Does anyone know of any ...please don't laugh..Dating Sites

[kristof65]

It is also my observation (at that time) that woman seemed to take dating sites less seriously that men did. I had to put in all the effort to contact people...

My observation of the same phenomenon (in approximately the same era) wasn't that they took it less seriously, but more of an extension of real world expectations - that the man would make the first move.

 

For pretty and/or young women (or women without pictures who sounded young and/or pretty), they didn't have to expend much effort at all, as every Tom, Dick and Harry would seem to contact them. My wife said she had at least a half dozen responses within hours of her first ad being posted - and she ignored all of them because they obviously didn't read her profile, and merely looked at her pretty picture.

 

There is a small geographical and relative wealth component as well. I noticed this when I moved from the SF Bay Area to Denver. Afterwards I did some research, and it made sense. The SF Bay Area has a higher ratio of men to women than Denver does. It also has more extremes in the income brackets. The end result for me was that the higher paid single guys working in Silicon Valley were having higher success rates than the blue collar tech I was. Denver, OTH, has a more even ratio of single men to single women, and less extremes in pay (the extremes are still there, there just isn't as large a group on the high end). Anyway, that difference made it a lot easier for me to be noticed in Denver than in San Francisco. And yes, there is another difference between the two cities I'm deliberately ignoring, because I don't think it's as extreme as some would beleive.

[Orsino]

My wife found me on match.com fourteen years ago this month. Therefore, dating sites work.

 

On the other hand, that way waaaaay back when the Internets were young, and as I haven't been on dating sites in fourteen years, I can't say that they still work. I'm guessing that with today's enormous pools of "talent," it still comes down to the matchees: are they honest in beginning a relationship?

[DocumentaryGirl]

I believe the last time I tried a dating site was 5 years ago or more. I had some dates but none were successful. I tried eHarmony but my personality testing results and the kind of people I would be looking for seemed way off. I have a hunch that dating sites long ago were more successful!

 

You sound very much like my husband did. I met him when he was 30 years old and he thought he may never find the woman he wanted to marry. But then I walked through the Reaper Miniatures doors! ReaperBryan had invited me to game with some friends and employees on Tuesday evenings. It was months before my schedule opened up. And that is where I met my husband.

 

What's the lesson I learned? You gotta get out there and try new things. Well, at least I did. My husband just did the same thing he had been doing! If you try a few dating sites and they don't seem like they're working out for you. Look in your community - see if there's any interesting events or classes being held - and go to them! That way you can introduce yourself and not worry about rejection (which I worried about all the time!) because there's a good chance you won't have to run into them often, if at all.

[EntilZha]

Speaking for myself, Eharmony worked for me. Granted, it took 11 months to find the one I was looking for, but we've been together nearly 17 months now. She's a gamer, and a sci-fi/anime geek.

[Enchantra]

I wouldn't judge your experience based on mine. But I'm not huge on dating sites.

 

I also don't drink, don't frequent bars, cannot stand nightclubs and the like. My job schedule doesn't really allow me to do much either at this point as far as go out places.

 

I tried dating sites for several years, the major one being jdate.com, which is affiliated with Match.com and it's a Jewish singles dating site. It's been a few years now since I even bothered logging in there. Quite frankly my experience was the guys I met through those sites had more issues than Newsweek. One didn't disclose till after we had met face to face that he was a heart transplant patient, while I had no issues with his medical condition, it was the mental issues he had dealing with his condition that ultimately fried the relationship. Another one was a closet gay, who frankly had he just been honest with me, we could have parted on nicer terms. Another one - well I really don't know what his problem was as he had to many of them! The worst one was this guy who had recently moved into the area from California, He pulled up in a car with a broken window, the rain had fallen, the passenger side seat was wet, the car smelled of stale cigarettes and every other word was "Eh man." With first impressions being what they are, he didn't make the cut.

 

I even tried meeting guys over IM, like Yahoo and ICQ. That was really bad! The creeps that would message me finally made me set my Yahoo invisible and set my controls to only accept messages from people I already knew. I don't even wish to discuss some of the crap that was sent to me by IM from guys out of the blue. *shudders*

 

My best luck has come from meeting guys through websites with forums that I frequent that deal with my hobbies - in other words we have mutual interests to build on. I've even met a few through Roleplay sites I've visited in the past. My current boyfriend of a year and a half is a member of this forum. How did we meet? I messaged him because I liked how he painted his minis, and we were discussing an issue with a mutual friend - two purely innocent messages and we apparently clicked more than we initially thought. At the end of July I'm flying to spend a week with him. Last time we got to see each other was Rcon 2008. A bit rough at times dealing with the distance, but after this visit we're hoping to change the distance issue in the near future pending the outcomes of some other circumstances going on.

 

So there are ways of meeting people online, but for me, I'll avoid the dating sites like the plague if I'm ever in the situation again where I'm looking.

[fieldarchy]

Beo--I only read the first post you made but you just described . . . well . . . my situation.

 

It's really tough being a mid 20 something, childfree, educated female who is extremely independent to find someone worth dating. i have gone the dating site route before and had many many many BAD experiences. Now that's not to say all experiences are bad. My best friend and her husband found each other on Yahoo Personals if I'm not mistaken.

 

Anyway, I would just advise you to be careful. There are a lot of weirdos out there. However, you may want to check out singles clubs in your area. They organize activities for local singles to participate in. It's a good way to at least make some friends and have new experiences. What can that hurt? And I don't see it as being any more expensive than a sub to a dating site.

 

Best of luck to you . . . also, don't rule out us gamer girls! I know I feel overlooked by my male friends a lot of the time because I hang with them like I'm one of the guys. They tend not to look at me as an attractive female . . . at least that's not the impression they give (Bryan I'm referring more to my monday night group, you're not included in this statement)

 

Have y'all ever seen Fanboys? When the chick is trying to tell her guy friend she likes him and he's completely dense to it . . . yeah, been there done that. Not fun. And it's kind of disappointing. Don't rule out those female friends unless they've told you that they aren't interested at all.

[kristof65]

While a dating site won't work for everyone, something to keep in mind is that they aren't "instant gratification". Like any other method of meeting nice members of the opposite sex, there are usually a lot of failures and horror stories before "the one" comes along. I was an active member of several sites (and a couple singles activities clubs as well) for nearly a year before I met my wife. I had email and phone conversations with dozens of different women, actually met up with a dozen or so, made a couple of friends, had a few horror stories, etc.

 

All in all, using the dating sites didn't produce any better or worse results than any other method I had used in the past, the real difference was the number and variety of women I got to meet in that time frame. And I was accused of being too picky several times, too, because I restricted my online activities to women who were within 50-75 miles of me - I had no desire to even attempt a long distance relationship - even with that restriction severely reducing the number of "compatible" women, I corresponded with and/or met lots of women I probably would have never run into any other way.

 

You will hear people say they had bad experiences with online dating. But consider that bad experiences can come from meeting in any other way - I met my ex-wife at work, and knew her for several months before we even started dating. In the end, she gave me far more bad experiences than any woman I met online. My high school girlfriend pulled a lot of $h1+ on me, too. In retrospect, few of the horror stories from online dating are any worse than other forms of meeting and dating - at least not if you use common sense.

 

There is a trap that online dating has that I feel causes many of it's problems - it's easy to hide who you are, and therefore very tempting to attempt to make your profile look better with little white lies - things like trimming 10-20 lbs off your weight, using an old picture before you lost your hair, not revealing you have kids, etc. A lot of the bad experiences I had with online dating came from exactly those kind of little white lies. Face it, when you show up to first meet that wonderful girl you've been chatting with online to realize that the picture she sent you was from her high school graduation, not her college graduation like she said, that four years and 40+ pound white lie puts a negative spin on the rest of the date. You don't trust anything else she says, and that negative vibe carries throughout the whole experience. You may get fewer "hits" by being completely honest in your profile, however, you'll have fewer problems with the "hits" you do get.

 

I would, however, stay away from meeting people on chat or open IM, especially if I were a woman. I had a first hand experience on a chat room that really disturbed me. I knew a co-worker was using Yahoo chat rooms to meet girls, and so another co-worker and I decided to mess with him. We both both logged on with nick names that sounded feminine, attempting to entice him to meet one of us, and you know, embarrass the crap out of him when he showed up to the meeting site to find us, and several other co-workers. We never got that far - instead, we dealt with barrages of inappropriate private chat invitations and messages from all sorts of creeps. Frankly, after experiencing that, I'm amazed that any woman would voluntarily log onto any sort of open chat site like that, and reveal that she was in fact, a woman looking to meet someone. At least not more than once. At least the dating sites help you screen that stuff out and/or keep it from being so in your face.