Online Dating And Geographical Undesirability
A regular reader sent the following email [parts of it edited]:
I’ve been active in online dating for about two years now with inconsistent results. Currently I post on OKC and POF. I reside in a small town, essentially an ex-urb, about an hour from [big midwest city] and about the same distance from two other sizable cities. I enjoy small town life except for the scarcity of eligible women.
The excuse I hear over and over from women online is that I live too far away. This irks me tremendously. You would think she would be flattered that a man is interested in her, with him knowing he’ll certainly need to travel a ways to meet her.
Sometimes, online dating and geography are a poor match. A city with a fairly dense population presents more online options for both sexes. Our hero lives in a small town while the women have more options in the local city and are obviously loathe to travel far for a date. I feel his pain and understand his frustration. Life is often about trade-offs.
He then goes on to present some Red Pill wisdom analysis for the challenge he faces:
1. A half-hour travel from the beloved metro area: no ‘gina tingle.
2. These women already have a surplus of male attention due to living n a larger metro area.
3. As a result, and because they’re special little snowflakes, they fully expect a dreamy guy right down their street. Never mind that they haven’t met him there yet.
4. Also as a result, they’re even more disposed to actively look for a reason to reject a man who approaches them. There will always be another.
5. Hypergamy: Instead of looking for Mr. Right, at best they’re looking for another rung further up the ladder, while they wait for the alpha of their dreams to come along and sweep them off their feet.Am I right? I think I am. And if I am, how do I use this insight? Is there a way? Any light you can cast on this will be greatly appreciated.
He’s pretty much correct in his analysis. Each item is almost universal in this country. I will only take a mild exception to number three, the snowflaking. Given that the mid-west tends to be a friendlier place that tends to encourage modest thought and behavior, I am discounting some of that snowflaking.
As for alternatives, I present these:
A. Lie in his online dating profile about where he lives to put him closer to one of the cities. The truth will ultimately have to be revealed, however.
B. Refine his geographical search to the more distant suburbs of the best target city which are closer to his exurb. That’ll make driving distances less but will also reduce options.
C. Take the time to drive to the city on weekends to use some real life Charisma. If he meets a woman in person, it’s not so easy for her just to click a mouse and display the next online profile. Sadly, that’s a lot of driving for him every weekend.
I invite my readers to present other suggestions and input to address this fellow’s plight.
The Private Man 
You will have to downgrade, unfortunately. The women you are trying for obviously have better options than to be with someone that far away. But the lower bracket women most likely will not. For what you offer, the lower bracket is your market. Short of moving closer, this is your best choice
You have tested the market in your bracket range and found there was no demand. Lower your bracket to the lesser women and you will find demand there. I am sure there are plenty of 4s/5s that wouldnt mind dating a guy who lives an hour away. But anything above that you can forget.
Been there and done that. Private Man’s Alternative A is probably necessary to avoid being weeded out early. I don’t like the idea of ‘lying’, but I have stretched the truth: I live ‘near’ X town, (technically true, but X is closer to the city than my town).
I think Alternative C might be the best bet under some circumstances, but if a guy is self-employed or otherwise involved in a business which requires his presence on weekends, he’s pretty much screwed. I think enlarging one’s social circle by cultivating friends or relatives who have moved to the city might also help, but it won’t reduce the necessity for travel.
I found that one of the most frustrating things about being a single guy in a small town is the reluctance of most people in those small towns to recognize that there actually IS a scarcity of younger single women. There is a tendency for them to see high school girls around, or college girls home for the summer and then wonder aloud why the 29 and 30 year old guys are always complaining about the lack of women. But of course, they’d be scandalized if a 30-something guy actually dated a 19 year old.
For optimization, the best option is moving away from the small town and closer to the city if you want to access the kinds of women who live in the city/suburbs areas. If it’s more important to stay living in the small town than move closer in, then he’ll have to downgrade to a lower rung on the ladder because the women in his natural bracket aren’t interested in a guy from a small town an hour away from the city. It’s very much a trade-off here — what is more important to him: optimizing the quality of the women he is dating or maintaining a small town lifestyle. It’s unlikely he’ll be able to pull off doing both.
I’m not sure why there would be a scarcity of women in a small town. It’s true that there are fewer women in a small town but there are also fewer men so the ratio should be the same. I’ve always found that the ratio of men to women is more important for dating success than the total numbers of women available. Whenever I found myself in a situation during my life where there were lots of women around but only a few guys, I did much better. A problem with online dating is that there are more men than women on online dating sites and the attractive women get flooded with emails. You will need to lower your standards to get dates online, especially since there’s the distance problem. Since you’ll have to lower your standards a lot to get online dates, you might find that the women you can get online aren’t any better than the women available around you. That’s what I found and that’s why I’ve cut back on my online dating efforts.
In most rural areas the main export is young people. There are few job opportunities generally, in most rural areas, and even fewer of the kind of jobs that attract women, particularly women with some education. Consequently, young women leave rural areas and small towns at a much higher percentage than young men. Jobs in agricultural and extractive industries just don’t seem to appeal to a whole lot of women.
In terms of absolute numbers, many rural areas in my part of the Midwest have roughly equal numbers of men and women according to Census figures, but almost all of the ‘extra’ women are in the higher age ranges, while most of the extra men are in the lower (adult) age ranges. So while the sex ratio might appear to be 50/50, the ratio of men to women in the ‘marriageable age’ group is skewed toward a surplus of men to start, and it’s actually worse when you figure in the fact that most of the marriageable-age women are already married (or cohabiting), and the few who aren’t actually married/cohabiting are divorced or widowed, and tend to be at the upper end of the ‘marriageable-age’ range.
Women tend to be city creatures while men tend to be country creatures. A small town therefore is likely up for grabs, but it would probably be a sausage-fest in Wyoming while in Florida( Privateman?) it could quite possibly have more women, though likely older ones. All environments in the Midwest trend towards equilibrium.
But for small towns remember the saying in Spanish,
Pueblo chico, infierno grande
The anonymity of city living helps make mujeres alegres.
For what it’s worth, there are at least some dating sites that claim to cater to rural singles. Farmers Only comes to mind, but there are others. I have no experience with any of these sites, so I don’t know how productive having a profile on one would be. My guess is that a guy would still have to do quite a bit of traveling.
I haven’t lived in a small town for many, many years, so take this for what it’s worth, but I think online dating is probably not going to yield good results for the reason the OP outlines. If moving closer to the big city isn’t an option, then offline game is likely to generate the best results. Of course, one’s Charisma must be tightly calibrated in a small-town setting, as the target environment is smaller and tongues will wag.
Of the options TPM offered, I agree with C. In fact, if finances allow, I’d suggest renting a small studio apartment in the city for weekend use. Doesn’t have to be fancy, but you might want to invest in a decent mattress…
Hmmm….sensing a bit of victimization here…I’d prefer that author be more proactive with the women near the cities and invite them along on a fun thing he’s going to be doing there. “Hey – I’m going to be in X to do Y – come join me” etc etc etc. This shows A) he’s fun B) he’s active C) he likes doing stuff and D) he doesn’t expect them to always travel to him much less E) he’s fishing in the cities b/c he’s burned up all the locals.
FWIW, I live in a medium sized Midwestern city about 3 hours from a very large city and an hour from one which not as large as the very large one. Went of plenty of dates with women from the large cities* – some there, some in my neck of the woods – so I’m thinking the women he’s writing to are using distance as an excuse/shit test to see if he’s really interested in them.
*Had a very hot and raunchy date with a girl from the VLC which involved meeting her at the Ikea in the VLC. We shopped and talked and I made fun of her taste in furniture and she basically raped me right there in the parking lot afterwards.
Option C.
Like it or not, the disadvantage of living in a small town can be likely made up with some great pictures. When I see profiles from women from small towns who are unattactive (because they are heffers usually) I think “forget it” but if the woman is a sexually attractive or “hot” I dont even notice where she lives. In fact, I think, a bit of a drive might be kind of fun.
I would not expect women to respond in the same magnitude of feelings here but the basic principle still holds. If you look like an alpha and have a good profile they will want to meet you if you are 1/2 to 1 hour away.
PM: have you seen this site? http://hotchickswithdouchebags.com/
VERY, VERY edifying about how a young man (and old fogies like ourselves, but toned down) on how to dress to get a hot chick. Great Pics through and through.
Yeah, I’ve seen that website. It’s quite funny. I need tattoos and big biceps. Oh, and a fake tan. Alright, time to practice my duck lips.
Visualize this man with his arm candy in your mind every second:
Quit smoking, shave your head, pump some iron, and it will be you……………
I would also point out that the willingness to travel a long way to meet them might, in and of itself, be a DLV that, even though they don’t realize it, the women find to be a turn off. It would be interesting to see if he gets better results by suggesting they meet him half way or come up to see his town. Alternatively, he could say he is going to be in their city doing X on day Y would like to meet up afterwards.
I can totally feel the pain of someone who is “beyond the ‘burbs”. Not because I live there, as you can see from my name, but I see the patent absurdity TPM describes in -a lot- of profiles here in DC. The amount of “within 5 miles of” I see around DC just boils my blood. So much so that I have some snarky comments about all the ridiculous shit I see in profiles and one of my favorites is thusly- “Within 5 miles of- way to get out of your comfort zone! I’m -certain- that your soulmate is within 8000 meters of you at this very moment.”
It is grossly myopic and self-centered but in one of the worst cities in the universe for this personality, go figure…
Agreed. And it seems that the very same women who include this bit in their profiles will bang on a few paragraphs earlier about riding camels in the Sahara, skiing in the Alps, backpacking across the Brazilian rain forest….
But travel five – whole – miles away from the urban core?! (Shudder!) Sorry, no can do.
At minimum, it’s tone-deaf. More accurately, as you say, myopic and self-centered.