Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
There's a difference between someone sharing all of your interests, and someone who is willing to tolerate all of your interests. Even if they don't share the same hobbies, you don't want to date someone who fundamentally is unwilling to accept a part of you. If someone is going to be scared off by me liking anime, I want to scare them off instantly, not 5 dates later when they find out. Now, granted, there is some middle ground where some people might be willing to accept anime in someone who they already know is sane and not a pedophile but would screen it off on a stranger, but that still indicates some level of judgemental that I personally would rather filter out too.
Yes, this. This is who I am, this is who I deliberately signaled that I am. The kind of person I filtered for is someone who not only doesn't have a problem with this, but sees it as a positive. The woman who I eventually found and married is the kind of woman who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much. We have literally never gone out on a restaurant date just the two of us, because neither of us enjoys that environment and only go in a group when socially pressured by friends and family. When given the choice, we usually stay home and play games, where we both want to be.
Positives and negatives are subjective and high variance. And ultimately are scored from the single unique perspective of the person you end up with. They are not averaged. Your value as a romantic partner is not the average value ascribed to you by women collectively, but the value from the perception of the one person you actually end up with. So if you have niche interests and traits with high variance, where rather than everyone slightly disliking them, some people strongly dislike them and other rarer people strongly like them, then you want to filter for and find the people who like them, and then they become positive traits.
I understand what you're saying, and I'm happy for you, but GP was giving generalized advice. Like I said, most people aren't that selective. I can't imagine giving someone dating advice that consists of "list all your fringe interests that won't impress women at best and turn them off at worst and plug away for years with little success in the hopes of attracting your one true love". It's not what most people are looking for. And while I understand not wanting to get too involved before finding out it's a dealbreaker, it's not like you're going to keep it a secret. Like I said in my post, when you're online dating, you are your profile, and you're going to be your profile until she meets you in person. The profile is to get your foot in the door; after you actually meet, you're a real person, and discussing hobbies and interests is fair game for a first date, and you can tell her whatever you want on that front. And if you think that one date is too much of an investment to be worth the risk, then online dating just isn't for you, period.
Nobody is giving that advice. They are saying "if you like something, it's fine to put it in your profile", because they believe (correctly imo) that those who are put off by that are people you don't want to date anyway. There's no need to obsessively list everything which might be a red flag for someone somewhere, the point is to just be yourself and not worry about those who don't like that.
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I thought my girlfriend and I were the most introverted couple out there, but we like going to restaurants and visiting scenic sites. Though I admit, there's a lot of "watch youtube on the couch."
It's interesting that a lot of dating advice is
"be attractive""be extraverted", and introverts have a hard time dating. I wonder at times how introverted women are meeting men. Perhaps the answer is "they aren't"; I have a theory that introverted women make up a majority of the "women going their own way" and not dating. I don't know that I've ever dated, or seriously considered dating, or asked out, a woman I would consider extraverted, and I wonder at times whether this contributed to my limited success back when I was on the market.Which is weird because you would think that online dating would be the perfect environment for introverts. I never was able to work up the courage to ask out a girl in real life. I could never quite tell when it would be creepy and unwelcome and when it would be fine, so I always erred on the side of caution. But online dating everyone is there explicitly for the purpose of meeting people and can ghost you the instant they feel uncomfortable, so I didn't have to worry about that and could just be honest about being attracted to people. And can do it from the comfort of my home and not have to go outside and meet people in real life and do public social stuff with lots of people when I'm trying to have a one on one conversation.
Maybe the issue is that most of the shy introverted women get scared off by the tons of attention and unsolicited dick pics from creepy guys even online, and then the shy introverted men are left in a sea of women who have thick enough skins to stay anyway.
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