This is not the fault of the women, however. Guys getting upset that women aren’t responding at all are unfortunately probably also the type that do the spamming. A free online dating site is going to be heavily biased in favor of a) women* and b) extra good looking men. Getting mad that you, a perfectly nice looking guy and a nice guy, to boot, aren’t drawing attention in that context is a failure to understand the arena. Use a pay dating site, network through friends, join local meetup groups of interest and perhaps you will meet someone there (or a friend of someone there).

*biased in favor of women in the sense that women are much more likely to get a response to messages, the awfulness they have to wade through to for that benefit is arguably not worth it. Also note that “much more likely” doesn’t mean “definitely”. I know plenty of women who are attractive, and intelligent, and outgoing, but got not responses when they messaged people on OKC.

TLDR: OKC is a terrible place for most people to find what they want.

So I guess my main contribution to the conversation at the moment is to just add, in case anybody is wondering: men looking for men are also quite likely to not respond when messaged by men.

A lot of guys will claim that the reason women get angry at messages like this guy’s first one is because they hate sex and hate men and especially hate male sexuality.

I suspect that if a woman on OKC is not interested in men, sex, or sex with men, she will indicate this with something less oblique than “I’m not looking for casual sex.” Something more like “I’m not interested in sex” or “looking for a woman” or whatever.

It should be implied, but too often isn’t; someone who says it explicitly is making clear that they understand it.

It’s a problem with the way online dating works. Men must send mass messages. Even the good, nice, response-worthy men. It really is the best way to get results. This results in women getting too many messages to reply, getting annoyed, and pissed off. They then, don’t reply to an inbox full of thousands of copy pasted messages. This leads to men not getting enough replies, which furthers the need to send more mass messages and play the “numbers game” as you put it. They have no other choice. It’s a never ending cycle.

That’s not even internally consistent. If they’ve already gotten thousands of unread form letters, then sending them even more form letters isn’t going to encourage them to work through the backlog.

I’m 10 years out of the on-line dating pool, so I don’t know what things are like now. But back in my day, the best-known services were Yahoo personals and match.com, and they were both horrible cesspits of spam and inanity. The trick was to look for lesser-known services with fewer members. I had the best luck with Spring Street Personals. They’re not around anymore, but they advertised on various lefty websites – I found out about them through salon.com – and they charged you a quarter to initiate contact with someone, which blocked most of the mass mailings. The response rate wasn’t that bad; I was sending 1-2 initial messages a week and averaging 1 meet-for-coffee a month.

There are probably similar services around today. If there aren’t, then keep in mind that there are lots of unattached women who want to be in relationships, so they must be trying something. Back in the pre-Internet days they’d get their friends and relatives to set them up, or talk to people at invitation-only parties; maybe they’ve gone back to that?

@Brian Yee

Also, my comment may get deleted for disagreeing with you

No. I do not delete comments “for disagreeing.” You may see my comment policy here.

but in my opinion, deleting well written, polite comments is just as bad as your example where the guy didn’t take kindly to your advice about casual sex.

Absolutely not, and that is a ludicrous equivocation. One involves pestering and being rude to a person for politely telling you that you have been pestering and being rude to them. The other involves deleting comments. I do not have an ethical obligation to publish comments from you or anyone else. I do have an ethical obligation to treat people courteously and kindly unless I have a good reason not to. This OkCupid guy was not courteous or kind, even though his message seemed polite enough on the surface.

The bottom line is if men took your advice, they would fail to get dates.

Then I’m very curious how all my male friends and partners who use OkCupid have not only not failed to get dates, but have in fact gotten many.

Also, if the only way to get dates is to irritate the shit out of people, then, sorry, but you need to find another way to get dates.

@ hereandreal, thanks for asking!

I think I mentioned a couple of times that I’m never doing online dating again. I didn’t feel comfortable with it, everything I wrote seemed cliche and I was terrified putting myself out there in such a personal way that someone I knew would read my profile and judge me for it.

My initial question was never intended to help me find anyone online, more like “what the hell did I do wrong?”. Was there some formula that makes people respond? The answer just isn’t common interests, that’s absolute total crap, I’m sorry but it is and as AhmNee says demographics of people respond to certain things and I was curious as to what I was doing wrong with online dating.

I wasn’t connecting with women online but clearly others do. I also mentioned earlier that in an NPR story they said that if a guy put an emoticon in his profile he was 60 something percent less likely to get a response. Things like that made me wonder if there were other things I was doing wrong that meant people I felt I had a lot in common with, didn’t respond. Were my messages too long? Too short? Did I not compliment her enough?

AND you’ll notice I’m not blaming anyone other than ME here!!! I was curious as to what makes people respond to another person online?

But to answer your question as to what kind of person I’m looking for? I was/am hoping to find someone not exactly like me, someone who shares some common interests but also someone who I could learn from and they could learn from me if they wanted to. I want someone to compliment me, not be like me. Maybe there is something she’s not good at that I am and things I’m not good at that she is… so together we are pretty awesome!

I would like to meet someone reliable, honest and not flakey. Someone who is creative and likes the outdoors. But like I said, someone with interests OTHER than mine so I can learn from them is important to me too. Someone earlier mentioned they would be interested in someone who also liked Led Zeppelin for me I’d like to meet someone who liked a completely different genre of music and I could learn about it. I once dated a classical pianist and learnt all about classical music and loved it. I dated a stand up comic and learned a lot about comedy. My last girlfriend was a tattoo artist and I loved learning about the creative process she would go through and see the amazing work she would do every day.

I don’t want someone who is female version of myself, common interests are somewhat important to me but what’s more important to me are common values. Honesty, Integrity, Kindness to people and animals…

The idea of online dating was that I could find someone with some similar interests but also learn from them… it just didn’t work out for me so I’m back to the more traditional dating methods!

Hope that answers your question… but again… my question was more philosophical in nature around what makes some people more successful at online dating and others (like me) complete failures.

Mass copy-pasted messages produces MUCH better results than writing long personalized messages for each one.

Of course, this depends on how you define “results” and whether you have any other goal than simply to get as many women as possible to respond to you.

The thing is, in a sea of one line (or half line) messages, the even slightly longer, more personalized messages actually do stand out a bit, in my experience. When I was using online dating sites, I read all messages that went past the preview (i.e., were more than 2 lines) and were not obviously copied and pasted. Some were from people I thought I might have a connection with, and I usually wrote back to them. Some weren’t, and I usually didn’t. I always appreciated the more personalized messages, though. BUT – whether I chose to write back or not was just that – my choice. No one is, by default, “response-worthy,” and it’s exactly that kind of attitude that I think prompts so many of the angry and abusive messages in response to not getting a reply or getting a “no thanks” reply. To be clear, I’m not saying you write those types of messages. I do think, however, that your comment is indicative of an attitude held by some that they are, for whatever reason (good looking, wealthy, polite, “nice guy”), entitled to a response. No one is entitled to a response, and it is 100% up to the recipient of a message to decide how “response-worthy” any individual message/massager is to them.