Up until fairly recently, I have been almost exclusively been using Plenty of Fish for my online dating endeavors. It yielded some fairly good results and quite a few dates. Yet I seem to be exhausting the supply of available single women who I find attractive.
I also have a paid Match.com account and an OKCupid (free, mostly) account. I’ve only been using these online dating websites in a desultory manner. There’s been some recent activity on both those accounts (inbound messages) so I’m going to shift my focus away from Plenty of Fish and see what happens.
I will say that OKCupid seems to have smaller numbers of single women but more thoughtful profiles. OKCupid is rather different in that there are all sorts of quizzes and questions to answer. The website sort of forces members to be more thoughtful. The biggest issue with OKCupid is that there is no anonymous browsing unless one pays for the premium service. So, every time I look at a profile, the woman knows it. This might turn out to be advantageous, we’ll see.
It was OKCupid that yielded the Hamster.
As for Match.com, I’m actively corresponding with two women and will likely have some weekday dates lined up for next week. The real problem with Match.com is that it’s hard to tell who is a paid member and who is not. If I’m sending emails to free members, then I will never hear back unless I bury my email address in the outgoing message. I think. Can someone help me out here?
I’ve been bitten a few times on Match.com by the drive-by wink. I receive a wink from a suspiciously attractive woman and if I wait a day to check the profile, it’s gone. This actually happened with an incoming message (like an email) from a nice and slender Asian woman. She had a real profile and she had candid photos. It didn’t seem a fake, at all. She sent me a real message that mentioned a particular detail in my fairly long profile. Yet when I attempted to message her back two days after I received her initial message, she’s pulled her profile.
As things stand now, the Hamster is done and so I have two women to correspond with – the Russian and the Mom. The Russian has been escalated to a phone call (to be done today) and with the Mom I am still doing the online thing. Given my schedule, I’m not going to escalate the Mom to a phone call just yet. She can cool her heels in the meantime.
I need to hit Match.com and OKCupid to refill the pipeline. It’s all part of my system.
As for Surfer Woman… well, she said something wonderful to me this morning: “I think you need a morning blowjob.”
Hughman
/ August 7, 2011The way to view profiles on OKCupid: set up a dummy account. I actually invested some time in it, so giving out the odd award seems plausible.
or when you have the link to the profile in front of you, right click the logout button as a new tab, then click on the profile link: you’ll view it but logged out (so no questions, and it may be set to member only viewing)
theprivateman
/ August 8, 2011Good ideas, both. I’m not real keen on having my profile viewing history known to the women I am looking at. Anonymity is a good thing.
Hughman
/ August 8, 2011Agreed. Looking more than once or twice a week when talking unfortunately just looks too try-hard. It’s great when a girl keeps doing it, I know she’s trying to figure me out and find things to talk about
Iain D
/ August 7, 2011I’ve had trouble getting answers on match.com as well. When you use the ‘Daily Matches’ feature you can’t even tell how long it’s been since they were online. I think of my last 9 messages only 3 of them have even been read (most are more than a week old). Overall I haven’t been impressed by it and I don’t think I’ll be renewing.
I’ve had decent results with OkCupid. The girls on there are more my demographic, and it’s easy to see how active they are.
allie
/ August 8, 2011You can browse anonymously on okcupid… Downside is you can’t see who’s looking at your profile. Its in profile settings I believe
theprivateman
/ August 8, 2011I like to see who has viewed me. It’s a mild form of entertainment.
Richard
/ November 27, 2011Recently, as of November 2011, I looked into almost every online dating site. There were some that might have a few prospects in larger metro areas, but I don’t currently live in a huge area so I deleted those accounts and won’t mention them here. Match seemed like it had potential, but because I could not tell the few women who might have a paid membership and thus be able to respond to sent messages I decided not to continue my membership to Match and deactivated it. Match tried a Platinum membership before where non-members could respond to Platinum members and I would have gladly paid extra for this feature myself, but I don’t understand why Match discontinued this. Therefore, the only two sites I currently am on is POF and OKC.
On a technical side note to anyone: When on an iPad and you type in an email, make sure that the auto-fill did not separate the letters in the email. This just happened to me and WordPress had a pop-up that said to type in a valid email, so I corrected it and then WordPress said “Posting Comment” but would not post. Finally, I re-typed this comment on a computer and will see if it makes a double-comment or only posts one comment. I will make sure to check the fill in boxes more closely from now on.