Online dating: first impressions

I’ve been “doing” online dating for about six weeks now and feel like I’m ready to make a few initial conclusions. In general I’d say my expectations were pretty low to start with but to my amazement I’ve still managed to be disappointed with the experience. I know some guys seems to have success with it; not me so far. And this starts me off nicely with:

Online dating is game

My initial view was that online dating was somehow easy and that should I not be any good at ‘real’ game then I could always just drop back into online dating and get myself fixed up without too much fuss. Wrong. Online dating is just as hard as bargame or daygame. Fair enough, it’s easier to send a message than walk up to someone in a bar but it’s just a whole different set of problems. I was naïve to think that online game was easy and wouldn’t take much effort. Online game is a distinct subset of game and I think that to get results from it you will need to treat it as such and go through a learning process of many months.

Inefficient

I originally thought that seeing as so many people were doing online dating it would be quite easy to set up dates. Wrong. It takes time and effort and every date you get is a result of countless messages sent and hours spent online. BuzzLightyear told me that from about 200 messages on PoF he got about 8 replies[ED: correction, it’s actually 8 day 2’s.]. I’m using a more upmarket, pay site, and I thought it would be lots better; after all, people have paid to join so they must be more serious. When I was using this site last November in Newcastle I had about 14 women message me in the space of 4 weeks and that was with an embarrsingly Beta profile. It seems that in London it’s a different story. I’m beginning to think my success in Newcastle may have been because in the macho hard-drinking Geordie culture I may have been the only male signed up to the site. In London I get the feeling the site has a lot more men on it. And we all know what happens to a woman’s value when there’s an over abundance of men..

I’ve not carried out empirical double-blind studies here; I don’t have multiple profiles and accounts set up (that will come later). My baseline has been that I’ve had tried two reasonable profiles with reasonable sets of pictures. I’ve been taking a look at some of the mens profiles and generally they are very poor.  All I can say is mine is better than average. My pictures are ok and a reasonable representation of me. No big turn offs (me in Lycra, me standing next to a big car, etc).

I’ve sent plenty of messages and my results are something like this.

Reply rate for unsolicited messages: 1/10 max.

Reply rate where I message a girl who has checked my profile: approx 1/5

Now I thought online dating would be the easy option. Not true. If I think of a good day of daygame then in less than two hours you can talk to at least a dozen girls that you know for sure you’re attracted to, you can get a pretty good idea if they’re attracted to you and if you know your stuff then in a dozen approaches you should be getting a couple of numbers and a couple of instant dates. To my surprise I discover that daygame is hands down more efficient than online dating. This is inspiring to me. From a couple of hours wandering round London I can chat to a dozen or so pretty women, catch them off their guard and maybe get a phone number or two and possibly even have a coffee with one. This beats sitting at home sending messages to less hot women who generally don’t reply.

In terms of quality I’d say the quality of woman you can get out on a date from online dating is extremely poor. There ARE super-hot women on the sites, but you can bet they get at least ten messages a day from other guys, and sit sifting through profiles deciding who to humour. Generally I found that most women who viewed my profile were:

  • Old. A good 50% were a 35 or older.
  • Not hot. Probably a 4 or a 5 out of 10 on the looks department.
  • Probably fat. A lot of women don’t put body shots on their pictures

After number closing the odd 7 and 8 from daygame then you can see why I’m less than enthused.

I’ve been doing online dating for six weeks and I’d have to say I don’t spend a vast amount of time doing it as I find it increasingly tedious. I’ve had two day 2’s with not particularly attractive women, I have two more lined up and I’ve had two flake on me.

Saps your frame

Not only does daygame generate dates with attractive women at a far higher rate than online dating, but online dating actually gradually saps the confidence rather than builds it, which daygame does. The problem with online dating is far too much of the power is in the hands of the female. What do women do with power? What would a toddler do with a revolver? Nobody’s going to be happy at the outcome I’ll tell you that.

After you have spent hours trawling through the “catalogue”, reading the same banal profiles written by the same generic women over and over again, and you’ve spent further hours crafting excellent, careful messages only to get one reply back out of at least a dozen you send, and this is only for a girl that you don’t really a hundred percent fancy that much, then you think…. “this sucks ass”.

Online dating is playing the game on womens terms. Daygame is playing the game on your terms. That’s why it works and it builds you up.

Why does online dating favour women so much? Because they don’t send a fraction of the messages men do and there are an awful lot less of them than men with full paid up memberships. The end result is that men, as they actually want to try and get somewhere with it, end up sending all the messages and doing all the chasing.

Why do women not send many messages? This is because  90% of women on these sites are like this:

  • They are conditioned to regard temselves as something to be chased and wooed.
  • They are not sure what they really want so just browse profiles endlessly looking for reasons to reject men.
  • They live in a state of permanent confusion and uncertainty.
  • They’re tight and whilst they’d happily give a heroin addict a fiver on the tube they can’t bring themselves to part with sixty quid for three months membership. They therefore make the “free” profile to “see what messages they get”, telling themselves they’ll sign up if a really great guy messages them. A woman pay sixty quid to reply to a message? If George Clooney himself message them they still wouldn’t do it.

Saps faith in womanhood

I’d say that for most of my Game journey so far I’ve learned a lot more about women and begun to hate them an awful lot less. I’ve stopped getting annoyed because women are not something I foolishly expected them to be and just accepted them for what they are. Women’s brains are different. They’re fickle. They flake. They are generally pretty retarded. Their brains are full of shit. I know this and I’m okay with this. After all, I want a feminine, sensual, caring woman in my life. Remember: we are the oak, they are the squirrel.

The problem with online dating is it puts the power with the women and the whole thing ends up being fiddly, false and full of time-wasting. Like anything women end up controlling. It’s tedious and it’s frustrating. Why are there thousands of single women over 30? Because their heads are filled with garbage and they waste time, don’t know what they want and think no man is good enough for them. So what happens online? Thousands of single women over 30, endlessly browsing, thinking no man is good enough for them. Sheesh.. they should pass a law where any woman unmarried by 35 has a mandatory hysterectomy. That’d sort things out.

Look, if you study game and self development a bit you come to realise that yes, women are different, but hopefully you accept this and stop resenting them for it. The problem is that if you become involved in a process where you are at the mercy of this ‘difference’ (i.e. stupidity) regularly, e.g. having a woman boss, doing online dating, etc then you will start to resent women for their failings. You might think chimps are okay (they’re not by the way) but I guarantee if they are put in charge of the zoo, not the zookeepers, then everyone will be miserable and covered in shit. Don’t spend your time in that zoo. You won’t like chimps.

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I don’t regret doing it and it’s been an interesting little experiment. It’s one I’m going to continue and try and find my feet a bit more with.

[Edited]

Brilliant article here recommended by Tim discussing the pay-dating site scam.



14 responses to “Online dating: first impressions”

  1. You mentioned the issue of free profiles (namely, that women can’t write back to you unless they’re paying). That may be an even bigger deal than you realize, in which case the pay sites are a huge waste of time compared to the free ones. The following okcupid blog post does a good job of explaining why: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating

    BTW in coastal cities in the USA (and perhaps elsewhere) okcupid is a large and important free dating site. There’s a problem with it however: while below age 27 the women are decent looking as a group, but above that the women turn ghastly pretty quickly. (I’m a few years older than you, so it matters to me.) That’s not unexpected on a dating site, but the effect seems to be even worse on okcupid than on the pay sites (such as match.com) which have a decent number of attractive over 27’s and even mid-30’s. But those women look extremely conventional and boring, and I suspect they are a lot less frisky than the ugly, city-dwelling quasi-sophisticates on okcupid.

  2. Unfortunately, I completely concur with your conclusions on online game. Really, if I’m sitting in front of my computer for that long, I might as well just suit up and go to a club, or go walking outside and day game.

  3. I agree, it saps your self-confidence. Daygame is the way forward.

    1. Dude. I’m going to have to read your blog more. You put some excellent hand selected porn on there plus you must be doing something right as you fuck some majorly hot bitches.
      I’m daygaming a lot in Dec/Jan (if any females are outside what with the snow, etc). Give me a shout if you want to daygame in London.

  4. Wow, a great article from bhodisatta with the double bonus of the okcupid article AND having a laugh at the dickheads replying to the okcupid article.

    It seems that Harry Enfield was right when he did those “women, know your limits” sketches.

    Looks like pounding the streets and hanging out in bars is the way to go. It’s much more satisfying when you start to get it right.

  5. >BuzzLightyear told me that from about 200 messages on PoF he got about 8 replies.

    I think it was 8 day 2s from 200 messages, certainly not 8 replies. BuzzLightyear?

    The two big criticisms you have of online game are valid; lack of hot women and the tedium of it. You can make it all less tedious by sending out / replying to messages via your mobile on breaks / lunch at work. It’s fairly easy to do the following:

    Arrive at work: Send 1 new message
    Toilet break: 1 new message
    Lunch: 1 new message, reply to messages in your inbox
    Fag break: 1 new mesaage
    Get home: 2 new messages, reply to messages

    When done like that it doesn’t seem like so much effort, as your not sat infront of a PC for hours on end. Once you get used to writing openers, you can open a girl in maybe 2 minutes.

    Then there’s the hotness problem. Good looks seem to play a much bigger factor in online game then daygame. How hot you look in your profile pic is a big deal online. I’m not doing online game at the moment, but when I do get back into it I’m going to lose a lot of weight, and get a pro photographer (who does high quality photos which don’t look pro). This should give me a lot more success with the 8s.

    I think for me, maximum potential for online game is fclosing 15 6s/7s a year, or 10 7s/8s a year if I opt for higher quality. That said the best Ive banged from online game is a 7, so I can’t say for sure.

    The main advantage online game has is no AA. It made me realize how well I can actually game when I’m not experiencing crippling AA.

    That said, I am starting to give daygame a good go (going out most days), as I think this will give me the extra confidence I want, and the hotter babes.

  6. Yeah I’ve found that non-online game, specifically going direct is THE most efficient way to game. Just cutting the crap and telling a girl she’s cute from the get go saves an ASS load of time and energy. Opening the woman, sparking initial attraction, showing your dominance, showing your intent, setting a sexual frame – all that gets taken care of within the first minute when you go direct.

    It’s hard to pack all that in with a message online…

  7. I have to agree with you – your online experiences mirror mine, almost exactly. Interestingly, a girl at my place of work started on-line dating at about the same time as me. We had vastly different experiences.

    I’m a pretty decent looking guy and have had a fair amount of success in the bars, have a good job and make quite a bit of money. So, i felt confident i would have some success on-line. The girl at work is cute, probably 6-7 on a 10 scale, but is also a single mom with a teenage boy and approaching her mid 30’s. She’s not nearly as attractive as your HB3 blonde, for reference.

    We would keep each other updated on how the online dating was going. I checked in with her after 3 days. At that point, I had recieved about 5 or 6 contacts, all of them being physically unappealing to the point of being undateable – which is putting it mildly. I had sent out contacts to about 30 or 40 girls and had recieved, maybe two responses. The girls that responded back to my contact were all borderline, in terms of what i would date from a looks perspective i.e. i wasn’t thrilled to be hearing from them. When i spoke to the girl at work she told me that she hates online dating, as it’s way too overwhelming. She just had too many emails and was sick of replying to guys and having to tell them she’s not interested. In 3 days she had received about 90 emails and that’s with her not even trying to contact anyone! I had my account open for 3 months and never received even close to that number.

    She’s a mildly attractive girl in her 30’s and has a child. She’s not what i’d call a catch and yet she was inundated with emails. I thought to myself, if she’s getting that much attention, then what must a really good looking girl be experiencing? It was then that i realized the online thing is futile, unless you’re okay dating girls in the 3-5 looks range.

    As you said, it puts the power in the females hand. And even if you do meet a girl and make a connection, she’s still going to be checking her dating account just to see if “the one” has contacted her. You know, the guy with model looks and a million dollars who just so happens to be looking for a girl with 6 looks and a dumpy ass. There is every incentive for the girl not to commit to any one guy.

    It’s far better to man-up and approach a girl in a bar or on the street during the day. In 5 minutes you can figure out all things it would’ve taken days and weeks of endless and inane emailing to figure out online. Plus, no false photo representations to trip you up when you meet them in person…which i encountered alot, online. Somehow, alot of girls look a point or two higher in photos then they do in real life.

    After 3 months of aggravation, i shut down my account and never looked back. i’m happier for it.

  8. Mate this is excellent. Post it up on the LSS.

  9. Capt. No-Marriage Avatar
    Capt. No-Marriage

    Great post! For me it’s much easier to meet women through the normal course of my day than it is to set aside time to sift through online profiles, but I like that you stepped out and gave it a go.

  10. Dude if you are too busy, would you mind if I reposted this on thelss with a link back to here?

    1. You can if you want…
      although a more interesting question might be “why did the last post mysteriously disappear?”

  11. bhodisatta :
    You can if you want…
    although a more interesting question might be “why did the last post mysteriously disappear?”

    Ok, I will post this on the LSS.

    As to your last post… I am assuming you mean your review of Ross Jefferies seminar. That is still up on the LSS and hasn’t been deleted:

    http://www.thelss.com/forum/index.php?topic=27634.msg217880#msg217880

  12. I just want to say thanks for this article! I had the exact same experience multiple times on that stupid plenty of fish website. I’ve had some nice girls message me but the convo never lead to a meet up. Online game is such a waste of time when in day game you can go talk to a girl you actually like in seconds. Online game really saps your confidence. I hate reading a girls profile and it’s an itinerary list of what her perfect guy is. they have way too much power on these sites. I can convey who am I as a cool guy in person than online. online it’s way harder! forget online dating

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