Online Dating Hopes, Fears, and Frustrations

[DatingScribe]

I’m wondering about other people’s online dating experiences. Let’s compare answers to the following 5 questions.

1. What is your gender?
2. How long have you been participating in online dating?
3. What are you trying to accomplish with online dating exactly? What is your desired outcome?
4. What are your top 3 biggest frustrations when it comes to online dating?
5. What is your biggest fear when it comes to online dating?
6. If you could think about 1 obstacle that if removed from your way would make the biggest impact to your success dating online, what would that 1 thing be?

For me it goes like this:

1. Male
2. 3 years
3. LTR
4. fakes/liars, shallowness, everyone’s profile sounds alike
5. someone misrepresenting themselves
6. the stigma associated with it

What are your answers?

[Saishuu]

1)Male
2)Not long (weeks not months)
3)Make friends (male or female) to chat to because of 4)
4)Girls are boring, too wimpy to meet, or too busy being hounded.
5)Fear I'll spend to much time doing it.
6)Arranging real life meets.

I think online dating sucks.

[forever]

My experience has been most are not emotionally available or they are desperate to meet someone anyone. The only people benefiting from on line dating are the ones who collect your money.

[SteveJay]

1. Male
2. About a year
3. Honestly? Just for fun...casual sex. No commitments
4. Getting women to meet in person, thats it
5. Nothing really - even a bad experience I can make into a funny story
6. See number four.

I’ve been to a lot of the adult dating sites. I’ve been using sexinyourcity and it’s pretty cool. Met up with a few girls. Some were nuts. Others I had a lot of fun with. Seems to take some patience but for me has been worth it. What about you guys? I can’t be the only one?

[Beagle]

The problem with online dating is that you know about people EXACTLY what they want you to know. I have never met anyone online, but I'm a counselor and I work with people who have been through that situation. If you know someone personally, you at least know a little bit about them. I've known people who hooked up with some very dangerous characters without knowing it. The internet is ultimately anonymous. It's fairly easy to tell people what they want to hear and get them interested, especially if someone has ulterior motives. I know the old saying about not judging a book by it's cover; but in reality you can glean quite a bit of information from observing someone casually, especially their demeanor. I'm sure online dating works sometimes. I think it fails more times than it works. Once, I saw a commercial for eHarmony where they were bragging about how many people had signed up and later how many marriages has been made through eHarmony. My statistics brain kicked in and I did the division. Fewer than 1/2 of one percent of the people who signed up with eharmony have married through that medium. I think time is better spent in making your life better so that you can attract the person you ultimately hope to be with.

[Prince_Alarming]

1. Male

2. On-and-off... five years now maybe.

3. Meeting someone offline... i.e. not just talking to them over the F'ing internet. I'm great at conversing with women (I've honestly not had a problem courting them, dating them, etc.) I'm just awful at meeting them and finding decent ones single in the real world. I'm just not Mr. Know Everybody... not to mention that I'm new to the city I live in.

4. The almost complete and utter lack of enthusiasm from the opposite sex. I'm used to (in the real world) meeting a woman and having them intensely interested with me... we go out, we mesh as people, they let their interest be known, etc. Online, women don't respond to me in the same way, at all. I feel like the best looking guy in the world when I meet an interested girl offline, but feel like I'm "meh" to dog-ugly when talking to ladies on-line.

5. No fears, its just so very frustrating a futile when you message a girl who seems 3x as compatible with you as your last three girlfriends who were madly in love with, and you and get nothing or marginal responses back.

6. If there was a dating site where women HAD to do all the choosing. They do in real life (men do the ASKING, but women do the CHOOSING)... seriously, a place where men couldn't even view ladies profiles (goodbye, attention whores) and women were forced to do what they do in reality. Technology is created by those in the know, yet this simple truth has been overlooked.