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Does anyone have any good links to blogs or posts about how to use dating apps optimally? I figure someone has this stuff figured out
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Contrarian take: if your goal is to actually find a soul mate and not just a number of short flings, don't do this. Be yourself, aggressively. DO mention your less conventional hobbies like anime on your profile, unapologetically. Be creative and unique and weird, in a way that turns off almost everyone EXCEPT for that rare person who actually likes who you are.
I did this for several years, and 90%+ of the women I messaged ignored me completely. I barely got any responses, and the conversations I did have usually didn't lead anywhere since I was a weird goofball. And then a girl who had D&D listed in her bio responded positively to my D&D inspired pickup line and we dated for several years before eventually getting married. And now we stay at home playing board games and playing with cats instead of having to do stupid things like go hiking or eating at restaurants the way I would if I had managed to convince a normal girl to date me.
Your advice is excellent for maximizing engagement. But you will spend a lot of time dating a lot of average people who like average things if you take it too far. Obviously some of your advice is just general good advice for emphasizing your positive traits that you already have and doesn't run into this issue. But I think being authentic in a negative way (by normie standards) is actually useful to help filter out the normies and find someone else who shares your quirks.
I still would avoid obvious icky hobbies on a dating profile. Anime has a very strong association with porn, child porn, and childishness. Video games tend to send immature and irresponsible signals. If you have a weird hobby that’s fairly active, creative, or social, fine. But the goal here is to get a woman to want to take a chance on you. It’s like searching for a job in a sense — anything that would make a woman hesitant to hit the “buy” button is probably not a good idea. One in a thousand find a gamer girl. But at the cost quite often of having hundreds of women see anime and gaming in the bio and deciding to not engage.
This is the point. It's not that for each random woman who sees your profile you roll a random die and there's a 99% chance you lose her interest. It's that for each woman when she was born and grew up life rolled a random die and there's a 99% chance that she became the kind of person who would lose interest in a man who likes anime and video games. If you want to date a woman who hates anime and videogames then I suppose you might consider scaring her off to be a bad thing, but if you want to find that gamer girl then the normie woman is an obstacle. A waste of your time. Instead of spending hours, days, years of your life sending messages and spending time with women who would have been scared off by videogames and anime but you kept by playing it cool, you could instead scare them all off and then the only people left are the gamer girls.
You don't have time to date 1000 women. If you're some super hot gigachad I suppose you could if you go on a brand new date every day for three years without breaks or repeats. But realistically, that's way too many. But if you scare 99% of them off (and not randomly, you're scaring the worst 99% off) you DO have time to message and date the remaining 10 until you find the perfect one in a thousand.
But if you don’t get any hits or very few because your “about me” is full of anime and gaming, im assuming that this is a major part of your life, much like I’d assume that someone who mentions golf on their profile has golf as a major part of their life, and probably will spend most weekends on the course. Someone who’s into gaming enough to mention it on a dating profile is likely going to game at least 25 hours a week, and maybe more. If I’m looking for a person I might want to marry, I don’t see that in a guy who spends most of his free time with a controller in his hands. And I do like gaming, I just don’t want my life to consist of trying to squeeze in all the other stuff around the hobbies of gaming and anime.
Again, these are correct signals that I am sending intentionally. This IS a major part of my life. I DO spend at least 25 hours a week on anime and games. If you are looking to do "all the other stuff" that isn't gaming and anime and squeeze it around then you're not my 1 in 1000 and I don't want to marry you. That just sounds like a recipe for constant conflict and strife. While some amount of compromise is important in a relationship, and you should sometimes do things the other person wants to do for their sake, the less it's necessary because you both want the same things, the better. If one person expects to go out and do things all the time and the other wants to stay home all the time then at any point in time only one of them is getting their way. So if anyone sees this and realizes that I'm not the right person for them because I'm literally not the right person for them then good, we can both save some time and try to find someone more compatible. In practice, this did turn into me getting very few hits for precisely that reason. Most women saw my profile, made this assumption about me (correctly), they thought this was a negative trait, and then they didn't want to talk to me. Mission accomplished.
Because one did want to talk to me. Instead of dating and/or marrying someone like that, I found someone with whom I get to keep doing videogames and anime and my wife will do them with me. Well, she doesn't care for anime that much, but we play lots of games together. Sometimes we're just sitting next to each other playing completely separate games and she'll giggle as the monsters die and it's adorable. And sometimes she'll want to go somewhere and do something and I'll suck it up and go because it's not very often, because she's mostly like me and genuinely wants to be at home most of the time.
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