Have you had an opposite gender friend review your profile?
(On the other hand, updating your pictures genuinely can give you many, many more views, messages, and responses.)
I've read what most guys send my female friends on okcupid. Not just the random idiots, but what i would think would be otherwise intelligent people. It often comes off as desperate or creepy.
It's certainly true that it helps to be attractive. But I'm an average looking guy, but i have no problem finding dates on okcupid.
I've summarized the average guy profile here: http://www.okcupid.com/profile/RegularOKCGuy?disable_mobile=...
(humorously, this profile gets almost as many likes as my real profile)
Realistically, have someone of the opposite sex that is the type of person you want to attract, read your profile. Ask them questions about what they like and don't.
That will solve your profile problems. As for messages, this is harder.
Annoyingly enough very similar to my profile! :P
But yeah. I have a good job, I go to the gym and workout, what the heck else am I expected to do? I'm working my ass off to make a positive impact on the world. Fuck if I am going to drop that so I can be a narcissistic asshole, quit my job, and fly around the world discovering myself.
As for the messages I send, I try my best to be original and different, for example,
What does make you laugh? The silliness of life? Those who take themselves too seriously, or those who take themselves not seriously at all? Both are amusing in their own way, though I cannot understand why one would pain themselves by taking life seriously!
Not to say life is without value, life most certainly has value, and helping others is the noblest of callings.
But, well, I own a 5 foot long remote controlled floating dolphin. I gave up on being 100% sane long ago. Technically I am sane, but I do enjoy having fun toying around with things. I also drive a bright orange car!
What about yourself? What is your alarm clock set to? I once set my dad's cell phone ringer to a rooster crowing. He was not pleased, although my mother almost fell out of her chair laughing.
(My current alarm is Violin music, in all honesty, it is not that good at waking me up!)
That message apparently didn't go over very well!
Other messages are sent such as
Hmm, a good cup of coffee may be easy to find, but I have had to teach myself how to make a good cup of tea! I find the ritual itself can be fairly relaxing. (Depends on the culture of the tea of course, some teas are easier to prepare than others!)
Is your work in the heathcare industry on something like replacing old people with robots? Someone should get on that. I know for a fact that the day I turn 60, I want a super strong steel alloy robot body.
Actually I might take that offer a bit sooner than 60, it'd be hard to wait!
Which also apparently didn't go over well either!
> But, well, I own a 5 foot long remote controlled floating dolphin. I gave up on being 100% sane long ago. Technically I am sane, but I do enjoy having fun toying around with things. I also drive a bright orange car!
What this says: I own toys, you should know about them! Also, I think I'm "crazy!" And I have an awesome car, look at my success!
It makes you sound kind of like you're filling your life with things because you've been socially rejected. If that whole block of indented text was your entire first message, then it's incredibly rambly and full of similar flags.
One of my most successful stream of messages went something like this: noticing that my potential date lived in Cambridge, I asked if they had explored the area (they said they were adventurous in their profile). When they responded with "Yeah, I've found some cool stuff", I then asked if they'd found the secret staircase that led to the lair of angry geese on the river?
This establishes both that 1. I've actually read their profile, and 2. I have some knowledge they would be interested in, and that they can share in.
Here's how I'd rephrase your second message:
I noticed from your profile that you enjoy a good cup of tea. Do you make your own, or have you visited a lot of different tea houses?
You're not overwhelming the other person with information, just asking a question that, if they've shown an interest, they're generally really happy to expand on. Don't treat your messages like emails or letters, but more like instant messages. Keep them short and easy to respond to, and let the other person tell you some of their story.
Edit: Also, don't ask so many things! It's hard enough for someone to want to answer a single question you ask them. Answering 3 or more is too much effort: if they wanted to start answering your first one, but kept reading instead, you've failed to convert, and by the third one they've likely skipped on to someone else's message.
(The $10 inflatable dolphin is supposed to be cute, ends up being really freaky looking, go figure!)
The dolphin was actually something I brought into work for my team to play with, we had a good chunk of the building watching as we flew it around our atrium. The problem is, it is hard to capture that I am the sort of person who is always thinking of ways to help make his team happy without writing really lame sentences like this one!
I do write more sane messages, to a girl who had mentioned that she liked eating animals,
What is your favorite mammal to consume? I've been on a lamb kick lately, lamb burgers stuffed with basil and spinach are so good! Put some goat cheese in the very middle, and life is divine!
and in other food related messages!
There is a place in the ID that sells durian milkshakes. The shakes are a bit on the strong side. :)
What other sorts of weird things have you had? I think squid jerky was one of the more interesting foodstuffs I've tried.
Overall, after 4 years of trying I've yet to find a good way to write messages. :/
I think squid jerky was one of the more interesting foodstuffs I've tried. What other sorts of weird things have you had?
You don't want to put too much information into messages. When you say less the other person will fill the blanks with their imagination, and people tend to be optimistic. They'll see you as they want to see you. Whereas your messages are full of a subtext that makes you seem over-enthusiastic and a bit "quirky!" (in other words: annoying).
Sorry for being blunt, just calling it how I see it from the few messages you have posted.
My sentence structure is almost always question first then statement, not the best form, but one that seems to come naturally to me. I'll work on flipping it around!
Then again I enjoy abuse of English in general, one the sign offs to a message I sent went as such:
With the names of artists hanging in the air, I shall end this message, with hopes of hearing a reply.
(That one did get a reply!)
I have done other hideous things on OKC as well, including getting into a short story writing contest with an English teacher one time. That was enjoyable. :-D
If the women you respond to aren't interested when you're being honest -- why bother sending them messages at all? (Lame, casual sex, I guess -- but there must be easier ways to go about finding that than hanging out on a web page?)
DISCLAIMER: IANAW
I think specifically in this context what is meant is 1) have good pictures 2) don't have bad pictures
Even OKc harps on pictures, because they know from their data that pictures are important.
(I thought they send this to everyone, but it turns out not to be true, it's related to profile clickthroughs. See http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/12/20/is-being-one-of...)
They also have the mybestface stuff, which helps a lot.
The point is that you're not suddenly going to triple or quadruple your inbound message rate or reply rate by improving your written profile. This much is clear, and the fact that your average guy profile gets nearly as much positive attention as your real profile indicates as much.
However, smartly choosing quality pictures is probably the one thing anyone should do, and you're going to get far more value back for the investment than putting hours writing a profile slightly more witty and more interesting than your previous profile. It triples, or quadruples, or quintuples your reply rates.
ETA: Another way to look at it is this: someone who writes a boring profile and sends stilted messages will, at best, only be able to write a slightly less boring profile and won't in general be able to improve their crappy messages (with the assumption that the profile or messages don't contain stupid dealbreakers in the first place), no matter how much effort they put into the rewrite. If writing is an area of weakness for you, then rewriting isn't going to do much good for you. On the other hand, crappy pictures can be replaced in a matter of hours with something that anyone can tell is much better, even if you're not generally considered attractive.
I strongly disagree.
I have A/B tested written profiles on okcupid and elsewhere, and found it matters a lot.
" This much is clear, and the fact that your average guy profile gets nearly as much positive attention as your real profile indicates as much."
Actually, the attention is mainly from women who think it's hilarious :)
"However, smartly choosing quality pictures is probably the one thing anyone should do, and you're going to get far more value back for the investment than putting hours writing a profile slightly more witty and more interesting than your previous profile. It triples, or quadruples, or quintuples your reply rates. "
I don't disagree with this either.
Far too many people have profile pictures that they don't look comfortable or confident in. For example, too many people dress/etc based on what they think people think looks good, instead of what makes them feel actually confident and attractive. They look uncomfortable as hell, and it's completely obvious to the outside world.
The problem is there are plenty of people with passionate, interesting lives, but who aren't good at communicating that interest, or have interests that don't appeal to (most of) the opposite sex.
In dating, where first impressions are everything, it's often more important to appear interesting than be interesting.
I've found that when people have persistent difficulties finding a partner, it's almost always because they aren't actually interested in the women they date, but have some platonic ideal of a woman that they think they ought to date and so are dating the wrong people.
> Basically, be interested in everyone
I think the main advantage of this is that it keeps your options open. It is a numbers game, after all.
I have a friend of mine who is short (generally considered a disadvantage) and who has one miserable picture, but his messages are good enough that he has a good success rate on OKC. (His messages also violate every guideline, they are at least 5 paragraphs long and very in depth!)
The problem is, it is disheartening in the extreme. Spending years going to the gym and getting in shape, get promotions at work, buy a house, all for naught.
Doing the math, I figured it'd take me a 3 or 4 dozen dates to get used to socializing with women in a dating environment. The problem is in the last 2 years my success rate at getting dates has plummeted, I used to be able get a date a week w/o issue, now, months upon months of work to get one date. Ugh. This obviously sets back progress of skill acquisition.
It is annoying, I am one of those people who is otherwise successful, but the amount of contact I had with women before joining my current team @ work was almost nil, so an entire skillset[1] isn't there. OKC helps because it creates a way by which to meet women (for reference only one of my friends has any contact with women either!), but it involves what distinctly looks like black magic to be successful on it.
[0]http://ak2.okccdn.com/php/load_okc_image.php/images/150x150/...
[1]Recognizing non-verbal cross-gender communications. A subset of non-verbal communications in general of course, but there are (thankfully!) now good written resources on general purpose non-verbal communications.
Dance is just an easy thing to join: you could also go to underground music venues, join a co-ed softball/volleyball/tae kwon do team, take arts classes at a community college or join a book club at your library.
But yeah, dance classes have been recommended to me. I'm doing improv right now, which is already helping a good deal, it is a different set of experiences.
My confidence in social settings in general and particularly with women has been greatly improved. It's a great balance to programming and problem solving activities, too.
If you are at all able to approach a woman in real life and introduce yourself, do that instead. You'll get far more social interactions far faster (you don't even need to successfully ask anyone out to start improving).
As suggested elsewhere - joining a dance group or something is great for an easy environment for introductions. But even walking up to total strangers on the street and introducing yourself typically gets better responses than online dating. Where online dating beats "real life" is in using sheer volume to compensate.
I started using OkC to prove to an unreasonably paranoid (male) friend who was somewhat desperate to get a girlfriend that he should try it. He was based in Boston, myself in San Francisco. I would check profiles out from both locations and link him ones that I thought he might like. I was mostly just enjoying poking around the first month. I seriously approached the first girl that I did only because she played StarCraft. Ironically, the most dates (5) with a single girl off OkC I went on was with that first girl!
What worked for me there was picking a characteristic to look for that isn't "the sum of all features that would make my ideal girlfriend/wife" to find a person. And not something generic like "games" or "math" or "music." In my experience, even a specific TV show or music taste is not something people really relate over (I tried following a TV show to get along better with a girl I had a huge crush on who raved about it). If there's something specific you spend a lot of time on that you care about, try to find that. Talk about that. Try to find someone you would just love to geek out with, not because you're lonely and/or in need of a partner.
A lot of my other approaches were very similar to your messages. Asking lots of questions, showing an interest, proving I read their profile. Even though girls always demand you show you read their profile, dont ask that much. Just one question TOPS in a single message. Don't be that ridiculously interested in knowing everything about her so quickly. Just imagine the progression you had with getting to know your closest friend you know. It didn't start with you sitting across a table bombarding each other with questions. Pick one thing that catches your interest that you think would roll well. Go from there.
It's all about playing on your interpersonal strengths (everyone has something here). Mine is in being ridiculously passionate about a few topics (eg: education, women in technology, cross-culture romances) fairly popular among women in my preferred demographic. I am also even more passionate about game design and experience design, but I try not to get into that unless the girl expresses interest. And I always lay the disclaimer of how much I'm going to geek out when we get there. I too am uncomfortable with people-touching (although I very much wanted to not be!), so it took a while to get over that. Your weakness seems to be general communication discomfort around women. Takes a little getting used to. Of course you will get frustrated, but if you let any frustration show, it will heavily backfire. So try to keep a check on it!
However, as you can probably gather from my comment above, I think OkC (and online dating in general) is a difficult medium to make more than a superficial connection via. Context is everything. "Met online" just doesn't spark the magic. You need to have a better genesis story to even put you and the partner in the right mood.
Good luck!
PS: You're most certainly not unattractive. There's definitely a significant segment of women which definitely intersects the set that you'd be interested in that would find you attractive, and that's all that matters.
I think that one big disadvantage for those who work in a highly technical field (engineer, scientist etc), contact with the ladies are quite few, this means opportunities for interaction will be significantly smaller.