7 ms·

For a certain subset (perhaps minority) of the population, these sites are nothing but a bait-and-switch. And I think dating sites attract many of us (as I am i

For a certain subset (perhaps minority) of the population, these sites are nothing but a bait-and-switch. And I think dating sites attract many of us (as I am indeed a member of this subset.) I'm talking about people who lack the pre-requisites women require for mate selection which if not fulfilled, no other characteristics typically matter. Firstly - height - if you are significantly below the national average, you will find obtaining a partner extremely difficult. I am 2 sigma below the average in my country (5'5", UK). Oh dear. I think those who are not height-impaired find it hard to believe how much of a factor this is, but it really, really, really is. If you lack a certain kind of (I venture to suggest, actually somewhat unpleasant, cocky) confidence, especially good looks or social standing, then your odds drop even more significantly. From what I have read, the general experience of dating sites is that men get very few replies, and women are inundated, so the task for a man is to do anything to stand out, and the task for women is to filter. I think this exaggerates the already heavily filtering criteria listed above for those like myself. However, dating sites give people like me hope, the idea that somehow we might get around this problem, somehow say the right thing or after enough messages sent we might find somebody. I wonder how many people like me fund these sites (OK Cupid have a blog with lots of stats, perhaps some data to work with there.) I say 'from what I have read', as I have sent > ~150 messages with no reply whatsoever. After losing vast amounts of weight, optimising profile, following advice, etc. Apologies for the rantishness/possibly OT-ness of this post, but obv. quite a personal issue for me. UPDATE: Amusing news piece on short men dating - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LwRe6tyqY8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LwRe6tyqY8

dusing 14y ago
You should really try a pay site, OKC in my experience has just been for hookups. People are way more judgemental there. Also I would think a dating site where you could search for shorter girls would be helpful than real life, no?
- mykosmos 14y ago
  The thing is... even short girls want tall guys... =)
  - singular 14y ago
    I remember seeing this thing on TV where people with disabilities attempted to find dates, and a ~ 3' woman who featured on it said she preferred men >= 6'. QED.
- singular 14y ago
  Have tried many, paid/non-paid, with same outcome. And shorter women hilariously still generally prefer >= av. height men. It seems to be a major genetic thing. I shouldn't gonzo myself into this too much, as I've decided to give up on relationships altogether, so this isn't about me finding some site that'll work (not feasible IMHO, since real life is equally impossible), but rather whether people like me are being baited-and-switched much by these sites...
  - Retric 14y ago
    That's true in both online and offline dating. My suggestion if you want a far easier time hooking up is to simply get into very good shape. Height, weight, completion, and dress are all vary important in first impressions. But surprisingly weight / fitness is by far the most important.
    - singular 14y ago
      I would be more than willing to do that, if I believed it was as much of a factor as height/looks/cocky confidence. I actually experimented with this, lost > 55lb in weight, worked really hard, and it made no difference. None. As you can imagine, motivation to do these things is not great these days.
      - Retric 14y ago
        If losing that much weight made no difference your either still significantly over weight, gained no mussel mass, aiming rather high, or something else is wrong. My honest suggestion is to remove you expectations. Spend a month responding to every profile until you start getting responses you don't have to keep going after that but you need a little signal to start. Then do some A/B testing to see what helps vs. hurts your response rate. PS: Think of your profile like a resume you get ~5 seconds to catch someones interest.
        singular 14y ago
        I looked a lot better, but there was definitely still flab. You exclude the possibility that other factors outweighed (no pun intended) the weight issue? We're talking > 55lb, so it obviously had a major visual impact. I don't believe it should have had no impact. Maybe minor, but for it to make no difference says something about other factors I think. when I was young I wasn't overweight at all, and had exactly the same experience. I agree that the profile is like that. You have very little time to catch somebody's attention.
- mistercow 14y ago
  >You should really try a pay site, OKC in my experience has just been for hookups. I guess it would be that way if you just looked at people's profile pics and didn't bother with answering match questions, comparing scores, and reading profiles (which is how a frightening number of people seem to use it). If you actually use the tools it provides, you may find you have better luck. That said, I guess I don't have much of sample size to work with since I've only dated one person I met on OKC. Still, that's because we're getting married, so take that for what it's worth.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I know more people in my age/location cohort who got married due to OKC (far and away #1) or Craigslist (#2) or IRC (dear god) or Erowid than Match.com+eHarm+etc. combined. I've never even met a Plenty of Fish user.
- Cyranix 14y ago
  I disagree utterly. There's a significant number of people looking for real relationships on OKC -- you just need to find out whether the other person is on the same page as you ASAP (profile, messages, first few dates). Thanks to OKC I went on several first dates, which led to two exclusive relationships (at different times, of course!), one of which resulted in my marriage. I also found that OKC gives greater flexibility in self-expression and how you discover others. Online dating is a bit of a numbers game, so I feel that it's poor advice to steer someone away from a dating pool. Maybe adding a pay site to one's online dating efforts (at least for a trial period) would be a better strategy.
  - singular 14y ago
    May I ask how tall you are? I am not trying to be facetious, just curious. I agree that it's a numbers game, assuming you are at least vaguely viable.
    - Cyranix 14y ago
      Just under 5'9", which I suppose is a fairly average height. Re: vaguely viable, I'd say my main prima facie drawback is very thin hair on top. There's no doubt in my mind that shorter men have a tougher time, but I don't think it's limited to online dating. One thing I've (anecdotally) seen help shorter men is a muscular physique, but I agree that a short man will likely have a higher ratio of first dates to relationships. It's not like a successful relationship is out of the question, but the process of attaining it can be longer and more emotionally taxing.
jacques_chester 14y ago
The first rule of online dating: Nobody owes you anything. If you forget that, you're destined to wind up on that niceguysofokc site.
- singular 14y ago
  I don't think anybody owes me anything, sure, of course. Personally, I took the attitude of optimising profile, contact endless women using advice from those successful on the site to elicit replies, play the numbers game. My point is that there are a subset of us who have such low odds of response that it'd be better not to be on there at all. I wonder how many of us fund these sites... I have heard of seedier sites in the past using false profiles to reply to people, perhaps keeping those such as myself strung along...
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    I've done all that stuff too. It sucks for me because the pool is pretty modest hereabouts. I haven't sent ~150 unanswered messages, for example, because there aren't 150 women I'd message in Perth. When I stopped taking it seriously, my results improved. Periodically I get bored and close my account for a few months. When I come back I rewrite my profile. It's fun. Very liberating. Try it. (There's also the time-honoured tactic of spawn camping -- on OKC you can sort profiles by newness).
    - singular 14y ago
      Yeah, the thing is, after that many messages sent, done thick-skinnedly, in a big pool, with a friend who also is short, though slightly taller (5'7"), with him doing significantly better, and after lots of previous attempts AND lots of attempts in real life, I am at the end of my tether with the inevitable emotional pain involved. There has to come a time when you think the cost of an activity exceeds any possible benefit, and the EV of this is starting to look pretty bad.
      - jacques_chester 14y ago
TinyBig 14y ago
"From what I have read, the general experience of dating sites is that men get very few replies, and women are inundated, so the task for a man is to do anything to stand out, and the task for women is to filter." How is this different from regular/non-online dating?
- singular 14y ago
  It's not, just exaggerated, as facing 100 emails in your inbox vs. some guy face-to-face is a different proposition I think. Perhaps a distillation of my point is - 'do dating sites give false hope to undateable people?' I'd love to see the data on people who get few/no replies, and what % of income they produce. It'll differ between ad-supported + paid I expect too.
toumhi 14y ago
You're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. You believe you lack pre-requisites women require. Truth is, there are loads of short guys, ugly guys or otherwise challenged guys that get what they want out of dating, whether it's lots of random sleeping around, or a committed relationship, and everything in between. Please don't talk about giving up on relationships. Online dating might actually not be the best choice for you. It creates the illusion of control and comfort from your living room. As you saw, it's tough work and you don't really learn much from it, not as much as you could learn if you spent the same amount of time outside meeting women. Try to meet women in your day-to-day activities. Join classes. Get active. Go to bars and parties. I don't know where you're coming from, but if you're shy and lack confidence, make a point to talk to other people, and that includes attractive women. Also, you need to have a mindset of abundance, not of scarcity. There are plenty of women that'd like to be with you, if you go out to meet them and show them your true self and get your act together. You'll get vastly better over time. But it does take time, so don't give up after 1 week :-)
- mykosmos 14y ago
  Great post. Being a short yet confident man is way much more appealing to a woman than to be the 6' average joe.
  - singular 14y ago
    Citation required? Women might say this, but in my experience it's simply not true. Like the whole 'love yourself so others can love you' line. Which is just B.S. in my experience. Having said that, I agree confidence makes a huge difference. However, the kind of confidence women like is in my opinion an unpleasant cocky kind. And should I attempt to completely change who I am, become somebody I dislike just to fulfil that? Would that lead to a relationship that would work? I don't even think it's feasible to be honest.
    - asdfologist 14y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Strauss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Strauss
huhtenberg 14y ago
Confidence is pretty much the only factor. If you don't have it, nothing else matters. If you do, everything else is just an icing on the cake. Took me a while to realize this, but that's an ultimate truth :)
- colmvp 14y ago
  "Confidence is pretty much the only factor." Not really. It's not like a woman is going to throw out all her requirements (e.g. has to be equal height or taller) just because the guy is confident.
- singular 14y ago
  Assuming you're >= av. height, and of reasonable relative social standing... For a tall person height isn't a factor at all. They could say that as height isn't a problem for them.
victorhn 14y ago
Have you ever tried to go for foreign girls? I don't speak from personal experience here, but i have read that girls overseas don't have that big checklist of requirements and still go for provider types. I would try in Eastern Europe or Latin America.
return0 14y ago
It's kind of frightening how fiercely modern (western) humans seek to turn their pairing ritual to a rigid, darwinian free market. Dating sites want to become the equivalent of online trading for the dating market, but they fail miserably due to the heavy assymetries in dating culture (traditional male-hunter role, competition among males etc.) - cultural norms that are very old and yet being upheld even after decades of feminism). It's also odd how people tend to link their dating success to their personal worth.
ttcbj 14y ago
I had a very similar attitude to yours about 6 years ago. I sympathize with your frustration. Although I am not denying that it may be harder for you to find someone, I think your current attitude/self-perspective is not helpful to you. I highly recommend this book, in absolute seriousness: <http://www.amazon.com/Self-Esteem-Cognitive-Techniques-Assessing-Maintaining/dp/1572241985/ref=sr_1_1&#62 http://www.amazon.com/Self-Esteem-Cognitive-Techniques-Asses...; It was a real revelation to me. Don't dismiss it as psychobabble-nonsense just yet, buy it for a friday night when you are dateless, then honestly consider what it has to say. If nothing else, it will make you happier while you continue to have limited success dating. Also, when you find a woman who will look past the height thing, you want to be in a healthy place to actually make the relationship work from there. For what its worth, I married to a truly wonderful, brilliant and amazing woman a few years ago. The person I was before reading that book would not have gotten past the first date with her, and certainly wouldn't have been a good partner in a relationship.
- singular 14y ago
  Thanks, appreciate your candour + glad to hear things worked out for you. I'm always open to different perspectives on things. I will check out the book.
mkr-hn 14y ago
Do you write like this in messages to women?
- singular 14y ago
  What, in a somewhat geeky analytical way? No, I don't :-)
aswanson 14y ago
Height is a relative thing though. I used to club with a good friend of mine, about 6'8". I'm 6'2". Females used to flock to him when we hit clubs; all he had to do was walk in. I had to put up a lot of effort just to get a "hello". I grew bitter and mentally bashed females for a long time for being so shallow; that mentality reinforces itself and destroys dating prospects. I missed out on a lot of opportunities because of that. On the dating front, optimism always trumps pessimism. Do the math, there statistically has to be someone who would want you in a city of 7m.
geuis 14y ago
Found your photo on your Twitter profile. You're a decent looking guy! I have no advice to give, as I'm currently single too. I'm an overweight fellow in San Francisco but have had modest success in meeting women in the last few years. Haven't met anyone that threw a spark though. I mainly use okcupid when looking around. Point is mainly about confidence I think. When I'm exuding confidence (feeling like a million bucks) I notice women in the street actually smile at me sometimes. When I'm down on myself (more often) that never happens. Good luck to you.
- singular 14y ago
  Thanks, that's kind! I am overweight right now too, that photo was when I was lighter (recently) - I lost loads, then gained again partly due to anti-depressants, partly due to feeling there was no point in keeping it off. I think confidence is a big part, but height is huge. And I don't think I could exude the kind of cockiness that might lead to success, as I am naturally a skeptical person, and a depressive as well which makes that hard anyway.
  - thoughtcriminal 14y ago
    My advice is to just be the absolute maximum you. No one else in the universe has your unique blend of qualities. Be confident being who you are, because your good at that, aren't you?
Mz 14y ago
I hesitate to post this because I am not interested in being hit on and I am not interested in adding to the pile on of people criticizing you. But I spent all this time writing the damn thing. Sigh. So here it is, fwiw: You know, I have gotten a crapload of rejection and hostility in recent years, not in a dating context but in another social context. So I am very familiar with how hard it is to remain open and do the zen thing and say "Those 5000 other catastrophes don't matter. This is a new person and what they think has nothing to do with what all those other people thought." But it sounds to me like that's a big part of your problem. In fact, you remind me of another man I used to know. He was average height (slightly taller than me even) and he was convinced that "being too short" was part of why he had such a hard time getting a girlfriend. I had the worst crush on him (and my ex husband was shorter than me and he knew it) but he would not give me the time of day. He was toxic and mysogynistic and harped incessantly on how badly women had treated him. He did so in a manner that was incredibly ugly and blaming, like "all women are bitches" type attitude. To me personally, he was rude, hurtful, and talked incessantly in front of me about what he found attractive in a woman and did so in a manner that just screamed "Gee, Michele, you are such a fat ugly cow you ought to just have your vagina removed since it will never see action again". I really liked him and I understood why he was so bitter, so I tried to get him to talk to me anyway. At some point he got irritable with me and basically told me I was wasting his time and that he would be willing to talk to me if he thought it might go somewhere. For me, that was the final straw. I gave up. I still had the worst crush on him but concluded that if he was the last man on earth, I would get a girlfriend. You can't change your height. Yes, for many women, your height is a dealbreaker upfront -- just like for many men, a woman's age, weight or bra size is a dealbreaker upfront. Both genders can be equally shallow and asinine. The trick is to find some way to set aside your hurt and anger from previous interactions and not hang that crap on every new person you meet. As for dating sites, I don't use them. But then I jokingly say "dating is against my utter lack of religion" generally, whether online or off. It is not my cup of tea. I don't have a particularly high opinion of the dating paradigm to begin with. It strikes me as a meat market approach. I think it is an especially poor fit for folks who won't "measure up" to whatever arbitrary norms most people are sorting by. I know I don't fit that mold either. And I won't accept being treated shabbily because of it. Men who think I am too old or too fat or too flat chested aren't the sort of men I want standing next to my fire anyway. Frankly, they aren't worthy.
nateweiss 14y ago
I can sympathize. I dated online for a time, and the stated-height-requirement thing used to drive me either totally, totally nuts or into extended moments of depression, depending on the day. I am not very short, but I am under average, and I was really blown away by the sheer number of women whose stated requirements ruled me out on the basis of height alone. I think the percentage of women who actually write that kind of thing down might really surprise folks who haven't seen it themselves. This stuff can you depressed real fast (the classic lyric "pretty women out walkin' with gorillas down my street" comes to mind), and not just with respect to dating or women. For instance, wall street or other "money" types are very frequently quite tall, and very seldom short. Not saying that there aren't exceptions, but when you are sitting around thinking about your height it sure can be annoying! :) (Then again, I bet the fact that sooo many men overtly state that they are looking for someone up to but no older than their own age probably amazes/dumbfounds/exasperates the ladies just as much.) At the time, I eventually realized that the main thing that the women were saying was that they wanted a man taller than their own height--not necessarily taller than other men. (There were a lot of descriptions in their profiles like "must be taller than I am in heels", which always seemed like a clever way to make the "requirement" sound sexy btw.) Anyway, the point is that there are plenty of short girls around, and I went out of dates with a number of very attractive ladies who were shorter than I. Nothing in particular came of it, but I generally had a good time and never felt like I had wasted an evening. A friend of mine has done lots of research in an academic capacity in this area (using source data from dating sites, speed dating services, etc), and one thing that has been proven rather definitively as far as he is concerned is that ladies behave differently when they are in a "competitive" mating situation such as a speed dating event, bar/club, etc. All the things they say they want in a man (stable, nice, smart, funny) go out the window and they just go for whoever is "hottest". Dating sites appear to trigger many of the same behaviors. But if you look at who they end up with long-term, it's a whole different set of factors that matter (again, not necessarily what they say to themselves or others). I can't provide any source links for this research, and I am massively paraphrasing from memory, but these are, I think, legit gists of some pretty legit findings unless my memory is doing me a terrible disservice today. As the risk of offending USA-born females who might be reading, I would suggest perhaps trying to focus on ladies from other lands, as from my (all caveats about small sample size noted but notwithstanding) personal experience, the literal-minded "list of requirements" is somewhat of an American-girl-next-door phenomenon. My girl is from one of the lands down under and is the find of the century (and physically well out of what I had perceived to be my league). We are delightfully married in a "soul-mate" style and couldn't be happier. I spend many a moment disbelieving my own luck. FWIW, she is just about the exact same height as I am. [Edit: I missed that you're from the UK so the USA-biased part of my post here is questionable at best. Sorry!] I mention my wonderful wife not to brag, hopefully, but just to point out there are so many exceptions to whatever evolutionary/social programming we have (so much noise amongst the signals) that the rules only matter in the aggregate, not to the individual. At least that's my experience, one shortish geek to another. :) My armchair analysis of my friend's papers, my own experience, and other reading is that both men and women have an elaborate system of truths and deceptions in our heads about what we are looking for in a mate. Many women have this annoying height thing and a bunch of stuff about income (sometimes masked, sometimes not). Many men have similar stuff about age, measurements, etc. Both are, I believe, about trading up genetically--so that our imagined offspring will have a genetic advantage in successive generations. But those are "10,000 foot view" ways of initially identifying potential mates when faced with a big group of them (like "all the guys on this site" or "all the chicks in this city"). On a one-on-one level though, it's a whole different story--a whole different set of things can trigger that "my genese might be able to trade up here" response. And meanwhile, our conscious brains are doing their own thing--getting intrigued, falling in love, etc--which are using a much more sophisticated type of modeling than the crude ">= meanHeight" gating that we think it might be from looking at the "hard" evidence. Anyway, the main reason I wanted to post a response here was to respond that: 1)Yes, yes, a thousand times yes the "height thing" is a real thing. It feels and appears to be a glass ceiling. 2) It is really frustrating, so frustrating that it's tempting to write the whole enterprise off as the realm of the tanned and shallow. 3) But, as demonstrable as the rules appear to be--the evidence right in front of you--they are illusory and don't actually apply. That's my experience anyway.
eru 14y ago
I am about your height, and did not find it too hard to find dates in Britain. (Oh, and after moving to Singapore, I can tell you it's now actually harder to avoid the attention of women than to get them.)
- colmvp 14y ago
  Depends on your race. White Males have no trouble everywhere. Asian males on the other hand...
  - eru 14y ago
    > White Males have no trouble everywhere. They do where white males are abundant.

dusing 14y ago

You should really try a pay site, OKC in my experience has just been for hookups. People are way more judgemental there. Also I would think a dating site where you could search for shorter girls would be helpful than real life, no?

mykosmos 14y ago
The thing is... even short girls want tall guys... =)
- singular 14y ago
  I remember seeing this thing on TV where people with disabilities attempted to find dates, and a ~ 3' woman who featured on it said she preferred men >= 6'. QED.
singular 14y ago
Have tried many, paid/non-paid, with same outcome. And shorter women hilariously still generally prefer >= av. height men. It seems to be a major genetic thing. I shouldn't gonzo myself into this too much, as I've decided to give up on relationships altogether, so this isn't about me finding some site that'll work (not feasible IMHO, since real life is equally impossible), but rather whether people like me are being baited-and-switched much by these sites...
- Retric 14y ago
  That's true in both online and offline dating. My suggestion if you want a far easier time hooking up is to simply get into very good shape. Height, weight, completion, and dress are all vary important in first impressions. But surprisingly weight / fitness is by far the most important.
  - singular 14y ago
    I would be more than willing to do that, if I believed it was as much of a factor as height/looks/cocky confidence. I actually experimented with this, lost > 55lb in weight, worked really hard, and it made no difference. None. As you can imagine, motivation to do these things is not great these days.
    - Retric 14y ago
      If losing that much weight made no difference your either still significantly over weight, gained no mussel mass, aiming rather high, or something else is wrong. My honest suggestion is to remove you expectations. Spend a month responding to every profile until you start getting responses you don't have to keep going after that but you need a little signal to start. Then do some A/B testing to see what helps vs. hurts your response rate. PS: Think of your profile like a resume you get ~5 seconds to catch someones interest.
      - singular 14y ago
        I looked a lot better, but there was definitely still flab. You exclude the possibility that other factors outweighed (no pun intended) the weight issue? We're talking > 55lb, so it obviously had a major visual impact. I don't believe it should have had no impact. Maybe minor, but for it to make no difference says something about other factors I think. when I was young I wasn't overweight at all, and had exactly the same experience. I agree that the profile is like that. You have very little time to catch somebody's attention.
mistercow 14y ago
>You should really try a pay site, OKC in my experience has just been for hookups. I guess it would be that way if you just looked at people's profile pics and didn't bother with answering match questions, comparing scores, and reading profiles (which is how a frightening number of people seem to use it). If you actually use the tools it provides, you may find you have better luck. That said, I guess I don't have much of sample size to work with since I've only dated one person I met on OKC. Still, that's because we're getting married, so take that for what it's worth.
- rdl 14y ago
  I know more people in my age/location cohort who got married due to OKC (far and away #1) or Craigslist (#2) or IRC (dear god) or Erowid than Match.com+eHarm+etc. combined. I've never even met a Plenty of Fish user.
Cyranix 14y ago
I disagree utterly. There's a significant number of people looking for real relationships on OKC -- you just need to find out whether the other person is on the same page as you ASAP (profile, messages, first few dates). Thanks to OKC I went on several first dates, which led to two exclusive relationships (at different times, of course!), one of which resulted in my marriage. I also found that OKC gives greater flexibility in self-expression and how you discover others. Online dating is a bit of a numbers game, so I feel that it's poor advice to steer someone away from a dating pool. Maybe adding a pay site to one's online dating efforts (at least for a trial period) would be a better strategy.
- singular 14y ago
  May I ask how tall you are? I am not trying to be facetious, just curious. I agree that it's a numbers game, assuming you are at least vaguely viable.
  - Cyranix 14y ago
    Just under 5'9", which I suppose is a fairly average height. Re: vaguely viable, I'd say my main prima facie drawback is very thin hair on top. There's no doubt in my mind that shorter men have a tougher time, but I don't think it's limited to online dating. One thing I've (anecdotally) seen help shorter men is a muscular physique, but I agree that a short man will likely have a higher ratio of first dates to relationships. It's not like a successful relationship is out of the question, but the process of attaining it can be longer and more emotionally taxing.

jacques_chester 14y ago

The first rule of online dating: Nobody owes you anything. If you forget that, you're destined to wind up on that niceguysofokc site.

singular 14y ago
I don't think anybody owes me anything, sure, of course. Personally, I took the attitude of optimising profile, contact endless women using advice from those successful on the site to elicit replies, play the numbers game. My point is that there are a subset of us who have such low odds of response that it'd be better not to be on there at all. I wonder how many of us fund these sites... I have heard of seedier sites in the past using false profiles to reply to people, perhaps keeping those such as myself strung along...
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  I've done all that stuff too. It sucks for me because the pool is pretty modest hereabouts. I haven't sent ~150 unanswered messages, for example, because there aren't 150 women I'd message in Perth. When I stopped taking it seriously, my results improved. Periodically I get bored and close my account for a few months. When I come back I rewrite my profile. It's fun. Very liberating. Try it. (There's also the time-honoured tactic of spawn camping -- on OKC you can sort profiles by newness).
  - singular 14y ago
    Yeah, the thing is, after that many messages sent, done thick-skinnedly, in a big pool, with a friend who also is short, though slightly taller (5'7"), with him doing significantly better, and after lots of previous attempts AND lots of attempts in real life, I am at the end of my tether with the inevitable emotional pain involved. There has to come a time when you think the cost of an activity exceeds any possible benefit, and the EV of this is starting to look pretty bad.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago

TinyBig 14y ago

"From what I have read, the general experience of dating sites is that men get very few replies, and women are inundated, so the task for a man is to do anything to stand out, and the task for women is to filter." How is this different from regular/non-online dating?

singular 14y ago
It's not, just exaggerated, as facing 100 emails in your inbox vs. some guy face-to-face is a different proposition I think. Perhaps a distillation of my point is - 'do dating sites give false hope to undateable people?' I'd love to see the data on people who get few/no replies, and what % of income they produce. It'll differ between ad-supported + paid I expect too.

toumhi 14y ago

You're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. You believe you lack pre-requisites women require. Truth is, there are loads of short guys, ugly guys or otherwise challenged guys that get what they want out of dating, whether it's lots of random sleeping around, or a committed relationship, and everything in between. Please don't talk about giving up on relationships. Online dating might actually not be the best choice for you. It creates the illusion of control and comfort from your living room. As you saw, it's tough work and you don't really learn much from it, not as much as you could learn if you spent the same amount of time outside meeting women. Try to meet women in your day-to-day activities. Join classes. Get active. Go to bars and parties. I don't know where you're coming from, but if you're shy and lack confidence, make a point to talk to other people, and that includes attractive women. Also, you need to have a mindset of abundance, not of scarcity. There are plenty of women that'd like to be with you, if you go out to meet them and show them your true self and get your act together. You'll get vastly better over time. But it does take time, so don't give up after 1 week :-)

mykosmos 14y ago
Great post. Being a short yet confident man is way much more appealing to a woman than to be the 6' average joe.
- singular 14y ago
  Citation required? Women might say this, but in my experience it's simply not true. Like the whole 'love yourself so others can love you' line. Which is just B.S. in my experience. Having said that, I agree confidence makes a huge difference. However, the kind of confidence women like is in my opinion an unpleasant cocky kind. And should I attempt to completely change who I am, become somebody I dislike just to fulfil that? Would that lead to a relationship that would work? I don't even think it's feasible to be honest.
  - asdfologist 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Strauss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Strauss

huhtenberg 14y ago

Confidence is pretty much the only factor. If you don't have it, nothing else matters. If you do, everything else is just an icing on the cake. Took me a while to realize this, but that's an ultimate truth :)

colmvp 14y ago
"Confidence is pretty much the only factor." Not really. It's not like a woman is going to throw out all her requirements (e.g. has to be equal height or taller) just because the guy is confident.
singular 14y ago
Assuming you're >= av. height, and of reasonable relative social standing... For a tall person height isn't a factor at all. They could say that as height isn't a problem for them.

victorhn 14y ago

Have you ever tried to go for foreign girls? I don't speak from personal experience here, but i have read that girls overseas don't have that big checklist of requirements and still go for provider types. I would try in Eastern Europe or Latin America.

return0 14y ago

It's kind of frightening how fiercely modern (western) humans seek to turn their pairing ritual to a rigid, darwinian free market. Dating sites want to become the equivalent of online trading for the dating market, but they fail miserably due to the heavy assymetries in dating culture (traditional male-hunter role, competition among males etc.) - cultural norms that are very old and yet being upheld even after decades of feminism). It's also odd how people tend to link their dating success to their personal worth.

ttcbj 14y ago

I had a very similar attitude to yours about 6 years ago. I sympathize with your frustration. Although I am not denying that it may be harder for you to find someone, I think your current attitude/self-perspective is not helpful to you. I highly recommend this book, in absolute seriousness: <http://www.amazon.com/Self-Esteem-Cognitive-Techniques-Assessing-Maintaining/dp/1572241985/ref=sr_1_1&#62 http://www.amazon.com/Self-Esteem-Cognitive-Techniques-Asses...; It was a real revelation to me. Don't dismiss it as psychobabble-nonsense just yet, buy it for a friday night when you are dateless, then honestly consider what it has to say. If nothing else, it will make you happier while you continue to have limited success dating. Also, when you find a woman who will look past the height thing, you want to be in a healthy place to actually make the relationship work from there. For what its worth, I married to a truly wonderful, brilliant and amazing woman a few years ago. The person I was before reading that book would not have gotten past the first date with her, and certainly wouldn't have been a good partner in a relationship.

singular 14y ago
Thanks, appreciate your candour + glad to hear things worked out for you. I'm always open to different perspectives on things. I will check out the book.

mkr-hn 14y ago

Do you write like this in messages to women?

singular 14y ago
What, in a somewhat geeky analytical way? No, I don't :-)

aswanson 14y ago

Height is a relative thing though. I used to club with a good friend of mine, about 6'8". I'm 6'2". Females used to flock to him when we hit clubs; all he had to do was walk in. I had to put up a lot of effort just to get a "hello". I grew bitter and mentally bashed females for a long time for being so shallow; that mentality reinforces itself and destroys dating prospects. I missed out on a lot of opportunities because of that. On the dating front, optimism always trumps pessimism. Do the math, there statistically has to be someone who would want you in a city of 7m.

geuis 14y ago

Found your photo on your Twitter profile. You're a decent looking guy! I have no advice to give, as I'm currently single too. I'm an overweight fellow in San Francisco but have had modest success in meeting women in the last few years. Haven't met anyone that threw a spark though. I mainly use okcupid when looking around. Point is mainly about confidence I think. When I'm exuding confidence (feeling like a million bucks) I notice women in the street actually smile at me sometimes. When I'm down on myself (more often) that never happens. Good luck to you.

singular 14y ago
Thanks, that's kind! I am overweight right now too, that photo was when I was lighter (recently) - I lost loads, then gained again partly due to anti-depressants, partly due to feeling there was no point in keeping it off. I think confidence is a big part, but height is huge. And I don't think I could exude the kind of cockiness that might lead to success, as I am naturally a skeptical person, and a depressive as well which makes that hard anyway.
- thoughtcriminal 14y ago
  My advice is to just be the absolute maximum you. No one else in the universe has your unique blend of qualities. Be confident being who you are, because your good at that, aren't you?

Mz 14y ago

I hesitate to post this because I am not interested in being hit on and I am not interested in adding to the pile on of people criticizing you. But I spent all this time writing the damn thing. Sigh. So here it is, fwiw: You know, I have gotten a crapload of rejection and hostility in recent years, not in a dating context but in another social context. So I am very familiar with how hard it is to remain open and do the zen thing and say "Those 5000 other catastrophes don't matter. This is a new person and what they think has nothing to do with what all those other people thought." But it sounds to me like that's a big part of your problem. In fact, you remind me of another man I used to know. He was average height (slightly taller than me even) and he was convinced that "being too short" was part of why he had such a hard time getting a girlfriend. I had the worst crush on him (and my ex husband was shorter than me and he knew it) but he would not give me the time of day. He was toxic and mysogynistic and harped incessantly on how badly women had treated him. He did so in a manner that was incredibly ugly and blaming, like "all women are bitches" type attitude. To me personally, he was rude, hurtful, and talked incessantly in front of me about what he found attractive in a woman and did so in a manner that just screamed "Gee, Michele, you are such a fat ugly cow you ought to just have your vagina removed since it will never see action again". I really liked him and I understood why he was so bitter, so I tried to get him to talk to me anyway. At some point he got irritable with me and basically told me I was wasting his time and that he would be willing to talk to me if he thought it might go somewhere. For me, that was the final straw. I gave up. I still had the worst crush on him but concluded that if he was the last man on earth, I would get a girlfriend. You can't change your height. Yes, for many women, your height is a dealbreaker upfront -- just like for many men, a woman's age, weight or bra size is a dealbreaker upfront. Both genders can be equally shallow and asinine. The trick is to find some way to set aside your hurt and anger from previous interactions and not hang that crap on every new person you meet. As for dating sites, I don't use them. But then I jokingly say "dating is against my utter lack of religion" generally, whether online or off. It is not my cup of tea. I don't have a particularly high opinion of the dating paradigm to begin with. It strikes me as a meat market approach. I think it is an especially poor fit for folks who won't "measure up" to whatever arbitrary norms most people are sorting by. I know I don't fit that mold either. And I won't accept being treated shabbily because of it. Men who think I am too old or too fat or too flat chested aren't the sort of men I want standing next to my fire anyway. Frankly, they aren't worthy.

nateweiss 14y ago

I can sympathize. I dated online for a time, and the stated-height-requirement thing used to drive me either totally, totally nuts or into extended moments of depression, depending on the day. I am not very short, but I am under average, and I was really blown away by the sheer number of women whose stated requirements ruled me out on the basis of height alone. I think the percentage of women who actually write that kind of thing down might really surprise folks who haven't seen it themselves. This stuff can you depressed real fast (the classic lyric "pretty women out walkin' with gorillas down my street" comes to mind), and not just with respect to dating or women. For instance, wall street or other "money" types are very frequently quite tall, and very seldom short. Not saying that there aren't exceptions, but when you are sitting around thinking about your height it sure can be annoying! :) (Then again, I bet the fact that sooo many men overtly state that they are looking for someone up to but no older than their own age probably amazes/dumbfounds/exasperates the ladies just as much.) At the time, I eventually realized that the main thing that the women were saying was that they wanted a man taller than their own height--not necessarily taller than other men. (There were a lot of descriptions in their profiles like "must be taller than I am in heels", which always seemed like a clever way to make the "requirement" sound sexy btw.) Anyway, the point is that there are plenty of short girls around, and I went out of dates with a number of very attractive ladies who were shorter than I. Nothing in particular came of it, but I generally had a good time and never felt like I had wasted an evening. A friend of mine has done lots of research in an academic capacity in this area (using source data from dating sites, speed dating services, etc), and one thing that has been proven rather definitively as far as he is concerned is that ladies behave differently when they are in a "competitive" mating situation such as a speed dating event, bar/club, etc. All the things they say they want in a man (stable, nice, smart, funny) go out the window and they just go for whoever is "hottest". Dating sites appear to trigger many of the same behaviors. But if you look at who they end up with long-term, it's a whole different set of factors that matter (again, not necessarily what they say to themselves or others). I can't provide any source links for this research, and I am massively paraphrasing from memory, but these are, I think, legit gists of some pretty legit findings unless my memory is doing me a terrible disservice today. As the risk of offending USA-born females who might be reading, I would suggest perhaps trying to focus on ladies from other lands, as from my (all caveats about small sample size noted but notwithstanding) personal experience, the literal-minded "list of requirements" is somewhat of an American-girl-next-door phenomenon. My girl is from one of the lands down under and is the find of the century (and physically well out of what I had perceived to be my league). We are delightfully married in a "soul-mate" style and couldn't be happier. I spend many a moment disbelieving my own luck. FWIW, she is just about the exact same height as I am. [Edit: I missed that you're from the UK so the USA-biased part of my post here is questionable at best. Sorry!] I mention my wonderful wife not to brag, hopefully, but just to point out there are so many exceptions to whatever evolutionary/social programming we have (so much noise amongst the signals) that the rules only matter in the aggregate, not to the individual. At least that's my experience, one shortish geek to another. :) My armchair analysis of my friend's papers, my own experience, and other reading is that both men and women have an elaborate system of truths and deceptions in our heads about what we are looking for in a mate. Many women have this annoying height thing and a bunch of stuff about income (sometimes masked, sometimes not). Many men have similar stuff about age, measurements, etc. Both are, I believe, about trading up genetically--so that our imagined offspring will have a genetic advantage in successive generations. But those are "10,000 foot view" ways of initially identifying potential mates when faced with a big group of them (like "all the guys on this site" or "all the chicks in this city"). On a one-on-one level though, it's a whole different story--a whole different set of things can trigger that "my genese might be able to trade up here" response. And meanwhile, our conscious brains are doing their own thing--getting intrigued, falling in love, etc--which are using a much more sophisticated type of modeling than the crude ">= meanHeight" gating that we think it might be from looking at the "hard" evidence. Anyway, the main reason I wanted to post a response here was to respond that: 1)Yes, yes, a thousand times yes the "height thing" is a real thing. It feels and appears to be a glass ceiling. 2) It is really frustrating, so frustrating that it's tempting to write the whole enterprise off as the realm of the tanned and shallow. 3) But, as demonstrable as the rules appear to be--the evidence right in front of you--they are illusory and don't actually apply. That's my experience anyway.

eru 14y ago

I am about your height, and did not find it too hard to find dates in Britain. (Oh, and after moving to Singapore, I can tell you it's now actually harder to avoid the attention of women than to get them.)

colmvp 14y ago
Depends on your race. White Males have no trouble everywhere. Asian males on the other hand...
- eru 14y ago
  > White Males have no trouble everywhere. They do where white males are abundant.