border said:
I gave the weblink for a free month of Yahoo Personals to a poker buddy that was looking to get into it. He said he posted up a picture/profile and wrote bunch of girls some cordial letters, but none of them ever even responded. Which seems really weird. He's a regular looking guy -- at least more regular looking than me I guess.
I think most of those services are pretty much stacked in favor of the women, and they just pick and chose the "hot guys". In some sense it probably is just an extension of the club/bar scene...
I've done quite a bit of online dating, well, had a few flings and hook ups, two serious girlfriends, multiple failed meetings with girls I've met online. Here's what works for me.
-Don't sit around and wait for women to write you. I've had a few write me out of the blue, but that tends to be abnormal. I think there tends to be enough guys out there just looking for girls that the girls don't HAVE to pursue guys very often.
-Make sure to write some of the girls that have no, or poor quality pictures. Firstly, the really fine girls, with great bodies and beautiful faces and tons of pictures... Well, they get more messages than everyone else. Not sure how many more, but it's definitely more. You'll be lucky if you even get the time of day from her, as she probably has much more on her plate than the girls who have no picture, or pictures where you can't tell too well what they look like. Of course you run the risk of being disappointed with an ugly hildebeast woman, but if you talk to her enough you'll probably get a pretty good feeling for whether or not she looks like the Toxic Avenger. The pictureless profiles are much more likely to be real people as well. This is especially true on adult-encounter-oriented matching sites, which by the way, I've had much, much less success with than "dating" oriented sites. Mostly I just received multitudinous porn ads.
-Spend a lot of time on your profile, not on first messages. Say what you want to say in your profile, it saves a lot of time to be funny, witty, etc in your profile than every single time you write a girl for the first time. When you do write someone, if something witty comes to mind write it, otherwise just write something quick and neat, it's ok to use the same message over and over to different girls. I say this because you likely won't get a response from every girl you write. I'm normally good for about 1 in 7-10 or so. It's not worth wasting too much time going after one person who may be out of town, currently seeing someone, just not interested, doesn't have time, etc.
good luck!
edit: Oh, yeah, I recommend
www.okcupid.com It's free. It used to be called sparkmatch.com, which went defunct a couple of years ago. I hooked up over that thing like mad in college. Now most of the girls on it are too young for me
