Internet Dating Thread

Only if you want a chance at scoring SuperJay's digits.

Remember that lower numbers are better and negative numbers are awesome.

Do you remember the stats for a level 3 elf, though? Do you?

It usually is.

Cute Animals, Bad Dates.

Dear [internet dating site],

My preferences clearly state that I'd like matches between 28 and 38 within ~25 miles of my city. Showing me 53 year old women in Los Angeles is not value added.


eta: nor is the 48 year old in Texas that came up on refreshing the screen.

Last spring I essentially gave up on dating until I got a message from a woman on Lavalife. Previously I had received messages from women on the dating site but they tended to be Eastern European women who sometimes pretended to be from the US and wanted me to email them to some @yahoo.com email address. Instead of being Eastern European she was Japanese and we messaged back a bit before exchanging email addresses. I was a bit suspicious when I noticed her email was essential "googleemail" backwards and it took her a day or two to respond back. Nonetheless we arranged for a first date which was suppose to be at a coffee shop but instead she changed it to meeting at the Sea Wall here in Vancouver.

Fast forward six months to the day, I proposed to her when we went to the Okanagan Valley. (She said yes) She's back in Japan for three months and we'll get married when she gets back -- depending where my next job will be.

Congratulations!!

So in other words, sometimes it really is a Nigerian prince who needs your financial assistance!

Well, yeah... After we get married I'll sponsor her for Permanent Resident status here in Canada and while her application is being processed, which can take six to twelve months, she isn't allowed to work. Also, under the new Canadian laws, which are cracking down on fraudulent marriages, the Canadian spouse is financially responsible for their foreign spouse for up to two years even there's a divorce.

So, I need help responding to something.

How to dating?

Perhaps I'll regret asking this quite boldly in public under my own name without even the thinnest veil of pseudonymity, but I'm now filled with in excess of 32 years and I have no fucking clue how to operate this entire segment of being alive. I ask because I had essentially just given up on everything, figured myself for utterly and completely beyond all hope for all sorts of entirely valid reasons, and reconciled myself to the fact that I would just be alone, but out of the blue some brave and unfortunate young lady messaged me on OkCupid and we've now met for coffee and I like her just fine, but I'm realizing that there are some considerable barriers to this whole situation in my very being. Like, for instance, I never have ever even a single impulse to actually go out and do anything. As you might imagine from my body of work, my life experience can be accurately described as the sum total of all of the (many, many, many) things that I have read and watched and played and heard, but not so much the things that I have done. I, frankly, am quite okay with that, but I'm not entirely sure how I would go about doing a dating when the sum total of my aspirations for the weekend can be expressed as a list of television shows to process and games to play and not at all about anything taking place in "society" with all those, you know, other people and whatnot. And it's not even that I necessarily object to doing things (though it will take no small amount of retraining of my psyche to adapt to it, which is bizarre all by itself), but on my own I'll never actually be filled with the impulse to ever go to a place and do a thing. It also strikes me that I am incredibly bad at doing talking. I'm pretty sure I have no conception of a regular human conversation. I mean, I've basically worked out twenty minutes of material for being around people I don't know, but when I'm with people that I do know, there will often be long stretches of not talking, punctuated by the occasional declarative statement.

Now, it's entirely possible that this will all come to a grand total of nothing, as I've just now returned from said coffee/dessert and for all I know I come off as some sort of crazy person who wants to carve off people's skin and make a cape out of it, but on the off chance that I'm not actually as repulsive as I assume and this nice lady wants to see me again, it strikes me that I might do well to figure some of this shit out in advance, so as to avoid what basically always happens. While it's entirely possible that I'm the only person this crazy, I can't be the only person who's had to deal with general ignorance in this particular field of study. So...advice?

Jesus. Maybe I should just start a thread in the LP forum and let people operate me like a man-sized puppet.

Figure out things that you want to do.

Do them with her company.

Maybe that's watching a movie you haven't seen. Maybe it's sky-diving. Maybe it's going ice skating in Central Park. Whatevs.

The main thing I would say is don't feel like you have to force yourself to go out and do Official Things. Like Aaron said, figure out things you want to do, and then ask if she'd like to do them with you. And ask her if there are things SHE would like to do, and hopefully she would like you to do them with her. Try to be open to doing them (within reason, of course)! You don't have to love all her hobbies, but even giving one or two a whirl, even if you end up not really liking it, goes a long way towards the lady thinking "hey, cool, he's interested in me and wants to at least learn a little about things I enjoy."

I do like the LP meat-puppet idea though. <3

Also, for the love of dog, don't start talking about your crazy brains and skinning people. You have to ease people into that sort of thing.

I warn them ahead of time I don't murder on the first date.

See, that's your problem right there. Some guys get their 20 minutes and just coast on that forever, but you're never going to move up to headlining if you don't keep writing. It can be nerve wracking the first time you try out a new bit, but it's the only way to get better.

Seriously though, if the conversation isn't flowing it's probably a sign that you don't have any chemistry. I'm not a recluse by any means but I'm pretty shitty at small talk. One of the first things I noticed about the woman I'm now dating was that talking to her was effortless, where with the other women I went out with it was a chore. An awkward, interminable chore punctuated by long silences. So while it's possible that you just weren't properly socialized as a puppy and are likely to bark and bite inappropriately, it's also just as likely that you would have no such problems with the right person.

As far as "going out", you probably do have to retrain yourself a little bit simply because you are currently filling all of your time with solo activities and so in order to add activities with another person you are going to have to re-organize and cull a little bit. And you will probably have to go to places and do things, at least at first, because nothing says skin-cape connoisseur like a second date at your own house. However, you should still be honest about your hobbies because there's no point doing a bunch of stuff you don't like to do to convince a woman to date you because she will expect you to continue doing those things. I would suggest going to a theater to watch a movie as a good compromise between doing something you do anyway but still going "out" to do it. Dinner is also good, because I'd imagine eating is something you are used to doing even if you don't treat it as an event. During dates 2 and 3 you should establish what TV shows she watches and then, assuming it's not all Dance Moms and Duck Dynasty you can invite her over to watch a show for date 4 or 5 (you may want to stick another dinner or movie date in there depending on what you think her skin-cape alarm level is). If she is into reality shows you can invite her over to watch Hoarders or My Strange Addiction which will make you look normal in comparison.

Two final points: dating is a skill, and it's highly unlikely that the first person you go out with is going to work out. So, don't worry about "blowing it" with this woman, think of it as your first attempt at a new game. A punishing, frustrating game like Dark Souls. Expect to repeat that first level over and over, dying horribly every time, until you eventually know what you're doing.

Puppet! Puppet! Be the puppet!

I need to update my OKCupid profile, remove the goofy self-deprecation that I thought was funny when I wrote it, and get a better picture.

Since everything in my life seems to be going so well lately*, I decided to sign up for OKCupid. I have been single for far longer than i care to admit and i figure its not a situation that'll change itself. Anyway, not three hours later, and I've already had two people message me.



*now that I've said this, I'm going to have some horrible aneurism soon!

Are either of the two people from Russia? I'm asking this because when I was using Lavalife I tended to get scam messages from women who lived outside of Vancouver, supposedly in the US or Russia.

One was in Kelowna and the other Yellowknife.

Sounds pretty Russian to me.

So the messages I've been receiving have pretty much ground to a halt. Which I'm honestly okay with. I had about 3 or 4 people with a minimal profile (usually something like: "I don't know what to write here...") and no pictures message me with "Hi". A few others have sent me messages that I just don't know how to respond to, just random comments that leave no room for any sort of meaningful reply.

On the flip side, I find myself repeating the same pattern that I fall into the previous times I've ever used OKC: I'll come across an interesting and well written profile by someone who isn't unattractive, think to myself "I should totally send this person a message!", get distracted, and never message the person. Part of it is just a bit of trepidation about having to actually communicate with random people, but part of it is also just a large amount of apathy towards the whole thing. I started out fairly well with the whole thing, I like the way my profile reads and all that (could probably use some better pictures, but I have about 2 pictures of myself pictures of myself that aren't shitty webcam shots). But after about a week, I just lose all interest in finding someone at all. It also doesn't help that like 99% of women in Vancouver seem to be vegan environmental activists while I'm a bacon eating accountant working in the petroleum industry.

There are non-vegan environmental activists. You just have to look in Yaletown for them (they tend to be high maintenance).

Sweet baby Jesus but pof has an absolutely wretched UI. I ended up deleting my account (I think!) simply because the site was just too damn painful to navigate.

I could never finish the questionnaire.

I was hoping I'd meet another accountant while working in a firm somewhere (a job and a dating pool (shh!); two birds, one stone)...it doesn't work like that?

"Rad" and "accountant" are two words I never expected to see together.

*ahem*

I dunno how you go about it, but I found that if you actually want to date, you need to man up and ask them out in the first message. If you're just looking to have a pen pal for a little while to kill some time, that's fine, but if you're actually doing the online thing with the intention of actual dating, you don't need to compose the world's greatest opening message. Just say "You seem cool, I'm into _________ too (mention one mutual interest to show that you read their profile), I'd like to get to know you better. Would you like to go out with me?" That's it. It takes no time at all.

Heh, I deleted my first PoF profile in frustration, and then created a second one after I literally went through the profiles of every single straight woman in Victoria on OKCupid and either messaged or rejected them. Just like Facebook, you have to learn to adapt to the shitty UI because that's where the people are.

I am at least two of those things on your list. Potentially three.

1. I've wished I were a guy so that I could show game makers what a (mostly) sane and (questionably) romantic love interest looks like. But that's probably not what you're asking.
2. I care more about whether I get along with the person and could see myself in a LTR with them rather than their gender, but if the girl you mentioned is only into dudes, then that's that.
3. No, I come from the true north, where people guzzle maple syrup and fight bears, and spearfishing is the national sport.
4. *Eyes yandere and sadist titles and is oddly silent*

Well, given the fact that "creative" accounting is looked down upon, I can see where you're coming from.

You should see a doctor about your throat before you go on your next date.

My grandfather and dad are/were accountants and my mom was a bookkeeper. "Creative" isn't a word I would apply to them...

Huh, so last night a girl messaged me on OKC out of the blue. We kind of batted messages back and forth for an hour, and did the same tonight. Normally the online messaging thing is not my, err, thing (I'd much prefer to just get to the actual date) but a) she's in NYC which I really am not about to go to except maybe on a weekend and b) she's apparently out of town on business this week and c) I'm not free at all this weekend even if she was. So I'm in this kind of unfamiliar space where we're having online conversations but uhh bleh I duno. I figure tomorrow I'll see if she's interested in getting together and then play it from there.

Well done, man!

So OKC has this thing where you can submit your images for voting. It pairs you up with someone else and users vote (based purely on images) who they'd rather date (basically, a hot or not thing). I thought it would be an interesting experiment. Out of 43 votes, 12 voted for me over the other guy. In all twelve of those instances, the site had paired me up with someone 30+ years older than I, and it was usually a 20-ish year old doing the voting.

I'll be over in the drunk thread.