Glad I just met my future wife at work and never had to deal with the online dating scene. Sounds like a goddamn nightmare.
My guess is that online dating and social media has made it better for LBGT and other people who are looking for something non-traditional and made it harder for people looking for a very traditional relationship because people have more options now and can draw upon a wider pool of possible matches.
Yeah I might try it again this winter. I don’t really get myself into situations as a 30yo+ anymore to meet new people outside of work right now.
I also don’t really care that much if I meet someone which does provide inertia
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I met my current gf of 3 years on Hinge and had pretty good success using online dating for about a year leading up to it (and I mean success as in it was a reasonable way to meet cool people, not as in I was getting a bunch of sex).
I think expectations are key–I used the dating apps as an ice breaker, rather than a conversation, and if we hadn’t scheduled an in-person meet-up within 10 or so messages I’d just move on. The result was like an improved version of meeting girls at bars because we were still mostly strangers but we’d both already expressed some sort of interest in each other before meeting.
Still, I had tons of shitty first dates, got ghosted a couple times (not as many times as I thought I’d be), and had a handful of decent 2nd, 3rd, and more dates before meeting my current partner. My goal was one date a week, whether it was with someone new or was a repeat date with someone I’d met before. I probably ended up doing more like one date every other week, but that was fine.
Edit: should mention that this was as a ~30yo primarily dating women in their late 20s in a major metropolitan area. Ymmv
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Outside of my personal experience I can see a lot of negatives with online dating, like I get all the frustration people have with it. I think backlash against it tends to get a little incel-y though. The positives outweigh the negatives.
Also sorry for the triple post but I forgot about this thread! You all gave me some good advice in here maybe a year and a half ago. Good stuff.
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Porn addiction doesn’t exist. It’s right wing Christian made up bs. There is no actual research to support its real.
Online dating is great is you just accept rejection is part of it. Like suck outs in poker. It’s built in. It’s the PLO of social interactions. 
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Really? I admit that I know nothing about it, but I have heard it discussed and it seems plausible, so I assumed it was a thing.
Nope. It’s not recognized by any major medical or psychological organization.
That’s not to say some people are not negatively effected by it. They clearly are. But it’s not an addiction.
Is there a good term to use instead of “porn addiction”? I think most people are using the term to refer to the various negative effects and whether or not the individual is technically “addicted” is not that important.
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It’s is important though. It medicalizes a social phenomenon. This gives religious nuts extra leverage to restrict access and harm sex workers
It also puts focus on solutions that can’t work. If people are over reliant on porn the cause is likely social anxiety or other issues. Those should be the focus not dumb things like “detoxing” from porn which is an lol thing that people argue for.
I say all this while agreeing many people should generally watch less porn.
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There is such a thing as impulse control disorder. Why can’t excessive porn watching sometimes fall under that rubric?
I’ve found that watching porn is best in moderation. Once a day for a few minutes is usually enough for me.
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“Milquetoast centrist seeking Nancy Pelosi lookalike. Can provide pantsuit.”
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AFAIK no porn related stuff in DSM but porn impulse control disorder is in ICD 11
Paging @Fossilkid93 to the thread, stat
There’s nobody on the internet who’s gotten more out of online dating AND can articulate it well.
I got very angry that his current gf has been such a great relationship for him…. It deprives us all of some legendary trip reports. Scour the online dating thread in OOT on 2p2 from a few years ago to see more.
Like I tell my married friends, their happiness only serves to highlight the inadequacies in my own relationships.
Hahahaha
…Sigh
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I feel like Gen-Xers and old Millennials have weird hangups about online dating. Like they’re internet-savvy enough to know how to do online dating but also they feel self-conscious about it because they think you’re a weird nerd if you meet partners online. I know so many happy couples my age who met via online dating and they’re always defensive about it.
Gen Z probably is going to take it in stride that this is how things are done, that’s how their parents met.
idk, my great-grandparents met when my great-grandma posted great-grandpa’s bail in a Canadian jail just like in Jackie Brown. Finding someone online is probably 100x healthier than hooking up with someone at your church or at the local bar like people used to do.
A throwaway line in my Bumble profile is “I’m willing to lie to your parents, and say we met at Whole Foods.”
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I can never pass up a chance to discuss online dating haha.
For me it was a massive net positive, but I can see both sides of it.
I was pretty shy in my teens and early 20s and can’t imagine how I would’ve met any type of decent partner if not for online dating. There were also lots of growing pains early in my online dating experience. I feel way more comfortable around women now and in social settings where I don’t already know the person/group ahead of time, but without online dating, I would have never gotten that experience. And as a poker player, I wouldn’t have been meeting any women organically so I’m fairly certain that I’d probably be single now or maybe with a crappy partner.
The experience varies massively based on your location though, so I could see it being super frustrating if you’re stuck in an area that isn’t great for it. Like if I had to use it in Omaha, then I’d be screwed. I had the luxury of using it in a lot of places where the experiences were a lot better and the matches flowing much more plentifully (New Zealand, Montreal, France, Mexico, etc.).
As others have pointed out, I think online dating can work out extremely well, I think a lot of times there are incongruencies with what people are expecting from it, and that can be the source of frustration. I always tried to be perfectly up front with what I was looking for: a LTR, someone to hang out with while I was in the city a short-time, sometimes I even straight up said I was looking for a fuck buddy. I can imagine though, that a lot of people hide their intentions.
Using my relationship as an example. I think the fact that I’d been on 100+ first dates over the previous couple years made me super confident that I’d met someone special when I found my girlfriend. She’s not really jealous, so I’ll tell her some of my dating stories. When I met her, she was actually #5 out of a 6 date in 3 day dating binge I was on (b/c I was returning to CDMX and had been heavily pipelining before arriving).
So you can look at in 2 ways. Yes, if someone isn’t a perfect match, there are always other options, BUT, if you’re truly looking for a LTR and have the luxury of going on a ton of first dates, then you can feel a lot more confident in your eventual match.
I’d rather my partner had been going out with lots of guys before me and then decided “hey, this guys is pretty great”, rather than had few options and just settled for me b/c there was nothing else.
I think in traditional dating, this can happen a lot. It’s just a relationship of convenience, b/c the two aren’t meeting that many partners so they say “meh, this partner’s pretty decent, so why not?”. Theoretically, online dating should be a huge boon for overall relationship quality b/c you could cycle through a lot of first dates and then hopefully settle with one of the better first dates. In practice though, it doesn’t work that efficiently, but I do think there’s a lot of merit to the idea.
Sorry for the rant, that was probably a quarter as long as it could’ve been though lol
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I used a variation of this for awhile. It’s not a great line, but at least it’s different and could potentially be a hook for a match to comment on.
I feel like 90% of profiles just say boring stuff like “I like tacos and travel”, “I’m equally happy going out or staying in and watching Netflix”. BS that everyone’s saying so you might as well have written nothing.
I tried to personalize my profile as much as possible, inject humor, and try to include lots of little hooks. I also went with a more polarizing, rather than generic, profile b/c I wanted to meet similar girls. I’m more introverted and can talk forever about certain subjects, but hate small talk, so I prefer someone that shares interest in yoga/meditation/mindfulness, learning languages, etc. So focused on that stuff in my profile.