The wonderful world of online dating

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I've been experimenting a bit with online dating, and it has been a horrible experience.

I have not attempted to date for about 20 years. Before that, I made an occasional, futile attempt. I thought that I would try online dating, on the assumption that I had nothing to lose.

For a brief time, I had a feeling of hope, but as hope has started to fade, I think that hope is the cruelest emotion, because when hope fades, there is only pain remaining.

I knew that the odds were against me, but I found that they were worse than I had expected. The dating sites are infested with scammers, vile, heartless creatures. Their only virtue is that they are so obvious. If they were more subtle, they could really hurt.

Not only do men outnumber the women -- that much I expected and was willing to deal with- -- but a lot of the men are "serial daters", going from target to target, looking for easy prey. I had not expected that sort of competition.

Furthermore, a large number of the accounts seem to be inactive. I suspect that this is because it is free to create a profile, but costs money to receive or send email. Whatever the reason, most of my messages go unread. A polite refusal would be much more preferable.

I grow tired of the cookie-cutter profiles that I see. All the women want the same thing, and it is not me.

I loathe the way that so many of the women's requirements are so unrealistically high.

At the other extreme, so many women set no requirements, and you know that they are not that open minded; nobody is.

I am tired of my profile, which though honest is carefully crafted to hide my differences with the NTs. I detest the misdirection. I think that my last act of defiance will be to post a completely candid profile, hiding nothing.

you should use okcupid.com

Last edited by alex on 26 Jan 2011, 10:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

^^^^^

What Alex said, been great for me too.

And it's free!

Thanks for the suggestion. I have an account there, but it is too early to tell if anything will come of it. At least there seems to be a wider range of candidates.

I was mainly complaining about match***, which is the biggest, and, according to a number of rankings, the best. In my mind, what they do is extremely close to fraud.

(The *** is because I'm not allowed to post urls yet.)

I think this is true of people in general, and is unrelated to whether it is carried out online.

Having never used these kind of sites until recently, i was rather shocked at how much effort and work they actually involve.

I find it so much easier just to meet people out of common interest or in person. It just doesn't feel a natural environment at all regardless of how they lay out an online dating site. It's just not me...

What happened to just talking to people, is that a novelty these days? I realise going up and talking to strangers in a place like London is a sure set way of getting you labelled as a weirdo, a criminal or a naieve tourist but occasionally you do get better responses out of people from a human conversation

are there any aspies there?

Of course there are, but I suspect not too many choose to identify as such.

Anyway, there's Alex P and me, so there's at least two...

I think i meant "out" aspies. I checked it out, i remember there used to be lots of quizzes there. I'm not sure what to make of it now, but the front page is pretty nice.

I'm an "out" Aspie on there. It's a conversation piece.

Seriously, though, I do find being open about my diagnosis to be a good litmus test. I've also been surprised at how many guys apparently googled Asperger's after seeing it in my profile, then sent me messages listing their various 'symptoms' and asking me if I think they have Asperger's. So, it's kind of like a little public service announcement right in my profile, lol.

At least that's one good thing that's come of me using the site ... I haven't had the best of luck with online dating in general and have pretty much given up on it to be truthful. Don't think I've logged into that particular site for at least a month.

I am there and out. I've not gotten any dates, but I am very particular. Chatted with some interesting people, but none of them near me.

Still, it's a much better site than Zoosk, which is nothing but spam.

Yahoo Personals worked great for me! Match was OK! I like OKCupid because it has a very intricate matching system based upon how the two respondents answered questions. All I know is when I answered the questions with as much honesty as I could muster. So far, so good for me!!

Leslie

I haven't had much luck with on-line dating. I tried eHarmony several years ago, but that didn't go very well. I just tried OKCupid, but deleted my profile after a couple of weeks. The whole communication thing is rather difficult for me, which doesn't help. The matching system wasn't working very well at all for me. I found very few matches 90% or higher and even with the high percentage matches we were answering very important questions completely differently, so I really don't understand how they derived the %. The funniest thing is that I had the most conversations with a woman who matched me 0%!

I'm not very good with Answering questions about myself. One day I might answer one way and the next another. I think Maybe I will sign up with my spam email, and if things go well I will change it to my real email.

Does anyone else feel embarrassed to be looking for dates on dating sites?

Can you delete your profile if you want to?

Update: made an account and am answering questions! this is a little bit scary!

1. Yes, especially at first.
2. Yes

Feel free to post a link to your profile here, the help I got here made a HUGE difference.

Good luck!

I recently put my details on one of these dating sites, I was more than open with my profile, reporting that I had Aspergers, was anti-social didnt want a relationship unless with a gorgeous but sexually perverted weirdo, and suggested everyone just move along to read the next persons profile.

I cant belive the number of "messages, "winks, "e-mails" I suppossedly get, and on a daily basis.

Its probably a scham like "Polish Dating" where they get some beautifull girl to say shes interested in you, so you pay the fee so you can reply, then never hear a word from her or anyone else, until your subscription is due for renewal.

My apologies to any genuine girl that might have left me a message, but once bitten twice shy Iam afriad.