Meeting Girls is harder than I'd have thought

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Disclaimer: This is NOT a rant / complain topic, I'm perfectly happy with where I am in life.

Some background before the questions: So I'm a pretty outgoing, friendly persona.. age 27.5, normal appearance, decent looking (but not an underwear model), I work out (running and light exercise, not body building.) , have a decent job, a car, am highly educated (have M.A and teaching diploma finishing soon) and I have very unique talents in music and also several other casual hobbies. I live in a relatively small town.

I do go out and use my hobbies as a mean to get to know people and mingle and it works great. I like to hit on girls IRL rather then texting, but I do it rarely (3 times only in the last half a year) because I don't fall in love quickly and I'd ask a girl out only after we're chatted a bit and I found I actually like her. Those 3 girls were either taken or didn't want a boyfriend (I still see them occasionally they didn't mess with me lol) the third one just said "but we don't know each other that much" so I said to her "well that's why I wanna get to know you , because I fancy you" and I told her to think about it and phone me back but she never did. This is just being unlucky no point analyzing.

The thing is and my friend who just moved over from Pennsylvania was astonished as he said and I quote that "the society here is extremely DUDE centric" just the ratio of guys to girls is incredibly high towards the guys, whether it's in the local clubs we go to, or just in generally speaking amongst people our age (students and young adults).

I tried a site called OKCUPID but I didn't pay, because I think it's way to expensive for what it is and I got a bit superficial feeling from it, plus the algorithm is tricking the human mind psychologically - 12 likes in the first hour and then for a couple of days no new likes, so it "forces" you to buy. A friend who's been a long time user and actually paid said that after his subscription ended suddenly he got MANY likes!. On OKCUPID I noticed most of the girls on there just not seem my type, and the very few that do there's no way to send a message without a mutual like ( because they won't see it , anyway.. to my knowledge).

From what I learned dating sites are not only "meat market" type superficial and attract very shallow people on average, but also guys have a different (worse) fate than girls on there. Correct me if I'm wrong I only used OKCUPID and never had experience with Tinder and other stuff for that matter.
Ideally I'd meet somebody IRL, but maybe I can learn from you guys experience, how you go about just expanding your potential dating pool, this is my big issue.

I know I'm a quality guy, but girls have a really hard time noticing this for some reason guys do not. I'm not a good match to most girls, but for the ones I am a bargain. Now I'm not generalizing as I don't mean "all girls everywhere" obviously just the girls I've ever interacted with... I've had a very long term relationship once with a girl I loved so much, but it's hard for me to find a girl that would fancy me the same amount I'd fancy her nowadays.

So TLDR: 1) Ideas for getting to know girls, 2) How to increase the pool of potential dates (sorry for my English, probably not the right "idiom" to use) and 3) Opinion on dating sites -should one use them? good/bad? and if so which?.

Edit: wow IDK what was I thinking asking for input from random people on the internet about dating.. it's not really my thing with the internet being like a zoo. But wth maybe one of you has 200 IQ insight that was right in front of my eyes and I didn't see it haha.

If you actually live in Micronesia, the dating pool is much more restrictive than it is in most places.

I have only once tried a dating site and it was a free one. I was not on there for long before I quit. There were these issues.

1. There was hardly anyone who lived in my area of the country.

2. I sent a message to one young lady asking if it was usually this quiet and she did not reply. She was the only "Possible" one that I could see apart from another one who I actually knew from a church I used to go to and when I was in church she was not interested and after I left the church and occasionally saw her she would ignore me so she was a definate no. He first lady I looked at her profile a few times and it showed that she had looked at mine a few times, but as she never replied I just left the site. She was aroun 100 miles away and she was one of the three people who were close enough.

I thought there was some hidden "Catch" to these dating sites. I can see what you mean when the sites are designed to give you likes to make you pay to see more. That is disshonest.
One issue I noticed was that most of the profiles had been skuttled in that it showed the picture of the person, but they had re-edited the details and left what they could leave blank. Is this because they could not leave the site after they had been on for a certain length of time? Maybe my profile is still there? Who knows!

I was only talked into joining many years ago by another man from a normal site I was on who wanted me to join as he wanted to marry someone and was nurvous of joining and wanted me to join with him for motivational support. I did not expect to find a date to be honest as in the past when ladies have asked me out I have pointed to other suitable men as I did not think I was good enough for them, and some married the men I pointed out so I guess I was good at pointing them out!

I have in the past been concerned that there was some sort of catch in joining dating site like hidden charges or not being able to talk without paying money, or not being allowed to leave without a big hidden payment to pay?

The only dating I have done really has been through ordinary sites that are not dating sites. I am only on a few sites.

My advice is though is that online is ok, but it is very restrictive as one does not really get to know people and how they react. All one has is a two dimentional picture. Real life is different. Real life... In some ways is not so easy as I would rarely meet anyone in real life as I tend to avoid meeting people in a way... Ok. I am shy.

@Mountain Goat From my limited experience in OKCUPID before I deleted it ( and my friend's experiences who's a long time user echoed mine) girls tend to act VERY weird. For example, after a mutual like, you send a message and suddenly they delete the app, or you just don't see them anymore (without them even messaging back). Sometimes it's 1 message and they don't care to show interest or help initiate the conversation so it doesn't die out. The sad thing is that "normal" girls ( of the smart, kind, emphatic type) they are not on there... and if there's one or two of them out there well the % of mutual like plus the manipulation of the dating site will result in me never meeting them.

I believe the cause of this is that I find a lot of people retracting into the virtual world and messaging in particular, (whether on Whatsapp , social media or else) instead of actually communicating by voice. I'm one of those guys who call my friends (I do use messaging but to a degree). What a sad, horrible time to live in! > in terms of bad social communication habits and lack of empathy in society it's like a disease that 95% of the people I know of are affected...

and I am afraid we haven't seen the worse of it.

From my experience:

Overthinking something like "meeting girls" will, inevitably, prevent you from meeting girls.

And when you get involved in social science things pertaining to dating, you have lost the race even before you get to the starting gate.

Really, the best thing you can do is hang out with your friends----both men and women. Most relationships occur within these social groups, and through introductions to people who are friends with people in those social groups.

Or even if you don't have a "social group" (I've never had a "social group," per se), you could be introduced to the friend of one of your friends or acquaintances.

There are apps that are more successful than others and apps where you can see profiles without them having liked you and even message them maybe a limited time per day or limited messages depending on the app. I kinda forgot what my favorites were by name.

My boyfriend said "meeting you was so natural" because when he tried dating apps he was scrolling through a bunch of cute faces and you really cant know what the person is gonna be like, its not a natural setting. But if this doesnt bother you, and you are not too compelled to do the real too much, id say try every way you have available and all the apps. I definitely dont suggest, especially in covid times but in life in general, dating people from far locations, me and my bf have met online and are having a lot of trouble meeting because of border restrictions and because we're so far away and I'm terrified and never used to travel. Eventually you have to take the step and meet because real life relationships are much more healthy, easy and fulfilling.

The ratio of males/females on dating apps could be because of risky behaviour is more associated with men and women are more likely to be satisfied to be single and not looking, also because there's the saying "men risk shame, women risk death." I also think dating apps are disgusting to women and they don't like just seeing pictures of strangers. The ratio of males/females in the world is very close in number by statistics.

"“People, especially as they get older, really know their preferences. So they think that they know what they want,” Ury said—and retroactively added quotation marks around the words “know what they want.” “Those are things like ‘I want a redhead who’s over 5’7”,’ or ‘I want a Jewish man who at least has a graduate degree.’” So they log in to a digital marketplace and start narrowing down their options. “They shop for a partner the way that they would shop for a camera or Bluetooth headphones,” she said.

But, Ury went on, there’s a fatal flaw in this logic: No one knows what they want so much as they believe they know what they want. Actual romantic chemistry is volatile and hard to predict; it can crackle between two people with nothing in common and fail to materialize in what looks on paper like a perfect match. Ury often finds herself coaching her clients to broaden their searches and detach themselves from their meticulously crafted “checklists.”

The fact that human-to-human matches are less predictable than consumer-to-good matches is just one problem with the market metaphor; another is that dating is not a one-time transaction. Let’s say you’re on the market for a vacuum cleaner—another endeavor in which you might invest considerable time learning about and weighing your options, in search of the best fit for your needs. You shop around a bit, then you choose one, buy it, and, unless it breaks, that’s your vacuum cleaner for the foreseeable future. You likely will not continue trying out new vacuums, or acquire a second and third as your “non-primary” vacuums. In dating, especially in recent years, the point isn’t always exclusivity, permanence, or even the sort of long-term relationship one might have with a vacuum. With the rise of “hookup culture” and the normalization of polyamory and open relationships, it’s perfectly common for people to seek partnerships that won’t necessarily preclude them from seeking other partnerships, later on or in addition. This makes supply and demand a bit harder to parse. "

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/arch ... th/606982/

"The marketplace metaphor also fails to account for what many daters know intuitively: that being on the market for a long time—or being off the market, and then back on, and then off again—can change how a person interacts with the marketplace. Obviously, this wouldn’t affect a material good in the same way. Families repeatedly moving out of houses, for example, wouldn’t affect the houses’ feelings, but being dumped over and over by a series of girlfriends might change a person’s attitude toward finding a new partner. Basically, ideas about markets that are repurposed from the economy of material goods don’t work so well when applied to sentient beings who have emotions. Or, as Moira Weigel put it, “It’s almost like humans aren’t actually commodities.”

When market logic is applied to the pursuit of a partner and fails, people can start to feel cheated. This can cause bitterness and disillusionment, or worse. “They have a phrase here where they say the odds are good but the goods are odd,” Liz said, because in Alaska on the whole there are already more men than women, and on the apps the disparity is even sharper. She estimates that she gets 10 times as many messages as the average man in her town. “It sort of skews the odds in my favor,” she said. “But, oh my gosh, I’ve also received a lot of abuse.”

Recently, Liz matched with a man on Tinder who invited her over to his house at 11 p.m. When she declined, she said, he called her 83 times later that night, between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. And when she finally answered and asked him to stop, he called her a “b***h” and said he was “teaching her a lesson.” It was scary, but Liz said she wasn’t shocked, as she has had plenty of interactions with men who have “bubbling, latent anger” about the way things are going for them on the dating market. Despite having received 83 phone calls in four hours, Liz was sympathetic toward the man. “At a certain point,” she said, “it becomes exhausting to cast your net over and over and receive so little.”

Read: Tinder’s most notorious men

This violent reaction to failure is also present in conversations about “sexual market value”—a term so popular on Reddit that it is sometimes abbreviated as “SMV”—which usually involve complaints that women are objectively overvaluing themselves in the marketplace and belittling the men they should be trying to date.

The logic is upsetting but clear: The (shaky) foundational idea of capitalism is that the market is unfailingly impartial and correct, and that its mechanisms of supply and demand and value exchange guarantee that everything is fair. It’s a dangerous metaphor to apply to human relationships, because introducing the idea that dating should be “fair” subsequently introduces the idea that there is someone who is responsible when it is unfair. When the market’s logic breaks down, it must mean someone is overriding the laws. And in online spaces populated by heterosexual men, heterosexual women have been charged with the bulk of these crimes.

“The typical clean-cut, well-spoken, hard-working, respectful, male” who makes six figures should be a “magnet for women,” someone asserted recently in a thread posted in the tech-centric forum Hacker News. But instead, the poster claimed, this hypothetical man is actually cursed because the Bay Area has one of the worst “male-female ratios among the single.” The responses are similarly disaffected and analytical, some arguing that the gender ratio doesn’t matter, because women only date tall men who are “high earners,” and they are “much more selective” than men. “This can be verified on practically any dating app with a few hours of data,” one commenter wrote.

Economic metaphors provide the language for conversations on Reddit with titles like “thoughts on what could be done to regulate the dating market,” and for a subreddit named sarcastically “Where Are All The Good Men?” with the stated purpose of “exposing” all the women who have “unreasonable standards” and offer “little to no value themselves.” (On the really extremist end, some suggest that the government should assign girlfriends to any man who wants one.) Which is not at all to say that heterosexual men are the only ones thinking this way: In the 54,000-member subreddit r/FemaleDatingStrategy, the first “principle” listed in its official ideology is “be a high value woman.” The group’s handbook is thousands of words long, and also emphasizes that “as women, we have the responsibility to be ruthless in our evaluation of men.”"

"The idea of the dating market is appealing because a market is something a person can understand and try to manipulate. But fiddling with the inputs—by sending more messages, going on more dates, toggling and re-toggling search parameters, or even moving to a city with a better ratio—isn’t necessarily going to help anybody succeed on that market in a way that’s meaningful to them.

Last year, researchers at Ohio State University examined the link between loneliness and compulsive use of dating apps—interviewing college students who spent above-average time swiping—and found a terrible feedback loop: The lonelier you are, the more doggedly you will seek out a partner, and the more negative outcomes you’re likely to be faced with, and the more alienated from other people you will feel. This happens to men and women in the same way."

TL;SR.

maybe so, but it's not the thing in my case. I'm not overthinking it, just thinking it. I'm not desperate or anything. I think it just comes down to probability rather than science btw. E.G if you have a bag of white and black pearls, 50/50% each. And for some reason whenever you reach for a random pearl you get a black one 95% of the times. It's still "luck" I guess in real life where there's "true randomness" rather than deterministic or scientific rules that can be predicted - so when it comes to meeting girls and dating which is my take on all of this. IMO it's like that movie "Sliding Doors" if you get what I mean.

I agree with your second paragraph in general it's true. I don't have a social group (I think? IDK what is a social group per definition). but I feel like all my friends except maybe one are "superficial" - "Friends" that come over only for favors, and take them for granted don't even say "thank you". "Friends" that don't initiate contact with me however I do with them from time to time and I genuinely care for. "Friends" that when friendship will be tested, I am not sure if they can be counted on. Now it's perfectly fine when we're at a pub or at an open mic or a musical jam or going to the beach fine we're having fun. But other than that "beer drinking" type buddies I don't have any friends that know me and connected with each other on a deeper level and I feel the lack of such a "real" friendship .

If the OP is living in islands of Micronesia then that probably explains his predicament.

I think you may need to look beyond your shores and try and link up online with a Kiwi or Aussie as you sound like a decent fellow with good prospects.

Did you just quote me an entire magazine article? lol... no offense, but I had an extremely hard time reading it as it's written in a tedious style. Anyway I'm really not interested in the science of dating sites.. like % matches, loneliness/dating site use correlation yada yada.. just looking for an alternative, or an alternative app that's not sucky like the big ones (OKCUPID, Tinder, etc.) or maybe I could take an initiative because clearly picking up women in the real world in my cases provides limited results. There are girls out there that I'd love to meet and they'd love to get to know me too. The problem is we don't know each other exist due to me being stuck with the girls I know from my "social group" (I hope I use that word right) which is the 3-4 pubs/clubs I usually go to. There are not much more places nearby, mainly malls and restaurants but those are not the places to get to know new people just to hang out with friends I already know.

I wanna get to know girls based on mutual interests and values. If said girls won't come to the places I go to, I'm quite limited which is why I'd wish there was a way to do that, so as even if we didn't happen to meet on the street or in the club (which is such a super low probability ) we could find each other through online and then setup to meet IRL.

only for a short time I'm not micronesian but since I opened this account 10 years ago and I never updated my info stuff etc. I only frequently posted at the beginning which is why I have a very high post count. But I haven't been posting much in the last couple of years

Where so you live?