can weigh 300 pounds and yet attract a 110 lb waif. It's been known to happen, but the odds are stacked against you.
For guys, being skinny isn't considered that attractive though. Better than being fat, but not as good as being buff.
I am not particularly buff, and I've had about a dozen girlfriends, and have "dated" another ten or so. Now if only I could meet the right one....
Yeah... nope.
Also, if you're sending out a ton of messages and still getting no bites, then you're probably pricing yourself too high. Aim lower and see if you get any bites. OKCupid isn't really that gender imbalanced (at least compared to the typical science/engineering circles) so most guys should be able to get some responses, statistically speaking.
Or it's more likely that the user has unwanted characteristics, i.e. Asian male, short, etc. FWIW, I've met and dated beautiful women who I first met in real life circumstances. Whereas in online dating, I've sent messages/requests to women who I would probably not be that attracted to in real life and got zero responses. In real life, personality and confidence can compensate for certain physical characteristics.
Also, let's face it, not every woman is out on the bar scene. There are plenty of women who find that social situation to be awkward and prefer the less intense world of online dating. I think if you're not naturally charismatic, going with the CW and trying to work the bar scene is a losing proposition. You're competing on a battlefield that doesn't play to your strengths while trying to meet the women who are least likely to overlook that aspect of your personality.
"American" covers a number of very distinct varieties of English. It isn't considered its own language for political and cultural reasons, not necessarily linguistic ones. (As another example, look at the divide between Hindi and Urdu.)
It's a perfectly valid concern in this wintry economic climate.
http://www.sciconnect.com/index.htm
the copyright notice at the bottom says "Copyright © 1991-2012." Does that mean they've been around since 1991?
Racism doesn't need to involve blathering idiots who want to burn your house down, all it takes is someone to treat another person worse because of their race.
Which is to say, we're all at least a little bit racist. One of the greatest lies of modern society is that racism is somehow exceptional, or intrinsic to a character, when it is in fact highly contextual and can be brought out of anyone.
Race in dating is very heavily influenced by popular perceptions of particular races, including stereotypes - that someone won't give a black person the time of day even if they are articulate and hit other criteria is racist, though the fault here seems to lie more with society than the individual.
(I do agree that everyone is capable of racism even if they aren't going round lynching people, just not that racial preference when it comes to sex is always about racism.)
For example: I'm attracted to slim women. But some of my best friends are curvy. I'm not discriminating against curvy women; it's just that I find the skinny ones more attractive, without any rational reason for it.
And this is even more true for race - there may very well be people who are biologically wired to dislike certain skin colors, but IMO they are well into the minority. Race in dating has much more to do with cultural perceptions of race than any evolutionarily hard-wired perception.
In any case though:
> " it's just that I find the skinny ones more attractive, without any rational reason for it."
Which makes you, I guess the word would be... weightist?
The whole point of my post isn't to point at people and go "you monster! you won't date black people!", it's to point out that even subconsciously influenced racism is racism, and the net effect for the target individual is the same, regardless of if you're "simply like that without rational reason" or if you actively and consciously dislike them.
The fact that we've been programmed by culture and circumstance to discriminate against a certain group doesn't make it our fault, but it is still discrimination at the end of the day.
Wonder how the male/female percentages on those platform are...