downndirty just last month: "hey guys, I'm going to try this online dating thing. Thoughts?" downndirty today: wizened and jaded voice of hard-won experience I just missed the online dating scene. My last two relationships were both girls that I started sleeping with at work. Which, in retrospect, was dumb because that job was the launching point for the rest of my career and I actually had a boss who set me up for success. But I was young and horny and the intern was cute and liked me, so what was I supposed to do? A decade and a half later, I guess we worked out okay. In the gap before my current relationship, internet dating was just barely starting to emerge as something other than the last bastion of weirdos and social misfits, but this was pre-smartphone so it wasn't nearly as accessible as it is now. I have noticed that, while the culture around Tinder definitely skews young (as you'd expect), I've seen a fair number of post-divorce aged people who successfully used it as a tool for relationships. The guys I know who are single, mostly baggage-free, and gainfully employed in decent paying fields are cleaning up in their 30s/40s on dating websites. It's kind of interesting to me, because you'd think it'd be about a wash - equal numbers of men and women dumping their first spouses and getting back into the dating pool. But I guess my immediate friends, for whatever reason, include mostly women of that age in relationships so perhaps the baggage-free, gainfully employed women are cleaning up as well.
I met my fiance on OKCupid. This was about 4 years ago. Most of my 30's was spent using online sites for dating. PoF sucked. Tinder was just for hookups which I've never really been into. Match seemed to be geared towards 40's+ divorcees looking for a new marriage and you had to pay for it. Bumble was JUST coming out and didn't really have a huge following yet. I had a stock message I sent out to anyone I was interested in. I spent A LOT of time sending messages to girls and finally found a good opening starter that had about a 75% message back rate. There was a rotating mix of bars and restaurants I'd take girls to that were cheap(er), but still cool local spots. Most of the people I met were 1-3 dates and then I moved on. I'm not really picky, but I'd been in enough longer term relationships to know what I was looking for and could tell relatively quickly whether someone fit into those categories. Not sure how my fiance and I actually matched as we were both on the site for about a year before either of our profiles showed up in the others feed, but once we met, we both knew pretty early on we were a really good match. I did meet a bunch of people through Meetup. Not sure if that's still a thing or not, but it was a good way to meet people without "date" expectations doing things you were interested in.
I'm so old I met my wife on MySpace. It was right after college. I was living back home and looking for work. My friends from college were distributed across CT and MA, and hometown friends had either scattered elsewhere or were busy working or looking for work like I was, so I had a decent amount of free time. I had forgotten I even had a profile, and one day I stumbled into MySpace and saw I was still logged in. I gave the profile a little refresh and a few months later ended up starting to message my future wife while we were both trolling the place for a hookup, I suppose. I don't even remember who messaged who first. Thanks for the intro, Tom!
I met my wife on OkCupid about 13 years ago. I was _really_ early in to the online dating scene. As for dudes in their 30's and 40's cleaning up, it's not surprising. The quality of men is considered to be declining rapidly (lots of reasons why, but often the "why are there only broke men is heard) as women manage to follow rewarding career paths and standards for what is "good" continue to rise. In Japan, it's extremely easy to stand out (and this is among foreigners) as the majority of them are working shitty jobs as language teachers, have no skills, and no real ambition. I've mentioned to friends of mine here that "you should assume that most, if not all, men who are charming, have a good job, and are good looking, are married or in a relationship". So far, I haven't been wrong _except_ when the guys have had something off with them (pedos, or "ephebophiles" if you prefer, abound here).
I used to be completely hopeless at clubs and such and had to be drunk in order to stomach them in the first place so most of my dating was online and have tried most of them over the years. Bumble and HInge have been the best with my current partner being someone I met on Hinge. In Aus Hinge seems to be the best of the dating apps with Bumble after that and the rest of them an absolute crapshoot. I found on Bumble a lot of ladies will match you but then not say anything. A lot of sites like OKCupid have stuff all people using it in Australia so the options are very limited. I've never had a great deal of luck dating either online or otherwise but as I've gotten older things have been working out for the better. On another tangent I saw a female friend's inbox on PoF and I can't imagine how horrifying it would be online dating as a female, within an hour of opening an account she had well over a hundred messages with the vast majority being hello, hi, how's it going or any number of show me your tits or something like that.
He probably does account for at least fifty percent of the requests but there were a lot of others haha.
I've seen more than my fair share of what enters a woman's inbox who is online dating (from a variety of statuses). It's definitely going to drive you towards the same demo of guys mentioned before. You've gotta strike that chord where you're clearly not some drooling idiot, and you're also not some kind of desperate loser (it's not a good colour on anyone). That being said, one of the comments from a mate of mine is discouraging for fellas:
I met my wife in the woods, where she'd gotten her jeep stuck in the mud. We went back to my house and showered together. I went on one online date. There was a head-on-collision within about 75 feet of us as we were walking into the bar/restaurant. I held one driver's hand and tried to keep her from moving while the ambulance was in route. The girl did the same for the other driver after going to get towels from the bar to slow bleeding. After, as we talked I found out she was roommates with a girl I went to highschool with, I dated that roommate's best friend. I didn't get a call back, as I expected. I messaged back and forth with another girl but didn't meet her until many months later, maybe a year, she was at neighbor's when I stopped by. They worked together. We had a brief fling. She had used very old photos in her profile. She was still very pretty, just older.
Dates through dating sites: 0 Dates through the Whisper app: 2 Yeah, I'm doing something wrong here...