Are there any GOOD dating sites?

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(spam removed by TallyMan)

POF has some real losers on it. It matched me up with a woman in Marysville (CA) who said she does hard drugs more than 3 times a week. Uh, no thanks. POF has no way of deleting your profile, either. You can HIDE it, but not DELETE it. POF will still send you emails. Until recently, POF mail had your password, UNENCRYPTED, at the top of every email. Any dating site that would do that is run by morons, and sure enough somebody hacked into POF and tried to download their username/password list. Apparently they only got the first 350 names. It was some kid who wanted to be hired as a "security consultant" (too much time reading old hacker texts, nobody gets away with that anymore). He also burrowed into eHarmony. After that, POF randomly changed everybody's password and stopped emailing people their unencrypted passwords 3 times a week. It made me FURIOUS that it took a hack to get them to stop doing what every sysadmin with three brain cells knows NEVER to do. So POF is gone.

I like OKCupid. It has some really great women on there. They DO have really high standards though. If you're fat, no dice. If you admit to ANY disability, forget it. Took me a while to figure that out.

Lavalife, back when they were Webpersonals, was wonderful. They got bought out by a huge corporation that runs phone chat lines, and the website was left to rot. Mostly fake profiles now.

Match.com was wonderful in the early years, when it was run from San Francisco. It has been bought and sold several times since then, and the aim of the current owners seems to be to milk it for cash. You can pay upwards of $50 a month to maintain a profile. With people's credit cards drying up, I think Match.com is a goner within a few years.

What else? eHarmony is useless, it's geared towards getting people married, well what if you don't want marriage? Their questionnaire is a PITA too. So is OKC's, but at least it's optional. Craigslist is FULL of fake ads, mainly Russian mobsters trolling for credit card numbers. Compose a reply with all your heart and wind up with what I call "Chatty Cathy" emails (because of their bizarre trying-to-be-informal tone that's obviously the result of non-Americans channeling the TV show Friends) that direct you to a website that asks for a credit card to view "pictures". The card is then drained. There's more and more Nigerian scams too-they will tell you, after a short interval, that they need money to get out of some African country (or to get a relative out) which you can wire to them. You will of course never see it again. Scamming is Nigeria's second largest source of domestic income, right behind oil! CL, not worth it.

some good observations.

The first line of my okc reads: "for the past 22 years i've expended too much energy trying to fit into society, so i quit trying"
I've never received a message since that edit, its been that way for a year or so.

my sister once seriously suggested that i try finding a russian bride.. i didn't think that was funny.

BTW OKCupid has been bought by Match.com

(spam removed by TallyMan)

Why this thread has a lot of 1-post users?

Meeting women is not the problem - hell, i can register anywhere, copy-paste a few letters with shallow texts with a few lies (like most guys seems to be doing) and get a date tomorrow. Finding someone you can live with - THAT is the problem.




Probably is, but it seriously needs to be fixed. I tried browsing around there a few days ago, then suddenly it dumped variables (including the database password) like it did a few months ago.




Or he is lying, or not - in which case it does not automatically mean that girls throw themselves over anyone who joins.

There is lots of chemistry and "game" going on at dating sites, if you are an Aspie - do not expect much from joining up.
As for commercial vs non-commercial: the quality does not improve if you pay for membership.

I've tried many many dating sites (and I'm even a forum moderator on one), and it's been a slightly worse than pathetic experience. I've met nine girls. The first one turned out to be an arsonist. I subsequently met a phony bank teller, a newspaper columnist who wanted me to write her column for her, a phony kidnap victim....it gets worse.

The worst part, though, is that the mainstream dating sites are....well, too mainstream. The women only care about booze and babies, and if you're not into that, they will try to CHANGE you.

There are smaller sites, more specialized sites, but the drawback to those is that they have fewer members, and nobody within 897,000 miles of me.

I found a smaller "geek" themed site and subscribed. Initially, I did relatively well at getting responses, and even met a few promising girls... Who lived three-thousand miles away. I also met a girl who demanded I talk to her on the phone from the time I got off work until after my normal bedtime every day, told me she loved me before we ever met in person, and threatened suicide when I told her I didn't want to meet her. Other than that, I've gotten a few naked pictures, some dirty text messages, and a couple of random gifts in the mail, but no dates.

As far as the bigger dating sites go, I've found that unless you're a perfect ten in the looks department (or lie a lot), it's nearly impossible to get a response.

Needless to say, I'm a little skeptical of dating sites.

I get a fair amount of reponses (for a guy) but the compatibilty factor was horrible! I wouldn't have ever gone on a date with 90% of them if I had met them IRL first - but then again I am an extremely difficult match...

That's been my exact experience, too! (as a woman, though) I joke with well-meaning friends and relatives that I've just priced myself right out of the market.

I quit the sites a while ago, though one keeps sending me e-mails every week. I just delete them without looking at them. I just need to find a place where I can meet eligible 40-something men organically...

Of course, it would be nice if I had less "girly" hobbies and interests, or if I had more time to pursue adult education classes (my custody schedule doesn't really give me much regular time to do this). Or if I could tolerate being among strangers for longer than 5 minutes...

I'm thinking of starting a thread on "dating in one's 40s". Wonder if anyone would contribute? So many people here on WP are very, very young and I can't really share their perspective anymore.

Well, I would certainly qualify to participate.

After my Asperger's, my age is probably my biggest limitation: I don't seem to fit in anywhere - I'm too young to be old, and I'm too old to be young.

I feel like a kid when I hang out with people my own age for some reason - severe social immaturity I guess...

One of the things that scares me is that I'll be thirty in a few months, and suddenly the twenty-somethings will think I'm "too old". It's kind of like how people won't buy something that's $3.00, but don't have any problem buying the same thing for $2.99.

At least around here, most women my age either have kids, or have a biological clock at five minutes to midnight and want a wedding ring somewhere around the second date. According to online dating sites, there are women who like some of the things I do and whose immediate future plans aren't "ZOMG BABIEZ NAO!!1", but they all live in California or possibly on the moon in some sort of underground bunker.

I am convinced that there is some sort of secret law requiring all women on dating sites to have children or to want to have children immediately. This puzzles me. On the site where I'm a forum mod, I get lots of e-mails, but 92% are from 48-year-old women with three kids who want to argue with me about the fact I won't date a woman with kids. It's disconcerting.

I have also noticed that it is apparently mandatory for women on dating sites to add "....AND THEY ARE MY WORLD!! !" after any mention of their children.

I am SO glad my spaceship does not stop at that world.

There also seems to be a secret law which requires women to state that they can seamlessly transition from "jeans to heels" for some reason...

I've noticed that. Along with "My family is very important to me and always comes first. Deal." or somesuch. Which always makes me want to message them with something along the lines of "So I guess this means you wouldn't be interested in forsaking all others and moving into my religious compound down in Texas, huh?"

The worst thing is when they don't mention that they have kids. I had a really cute girl message me and after a coupe of conversations wanted to friend me on Facebook. When I did, the first thing I noticed was the fact that her profile page was dominated by pics of her five-year-old of which she had made no mention of thus far.

Last edited by Crow_T_Robot on 25 Oct 2011, 1:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I applaud your being upfront with your unwillingness to date people with children already. I think it's kind of silly that people argue with you about it.

That being said, I sure am glad that not everyone thinks like you because then I'd be even more fat-out-of-luck than I already am. Seriously, what you do think women with custody of their children are supposed to do after they divorce or are widowed? Curl up and die? Date men who are 20 years older than themselves? Have you thought about it at all?

On the topic of dating sites, Match has two options when it comes to children: "Wants children" or "Does not want children". There is no option for "Wants the children she already has, does not want to bear any more children". I think it would be a bit mean-spirited for me as a mother to check "Does not want children". There should also be some way of communicating, "No, I don't want you involved in my children's lives unless our relationship becomes more serious, way down the road."