I'm not saying that is what you're saying. It just made me recall my experiences.

Now I will say it's not really anyone's fault. Women looking for men probably don't see what the other women on the site's profiles look like. Likewise my profile might be a trope as well. But men do have to go out of their way to stand out to get a decent chance at a connection.

You're right. Everyone is interesting once they open up a little.

The goal though isn't to show how you're different from the herd, it's to show that you're better than the herd, for whichever sub-herd you're signaling membership. That strategy preserves maximum choice.

Something interesting I've noticed, is that trying to break that mold is considered negative. If you look at subreddits that tend to give out advice (typically to men) on dating profiles, they advise people to do things that make their profiles more generic.

I personally avoid dating apps, because I'm not attractive enough (or at least, not photogenic enough, somehow cameras almost always manage to clown me) and I'm not outwardly interesting enough to attract people by reducing myself down to a few pictures and text snippets.

Because you then have established so much of who you are independent of the interactions between yourself and a who-would-be spouse, there's a greater chance that you'll have even more to disagree over.

You're only creating more difficulties for yourself. Beyond the intricacies of a crystallized person, there's a smaller dating pool, it's more difficult to get pregnant, you have a greater difficulty acquiring assets not having another person you're working together through life with.

Yes, those women in their 20s will want to date you, but if you're in your 30s, you're effectively dating a kid. They absolutely do not have the same experiences you will have at that point in time unless you did no personal growth for a decade.

Temporarily. Then you divorce and lose all of those assets. It’s not a gamble I would recommend based on expected financial gains for sure.

And also as I mentioned below but just to make sure it's clear: if you aren't comfortable dating, then you should date as often as you can because it can be genuinely fun and fulfilling and lead to very positive outcomes. If you _are_ comfortable dating and do well with the opposite sex of your preference, but just aren't satisfied with what's out there or it feels forced and unenjoyable, then you _might_ benefit from focusing more on developing yourself rather than focusing on the partner search. It's a cliche but once you're truly in a good place with yourself, you tend to attract to the right people into your life.

This needs to be hugely caveated. If you skip dating for five to ten years, you're gonna jump back in fresh and probably fuck things up terribly the first few times. Too eager, too indifferent, too clingy, too distant, etc... you're gonna be terribly out of practice at it all.

It's a skill, like anything else it takes practice. There's altogether too much BS out there about people being "meant to be" versus people putting in the work on both sides to create something real.

That’s why you should never stop dating, even after you’ve met someone. You never know when you’ll break up and have to find someone else. Best to stay sharp.

These are generally personality traits of someone who is not well adjusted. If you are the type of person who can become professionally and personally (think friendships and any other non-sexual relationship) successful, then you'll probably be fine jumping back into the dating pool even if you've only dabbled casually for a pretty long period of time.

You might also quite reasonably be confident in your professional and personal-friend lives, but be lacking some of that confidence in dating, since you haven't done it for years. These aren't transferable domains for a lot of people.

I was on dating sites and apps for several years before I started having any luck finding much, much less something serious, and every moment of it was valuable practice in an area that didn't come naturally to me at all. My career situation also improved throughout those years, sometimes faster than my dating skills, and I quickly learned that having a nicer car did me 0 favors while I was still uncomfortable on a date in the first place. None of that professional practice applied - was I going to talk about load balancers and HA strategies on the date?

I've had a long string of failures after starting dating (Post covid vaccine) and just felt so incapable of being next to another person.

It's like all this time quarantined as put my dating skills back to zero (not that they were ever good). I feel so broken, like shards of glass that cuts anyone who tries to touch me.

But you have inspired to to once again glue all my broken shards together and try and try again.

Thank you.

I don't know... I'm not sure most women would be comfortable dating a man in his early 30's who'd never had a relationship of any kind...

P.s. I've learn just enough bass to meet my wife !

I go out socialising/partying less now, and am on the PC more (games, projects, etc - most of my interests are on PC). Your advice creates the people in the article!

"Today" is an interesting word choice. This seems like a lingering problem originating in the past, when women were entirely expected to depend on a man to provide, and were NOT expected to have stuff going on in their own life beyond being fertile and useful around the house and of good family background...?

What's the line? "Feminism is for men too"?

Men who just want hookups can keep such women's calendar filled for a while but aren't going to be really doing that providing in the long run.

But in general, the obsession with not being a loser is dangerous for everyone: not everyone will be in the top 10%, and not everyone will attract someone in the top 10%, by simple math, and yet people of both gender's are convinced that it's the other group that has the unreasonable standards...

One school of thought says there are men on dating websites who copy-paste a message saying "hey how you doing?" to every woman they see; and that women are beset by hundreds of copy-pasted messages from men who haven't even read their profile.

This school of thought says, in order to stand out, men should carefully compose a different clever, charming message for each woman they contact, based on things the recipient mentions in their profile and suchlike.

Of course, a man sending 100 copy-pasted messages and a man sending 5 high-quality messages might be expending the same amount of effort in total but the latter is demonstrating greater effort per woman

In this context, kogepathic means more men should adopt the strategy of carefully composing messages.

The takeaway for me is profile pictures, physical appearance and class/status signifiers (vacations, hobbies, nice things in/around the picture) were all that mattered and if someone was sold on that all you really had to do was not get in your own way by saying something stupid.

To use a property analogy: if I am not the highest offer on a house, I probably won't get it. Doesn't matter if I have a trust fund or work for minimum wage (effort put into the offer) my offer wasn't accepted.

Similarly if I'm the seller, I can decide "No, actually I don't want to sell my house to BlackRock, I'd rather sell it to this young family" and that's entirely my choice. This choice might leave money on the table, but at least I get the warm fuzzy feels inside for doing what I think is best.

What you describe sounds like you want some kind of "thank you for putting in some effort" but you decide the amount of effort to invest, the other party owes you nothing.

It's hard to say which is worse: the messages that say that they haven't put any thought into you at all, or the messages that say they have exactly one thought about you -- and everybody else.

Everybody gets poor payoff percentages. You play if you think the game is worth the candle.

While if a guy wants a proper conversation... get lucky punk?

I'm told it's different in other places but I suspect that has more to do with the men than the women.

You're saying the "it's not hard" situation is similarly demoralizing to what women face? Sure I guess.

But BitwiseFool was describing a situation where it's extremely hard to get a reply, and that is much more demoralizing because there's no easy fix.

My suspicion is that I worked to make myself interesting, and worth conversing with. And I see a lot of comments here that betray a deep distrust of women, with a ton of stereotyping and lack of empathy. I hear tons of complaints from women about men's profiles, and it never has to do with looks or money.

I've sometimes thought of opening a dating profile consultancy. I may be completely off base, but I believe that in a lot of cases, men can do better without changing jobs or their appearance. And my first piece of free advice is that if you're blaming women, women aren't going to like you.

In what sort of ways are you “ interesting”? Genuinely curious. FWIW most advice I’ve seen regarding advice for dating profiles (particularly for guys) involves removing anything that might signify personality and to make it as formulaic as possible. Your pictures all have to be the right things, the profile description can’t be too short or too long, and can only say certain things, etc. I think on these sort of apps it’s almost seen as positive to be as basic as possible. Even I find myself suspicious of profiles that say to much or try to stand out now.

The other piece of advice I see almost always has to do with quality of pictures, which is understandable, but let’s be real, if I had the kind of life where I was happy all the time, doing cool things and taking pictures with friends, I probably wouldn’t need to be on this app ;)

So many women I've met complain that they start the date with "so tell me about yourself" and get, "uh I dunno. I like to play video games." (Not that there's anything wrong with video games but at least have some stories to tell. Maybe she'll also play. Jackpot. Unless you start telling her she's not a real games.)

I do lots of things. I act, i juggle, i run marathons. The tricky part is phrasing it in a way that doesn't come off as "I'm too cool an expect you to shut up and listen."

That is of course just what works for me, and for the kind of women I like. (Talking about dating sites is a really easy topic of conversation on a first date, so I hear a lot.)

If they're telling you to be dull, maybe that works for other men with other women. But to me it sounds like a recipe for a boring date.

I try to go in with the attitude that if we do nothing more than spend a few minutes chatting nicely over coffee, it will have been fun and worth my time. That kind of attitude seems best for making myself seem worthwhile and fun, so that she wants more.

If someone told you they were having a hard time buying a house and all their offers were silently rejected replying "The sellers owe you nothing" might be true, but it is beside the point.

No, that's an aberration perpetrated by software. The same problem has manifested in interviewing. Maybe you're thinking of "nobody owes you sex" instead?

If you greet a person in real life or over a call and they intentionally ignore you, they are being rude. Obviously, if you're being rude first, that's different. They can say "hey" back, or "sorry, I'm not interested" or "kind of busy right now, can we pick this up later?" There are plenty of options.

I understand that the way these apps are set up, responding like this isn't a winning strategy. Despite what the Internet would have you believe, there is a minimum social bar when there's a human on the other end of a comm channel.

(Looking for hookups on apps is, I imagine, an entirely different ballgame, and I have no idea what works or doesn't work there.)

Now? I just gave up. I have better things to do then spend hundreds of hours without a single conversation going anywhere. Online dating is a useless black hole.

Towards the end of my time on OkCupid (where I met my wife!), I wanted to only compose five messages per day. I did this to reduce my time on the platform. (Online dating services are masters of dark patterns and addicting behaviors.) However, even though those messages were short, since they were bespoke to the profiles I was looking at, those messages took time to write.

I found myself in this predicament where I burned too much time looking at profiles of attractive women with bland (to me) profiles. So, I thought "what if I hid the photos and focused on profiles I thought were interesting?"

Three things happened when I did that:

1. Writing short, but targeted, messages became a LOT easier because I was focusing on connecting with people I probably wanted to spend more time with,

2. Since I never "saw" who I was messaging when I wrote those messages, me never getting a response from them hurt way less (since I never met them to begin with!), and

3. When I un-hid the photos of the women who responded to me, _they were still attractive!_ As it happens, I learned that I'm attracted to smart, pretty women with personalities.

I suppose this won't work for people who want to do the nasty with as many hot people as they can find. There were, like men, smart, attractive women who didn't know how to craft an online dating profile and got filtered out from this approach.

What I do know is that my response and date rate went WAY up after hiding photos and responding to interesting profiles, and my mental health towards online dating improved significantly.

The "I want the total package" unrealistic-expectations person is prominent in both genders, even if "no fat chicks" t-shirts aren't as popular as they once were. The slob-with-hot-wife TV trope probably hasn't helped men's expectations here.

The "I'm gonna send a thousand dick pics and see who is down for a hookup" behavior, on the other hand, seems predominantly male-dominated. Even the women looking for hookups don't operate like that (you could debate chicken-and-egg here, around how they don't ever have to with all the dudes throwing themselves at them, but I'm not too interested in that). Those men result in a worse experience for BOTH women and men, but in a more acute fashion for the women on the receiving end of the creepiness than for the men who just have to try harder to manage to stand out above the background bullshit level.

Someone at Match Group must have worked out that having these users boosts the bottom line more than it reduces engagement and retention. Maybe these are the guys paying for Premium Platinum with extra InMails each day. (Oops wrong platform.)

So the two extremes are basically having sex with rando internet people and getting ultra-picky.