socialresearcher Posted July 8, 2011 Posted July 8, 2011 We are considering creating a new dating website and would love to hear from you all that date online. 1. What aspects do you really love about online dating? What are things that make sense for you? 2. What things do you not like about online dating? ----- 3. Would you be interested in a site that involves your friends in the dating process in some way. 4. If yes, which way? Background: We think dating websites can be improved. We think dating online is a very isolating process and we think many of these dating sites are more interested in making money out of you that really mediating a superb dating experience. In many cases, consistent online dating can leave people feeling worse not better. As well, we think people's dating styles differ tremendously but are rarely taken into account often leaving people feeling hurt. We also think your friends are a great resource to make dating a better experience. We are interested to design a site for people looking for a Long Term Relationship. In any case, we would like to design a new site from the ground up. If any of you veteran online daters might like to advise/join us we would love to hear from you.
thatone Posted July 8, 2011 Posted July 8, 2011 here's an excerpt from a reply i sent to a craigslist ad in another city from a woman bemoaning the inability to find smarter men... I must admit I got a grin out of your results at the Astronomy Club and the Intellectual Singles Club. I would have assumed the astronomy crowd to be either married or 25, that's not surprising. On the other hand the intellectual singles crowd sounds like a gold mine for me, for the same reason that it wasn't for you. Perhaps I should try that myself, but I'm really not that drawn to it. I'd really like to give you better advice on where to find a group of men like that group of women you ran into at the social gathering for intellectuals, but I'm drawing a blank. I'm reminded of a bit on a comedy show a couple of weeks ago, about "the 10 things that men hate to hear their women say". One of them was "lets take a class together". Allow me to speak for men in general on this. It's just not our cup of tea, as men, to look for such social gatherings unless we're there specifically for women of course. If we are specifically looking for women, one of two scenarios will apply. One, at some point we'll be pretty obvious in the fact that we don't care about the subject matter and are just there to pick up women, in which case we will likely be uncovered as patronizing charlatans, and we wasted a day going somewhere we didn't care the least about and got nothing out of it. Or two, we could just as well go flirt with the waitress at our favorite bar or restaurant and wind up with better results, and at least that was a place we preferred to be in to start with. Given those two choices to weigh and measure, we generally go with option two. Admittedly, taking your three college degrees to a job interview at a restaurant or bar with the intent of being the waitress is not really practical. So with those facts in mind I think you're on the right track by looking online, although craigslist is generally not the best place I've found. Although it is high traffic, it's too anonymous. From a man's perspective, OKCupid seems to be the best dating site I've found. Speaking in purely stereotypical terms, it satisfies the needs of both sexes pretty well. It has endless silly and pointless quizzes and surveys for women, thus giving women the proverbial double whammy of faux attention by being presented with questions to answer, and the invitation to think about themselves for hours at a time, which you must admit most women are quite good at. On the other hand you can answer those questions and quizzes until you're blue in the face (fingers?) and the end result won't matter all that much, since the result is just an arbitrary number denoting how much you "match" with someone else that doesn't mean anything. That part we men like, since we don't care about the questions or the quizzes or the arbitrary numbers, and we never read what women answered in them. We aren't particularly good at letting someone or something make decisions for us. That's our job, dammit, if our stupidity sinks the ship we're supposed to go down with it. Additionally, OKCupid has either the genius or the random dumb luck of having their profile format ask specific questions while leaving the opportunity for entirely open ended answers. That's a good thing. As a man you have to send the first message and initiate contact on these dating sites. A site that's too vague will leave women saying too little out of confusion or indecision, and then when not satisfied with the responses they get from saying too little, they'll revert into full blown self contradiction mode, turning their profile into a laundry list of everything that was wrong with their ex, everything they hated about the last 20 messages they got, and every adjective that describes the man they're looking for, which is hilarious in many cases because each word is a contradiction of the last. Ladies of the internet, I hate to break it to you but there is no such thing as an easy going, dominant, caring, decisive, stable, adventurous, liberal lumberjack type who oh by the way also has the motorcycle and the tattoos that the guy you wanted to leave the bar with a couple of weeks ago had. He does not exist. Back to the point, though, the open ended room for answers to the questions they ask gives us men material for those first emails. That's what we need to get the ball rolling. While we men are generally shallow, badly intentioned, superficial people for the purposes of striking up conversation with the above mentioned waitress, when we go looking for someone a bit loftier than the waitress as relationship material we need something to work with in the initial conversation. The target may change but the situation hasn't changed, we still have to initiate, and for that we need a game plan that must be derived from what the woman had to say about herself. OKCupid has provided this for men, so you should give it a try if you haven't. If you have a clever, witty, very intelligent list of answers to the generic question they ask, you'll eventually get some equally clever and witty replies. Couple that with some classy looking pictures and you'll strike gold eventually.
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