Social Online Dating

Layell said:
I've never been one to explain the joke, but I met my girlfriend princessofmusic through this website, we did some sprites for PS together. We've been dating since summer 2014.

I'm interested to hear how people are handling dating in this whole pandemic, are people more open to virtual dates and talks now? I would love to know.
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Yo it's been such a long time but I'm glad to see you on the forum again and hear that you two are still doing great, say hi to PoM for me!

I can't answer your question about pandemic dating since it doesn't apply to me but nowadays I can sort of relate to the circumstances of how you two met, I met my current girlfriend a while back through a small Fire Emblem/Smash community on Discord (which came together through mutual friends from Reddit of all things), we hit it off the first time we ended up talking to each other and now we've been together for about a year now. Unfortunately we weren't lucky enough to live close to each other and things like job circumstances and graduate school keep it from being easy to see each other in-person, but we fortunately have compatible plans for the future once some life obstacles are out of the way and have enjoyed plenty of visits over the past year, though of course the pandemic and travel risks have made such things uncertain and unlikely for the near future. Long-distance can have its challenges, but I'm always happy just to be spending time with her even online and we make sure to call or video chat as much as we can, and having better plans for the future to look forward to does make things easier.

Anyway feel free to find me on Discord if you wanna catch up more or play Smash or something, would love to hear about how you two have been doing or just talk more in general if you'd be interested!
 
internet said:
no not at all :psynervous:
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this bitch e-dated
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Wigglytuff said:
appearance: i wouldn't say i'm conventionally attractive; one of my grievances is that the snapchat filter that makes you look like a girl barely does a thing to my face. but i've been told that i'm "hot". pictures of me usually look pretty bad though (i do not have a Pretty Smile)
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Any dude who gets matches as such, especially with that generic-ass bio and being in a fairly rural area to boot, is obviously attractive. Congratulations.
 
Wigglytuff said:
Besides the implications of “first dates gone wrong”, she was wearing a MAGA hat in one of her pictures. This put me on guard because I’m 25% asian (sort of, that’s just the quickest way to estimate it) but I pretty much look like one full on so...trump supporter + knows how to throw a mean axe. I don’t know if she believes the “Chinese virus” crap but I didn’t want to find out firsthand so I just passed. Probably overly paranoid but you can’t be too careful these days
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dude you gotta lead with that part, the context turns "how is axe-throwing not a turn-on, men are weak" into "this guy very sensibly avoided hooking up with a fascist and becoming a hate crime statistic"

anyway so this isn't a one-liner: why leave when the conversation reaches its peak? if the point is to actually interact with a person it seems kinda counterproductive, like it'd make it harder to keep up the convo long-term
 
Wigglytuff said:
not gonna lie i probably wouldn't have sent a msg regardless of the MAGA hat. when you're as spoiled for choice as you are on tinder, you can be picky like that and not really lose out on anything. the axe + MAGA hat in conjunction made it a definite no but the fact that there's an axe in the equation makes things spooky on its own. perhaps a man with more balls than i will find out if her axe throwing skills are real


my friends didn't tell me the reasoning but i assume the mentality is that if you leave while the conversation is high, you leave with a good impression and you're also in a position to ask for their number/snap/whatever cause you want to finish the convo later or something. whereas if you leave when things are a low point, it's a little more muddy ig? sounds like some vapid pickup artist thing they found on youtube but hey, they've got a ton more experience with tinder hookups so i deferred to them. i think the point is to do that only on the first conversation, and then afterwards it's w/e since you've already made the first impression
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Nah attractive girls just match with 90-95% of guys. Guys tend to be more likely to match with girls that are less attractive than them if they think they can get a quick hookup, so even generically attractive girls are often matching with really good looking dudes who are just looking for a quickie.

There’s also wayyy more guys on these apps than girls and guys swipe a lot more. So girls just end up getting absolutely flooded with matches and messages from a ton of guys. You’re definitely solidly good looking if you’re getting those type of results on the app.
 
met my girlfriend through traditional e-dating means (discord) and met for the first time after 4 months and have met a handful of times (for at least a week at a time) despite both of us living in a different country entirely. have almost been together for a year and its wonderful! we have legitimate plans to live together and have the money to make regular trips to see each other until then. i think a lot of the time with traditional e-dating (usually meeting someone through discord or something similar) are usually destined to fail simply because there aren't any realistic plans to actually close the distance instead most of it is merely a fantasy. e-dating or LDR dating can absolutely work if it is realistic for the couple to meet often enough and actually have realistic plans to end up living together. most instances of e-dating doesn't work simply because these plans are not feasable and are often rooted within fantasy.

on a different note i agree with the popular opinion that tinder is a waste of time if you're looking for anything close to a serious relationship. i used tinder for 3 weeks (i got around like 110 matches or something close to that) and most of the time everyone is looking for the same thing, its very difficult (at least in my experience, im not sure if it differs with where you live) to find people who have similar interests to you. i personally don't recommend it unless you're just looking for a hookup, otherwise you're wasting your time.
 
Heavyweapons Mann said:
I’m still unsure of the whole online vs. offline dating. Mostly on which is better.
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Offline 100% unless you’re a very attractive, busy professional who doesn’t have much time to go out. It’s also good for LGBTQ dating and for shy people who are really good looking. Most guys are simply not attractive enough to do well in online dating. Most guys will just become super frustrated if they try to use online dating seriously. And the ones that can use online dating seriously with success are the guys who tend to already have a ton of options already.

It’s 10 times easier to build attraction by just talking to a person normally in person than it is to do it on an app.

https://medium.com/@worstonlinedate...ably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

Bumble is pretty similar too. Hinge is a little better for guys, but again still tough.
 
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until i quit dating apps three months ago (before lockdown happened actually) i used hinge, bumble and tinder quite extensively
edit: WARNING long post holy shit

tinder: the first one I used. Of the three I had the best ratio of good:boring dates on there, but it does mean sifting through a LOT of garbage. It also means having to develop a strategy to suss out the dud profiles before you invest too much time. Chatting to strangers and trying to find a rapport is tiring. I quit it as part of a general scaling back of using dating apps because they were lowering my mood, which resulted in several good conversations and dates going badly because I didn't have the energy for them. Which then made me feel worse. It's a horrible vicious cycle. Tinder seemed like the easiest to cut out because you literally have to make all the effort unless you're in the top 5-10% of men (which I am not).

bumble: the worst of the three, by far. You have to wait for women to message first only to get a "hey" 90% of the time, forcing you to take intiative AND change the mood. I struggled to get any sort of rapport going with anyone on there. The two dates I went on lacked any sort of chemistry. There's something about Bumble that completely kills any sort of mood for me. I quit this pretty early on. I also used it early on, before I had that much self-awareness

hinge: definitely a winner for me. It does an excellent job of allowing me to filter out low-effort users: you're forced to fill in 3 questions and 6 photos otherwise they can't respond. So if you don't see that it's an easy swipe left. And those who are putting in the bare minimum effort are pretty obvious. I got a lot of dates, but they were mostly terrible. However I had enough "success" meeting people that I could hone my approach a bit better and understand more what I want out of these apps (as well as understand what kinds of women I got on best with). It's definitely the best platform to meet people, but my lack of success finding someone I like is mostly down to two things:
1. the illusion that something better is always around the corner, which an app that brings 1000's of people to your fingertips is very good at tricking you into believing
2. london. everyone is too fucking busy. nobody is willing to spend time getting to know someone.

I'd say I was "active" on dating apps for about 2 years in all. Over that I learned a crucial lesson: my ability to meet someone I like has a lot to do with knowing what I want, and that's not something I learned until much later on. At one point I went through a long string of meh dates that varied from agonisingly boring to frustratingly nice, and I realised that part of the problem was jumping too quickly into dates. Which is something guys do because the dating world out of desperation, among other reasons. But once you actually start getting regular conversations with women you suddenly have to change your strategy to be more picky, which is something that took me a while to get used to.

Oddly enough I did develop a great amount of empathy for women who are dating - I'm not proud to say that I was resentful of women who weren't interested in me, and it's easy to wallow in the fact that men generally have to take more initiative still. The first step was not making those feelings their problem, but the feelings themselves are still problematic.

And then I had this one date where the girl wouldn't stop talking and I had to leave early, when I realised that she probably went on a date in good faith and just finds it as hard as I do. And yeah dating is unfair on men but that's kind of life. Not to mention that for women, dating still carries somewhat of an existential threat unfortunately. Emapthy is a hell of a drug. It finally allowed me to look past the systemic inequities of dating for the better.

One last thing I'll say in this rambling post is this: if you're not looking inward while dating, and instead blaming the state of play and/or others for your lack of success, you're doing it wrong. Of all the failed dates you're the common denominator. That's not to say that that woman you saw last week wasn't a complete tool, but you can't change that. What you can change instead is who you choose to meet, how you react to people and how you behave around them.
 
i quit dating apps because i became convinced that the best way to meet someone is through exposure: spending time with them. I don't believe in "the one" and dating apps place too much emphasis on initial compatibility, which is important but you gotta make it stick. So after two years without much luck and being able to meet women at work/shared interests I decided to just keep my eyes open around me day-to-day. Because I also think the compartmentalisation that dating apps encourage isn't great. By using them you it's easy to switch yourself off to making organic connections day-to-day, because you don't want to deal with the uncertainty and potential stress of it. And I'm wondering if those organic connections are ultimately more fruitful
 
cookie said:
i quit dating apps because i became convinced that the best way to meet someone is through exposure: spending time with them. I don't believe in "the one" and dating apps place too much emphasis on initial compatibility, which is important but you gotta make it stick. So after two years without much luck and being able to meet women at work/shared interests I decided to just keep my eyes open around me day-to-day. Because I also think the compartmentalisation that dating apps encourage isn't great. By using them you it's easy to switch yourself off to making organic connections day-to-day, because you don't want to deal with the uncertainty and potential stress of it. And I'm wondering if those organic connections are ultimately more fruitful
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I 100% agree with you here, and those organic connections can be made online as well, and that's how I've got into all the relationships I have (2, both currently active, i'm polyamorous). Both I knew for months before getting a crush on them, and then I told both and in one it turned out the other person was also falling for me, and another was more complicated but we're a thing now.
 
cookie said:
i quit dating apps because i became convinced that the best way to meet someone is through exposure: spending time with them. I don't believe in "the one" and dating apps place too much emphasis on initial compatibility, which is important but you gotta make it stick. So after two years without much luck and being able to meet women at work/shared interests I decided to just keep my eyes open around me day-to-day. Because I also think the compartmentalisation that dating apps encourage isn't great. By using them you it's easy to switch yourself off to making organic connections day-to-day, because you don't want to deal with the uncertainty and potential stress of it. And I'm wondering if those organic connections are ultimately more fruitful
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Most relationships start through mutual friends. I think that is the case even now with dating apps. It’s simply easier to make solid connections when you have common friends and interests, and when there isn’t pressure to see if there is comparability. I remember reading a study that the relationships that come from online tend to last less long as well. If you meet via online dating, there could always be the thought in the back of the mind that they can always meet another person if this relationship does not work out.

That said, I like using dating apps because they give me good practice for in person. In person is like 5x easier (and I have decent pictures too), so doing well on online dating helps me do better in person. I didn’t have much experience in dating before using online dating, so it definitely helped me. In general though, I think online dating is more suited towards kinda shy, but really good looking dudes who want to hook up with some girls without going to a bar/club. Which is a really small % of the population, but I guess it’s good for them lol.
 
Thought I'd share a story here!

I met my boyfriend during my time staffing for SmashCords, a large network of Smash Bros Discord servers. Meeting him was a pretty weird twist of fate, honestly. Never imagined I'd find a boyfriend on Discord. I helped a friend by filling in as staff in the Piranha Plant Discord after the initial hype caused a bunch to lose interest. I forgot why he asked me, but I did have staffing experience during the Wii U era of Pokken Arena, so maybe it was cus of that? I've been on a few other spots but nothing too serious at the time, but hey.

Thanks to this, I got access to Smash Assembly, which is where the magic happened. Eventually, Terry Bogard got revealed and I was hyped, so I was able to be a part of the initial staff for the character server through the hub. I contributed heavily to the metagame sections of the new Terry Discord, making a large spreadsheet among other bits. He happened to also like SNK games (way more than I do, though), so we started chatting. Eventually, it turned out we had very similar likes and dislikes, and well, I started crushing on him. He was pretty much the perfect match: super understanding, mature, smart and was willing to have a laugh.

So because I had the dating experience of a small pebble, I went and just...directly asked him. He's a bit oblivious at times, and I'm not the type to drop hints and get myself frustrated. It was a bit surprising to him as there's a bit of an age gap between us, but after thinking about it we gave it a shot. Best decision we ever made together: we're approaching a year since we started dating and it's been absolutely incredible. He was wanting to meet me but COVID-19 decided to elbow drop us; he's Canadian, so we have to deal with the long-distance factor for a bit longer. He understands some of the...ordeals I went through as a child that make me have a crippling fear of sex and all that, and it's a huge load off my mind. We tend to play games together and run events in my personal server, new experiences almost every day. It's so surreal.

Words cannot express how much I love him.
 
Meanwhile, here I am over a year later and I'm still right where I started. :fukyu:

I'm sick of the platitudes and Just-World blame game at this point. No, it's not me. Literally what the fuck else can I fucking do? Am I that hideously ugly? I'm not overweight, my face isn't deformed among other things; I don't think I'm that bad looking and I take care of myself. I go out and nobody ever takes any interest in me. I'd like to think I'm a kind and decent person, but the fact of the matter is my personality, real or imagined, is completely irrelevant if nobody is ever willing to take any time getting to know me in the first place. There is only so much I can do on my end and I'm doing absolutely fucking all of it. Nothing works. It doesn't matter what I do.

I even started resorting to Reddit this weekend to further expand my reach and... unsurprisingly, still nothing. I'm so fucking tired of this shit, I did nothing to deserve this fate of crippling loneliness and isolation. It's very difficult to not feel incredibly bitter about everything when people constantly treat you as nothing. When do I get my prize for being the better man and continuing to bury my feelings, putting on a brave face, and treating people with respect and dignity that they do nothing but deny me in return? Why even try when failure is predetermined? Honestly, I've only hurt myself more than years prior when I simply didn't bother and just sat at home mashing out video games with all my free time. If nothing works anyway, trying is a waste of time and false hope is nothing but suicide fuel.

I'm not a model-tier man, so online dating doesn't work for me at all, but the outside world doesn't seem much better either. Only difference is people IRL give me a cursory smile before moving on and pretending I don't exist.
 
99% it doesnt work. It might seem to work for a time and then you discover it doesn't. For the people who are long distance and haven't met, trust me- do not make ANY judgements until you have time in person. No matter what is said or felt or promised, the dynamic is entirely different in person pretty much always. Its a lot easier to edit nuances online. Which isn't to say that people are deceptive. This take isnt a cynical one; but be aware, what you experience online are curated 'snapshots' (literally and figuratively) of who a person truly is. And that doesn't always mean you're being lied to. That means that people often don't know themselves well enough in general life to accurately portray themselves online to begin with. There are just too many personal nuances.

I am of the mind that you cannot look for love or romance and be successful. Not online or irl. It just happens. One day you meet a person and you sort of just click. The nuances line up. The time happens to be right. And the harsh truth is: this doesnt happen to everyone. Love and romance isnt for everyone. Its a rare thing and people need to stop telling others that there is someone for everyone. Its cruel. Especially to people who never find anyone or are always ending up unhappy.

You should look for friends and hobbies. Thats something anyone can be successful with. People look for love for happiness and a sense of completeness and companionship. All of these things can be found among friends. And the nuances of friendship are free of the double edged nature of romance.

The focus needs to be on yourself as an individual first, basically. Online dating is truly not a good thing.
 
Anyone know any good apps/sites that are strictly video chat, no text chat?

I've been using The Intro, which is pretty much exactly what I'm after, but it's extremely UK-centric, so I don't think I'm going to get anywhere with it, given that I live on the other side of the planet.

I've tried Blindlee with no luck, I assume it just has too few users, and I think there are some design choices that could be tweaked.
 
StarkGod said:
For the people who are long distance and haven't met, trust me- do not make ANY judgements until you have time in person. No matter what is said or felt or promised, the dynamic is entirely different in person pretty much always. Its a lot easier to edit nuances online. Which isn't to say that people are deceptive. This take isnt a cynical one; but be aware, what you experience online are curated 'snapshots' (literally and figuratively) of who a person truly is. And that doesn't always mean you're being lied to. That means that people often don't know themselves well enough in general life to accurately portray themselves online to begin with. There are just too many personal nuances.
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That sounds exactly like you're saying people are deceptive. Nonetheless, seeing someone in 3D is different than seeing them in 2D. You can't smell someone through the Internet, you can't touch them. You can at least hear their voice, I suppose, but it's not quite the same au naturel versus digitized and transmitted. You don't get a good sense of their body language and mannerisms or how they act in the company of anyone besides yourself. That stuff matters even when two people are being completely genuine with one another.

To that point, I think online many people (women especially) are way too picky with their initial screening criteria.
 
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