Power up!
The internet dating treadmill is masochism for men. And that’s a fetish box I didn’t check.
There are no shortcuts to standing out; attracting women requires taking risks. As clicking and typing gets a danger score of zero, expect abysmal returns on your time in comparison to making a splash in person.
Most attractive women that dabble in online dating do so for a cheap ego boost. This vampirism comes at the expense of men that are using the site for its stated purpose. As the balance of women are mostly shut-ins, whales, devoted mothers, and snaggle-tooth wildebeests, connecting with an upper-scale woman is a fool’s game. I’ll expand on that later. First let’s explore the fundamental weaknesses of online dating.
1. Inflated male competition
Lack of transparency is inevitable as dating sites are forced to play dirty in order to stay competitive. Female to male ratios are a cinch to manipulate. Admins create fake girl-next-door profiles, send token messages, prune male accounts with misandric harassment policies to keep female numbers up, etc. Anything to keep up the illusion of a playing field comparable to the offline world flies.
Against all odds, men crawl over each other for a date. The reason is simple: real approaching takes courage, especially in a rape hysteria culture where men are perceived as suspects until proven otherwise.
2. Nobody takes it seriously (due to little personal investment)
Firing off a stack of messages in order to generate a few responses didn’t seem so bad at first. That is until I realized I’m a soul sloppily affixed to a body of decaying meat, wasting my best years in front of a flickering screen that is a poor facsimile of substance.
Soon I became the laziest of user on PlentyofWhales, focusing on offline game as the occasional woman messaged me first. At this point I had part-way given up on online dating, but saw the merit in leaving a trap baited as it wasn’t a time sink. Or so I thought. Turns out it was still more effort than it was worth.
After filtering out prospects that were reaching out of their league, the occasional stunner surfaced. Now I realize that these women were of the slipperiest kind since they were not only desirable but also willing to take initiative.
After batting around POF messages, doing MSN chats, and then sometimes graduating to the phone, more often than not it was a dead end. I lost interest, they did, or it was mutual. Although I accept some dropped off due to a perceived lack of connection, I suspect many weren’t serious about meeting with guys they chanced upon online in first place. The association was a step removed from their reality, as if it were a lab behavior experiment. As flaking has become an epidemic, the two steps forward one step back shuffle led me to my current phase of avoiding the site altogether.
3. Ego boost seeking babes
Desirable women, whom have no short of suitors, have little incentive to sign up for a dating site. If they do their inbox is flooded with messages from a diverse array of eager men: stodgy and barely literate, clever but too quirky, middle-aged pipe-smoking Harley-riders, cap-lock typing shirtless hoodlums, etc. These aren’t my judgments but an estimation of hers. With so many choices her hypergamy is thrust into overdrive. Men that could win her over in the flesh are ignored as she axes all but the top applicants within seconds.
Addicted to the rush, the daily ritual of checking her mail becomes less about finding a suitable man and more about appeasing her narcissistic desire for attention. Having so many options is actually a crutch because she sees no reason to act now as somebody better is bound to be around the corner. Online dating officially becomes like FarmVille or The Sims: an amusing distraction limited to the virtual realm.
At this point, if she’s of the malicious type, she will move on to trolling low-status men. She’ll unceremoniously reject nice guys, attempting to reaffirm her bias that they’re all thinly disguised jerks. When some of the less savvy respond with boorish rants, she gets ammo to gossip about with her friends. If an author, she may even post the responses on Jezebel, Buzzfeed or her pink-themed blog, while decrying the nice guys, freaks, and creeps her majesty is surrounded by. What she said to spark the coarse reactions is always omitted.
Later, her increasingly peevish girlfriend gets an earful of her first world problems. This is when the bragging and whinging commences. On one hand she trumpets that so many men want her, while on the other she complains that they don’t meet up to her 67 item long checklist of criteria. In an act of suspended logic she concludes “where are all the good men?” Bored by the chore of shooing away XY peasants she deletes her dating account along with hundreds of messages that have gathered in her inbox while she neglected it.
Bored, depressed and slightly buzzed on tequila shots, her criminally-minded ex-boyfriend texts her at 11pm. Catching her at a weak point by mere chance she calls him over. They barely get through one episode of Breaking Bad before moving the operation to the bedroom for some unhinged monkey sex.
She’s effectively wasted the time of perhaps hundreds of men without feeling an ounce of guilt.
–Photo: marimoon/Flickr
