How the hell does online dating work?

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You don't neccessarily have to use online dating sites.
I'm registered at Interpals, which is a site for finding penpals. I'm currently exchanging letters with two Russian girls, neither of whom (to my knowledge) are in a relationship. Not that that means that I'll ever get in a relationship with any of them, but at least it gives me something to think about other than being lonely.

That's a great idea actually. For a lot of us its really the emotional intimacy that we find ourselves lacking, having that taken care of goes a long way.

Just wanted to chime in about online dating...it CAN work, but it does take time and you will get a lot of rejections. This is par for the course...women experience the same thing. You will also meet people in person who are amazingly UNLIKE how they appear in photographs and through their email and even phone conversations.

Online dating is a great way to meet people that you would NEVER get the chance to meet in real life, because your social and professional circles would just never intersect, period.

I used to live in a rural town in the Southwest and had a fairly public profile, simply because I owned a small business and advertised with my picture in the paper. Seeing that picture, people would recognize me on the street, even though I kept a very low profile personally. I wanted to be in a relationship, but not with anyone living in my town, so I did online dating and specified that I was only interested in dating men from the nearest large city. I simply ignored the local responses.

After three YEARS of online dating, I got fed up with it and decided to stop it altogether. The breaking point was that somehow a client of mine (who wanted to date me) saw my profile. He called me up and said "oh, I saw your advertisement for a boyfriend on the internet, and it was really CUTE!" (Arghhh!) I had left my profile dormant for some months, but after that call I went online for the sole purpose of deleting my account and ending it permanently. There was a message from a fellow I recognized from a billboard I used to see when driving to the big city!

To make a long story short, we had our first date two days later. Within two weeks (!) he'd moved in with me, and two years after that we got married. We've been together for five years now and are very, very happy. So online dating CAN work, but there are no guarantees and it can be very frustrating. I got good at sucking up rejection...I got dumped by men as many times as I had to dump them! After awhile you just learn to let it roll off your back.

Oh, and if women aren't answering your messages, it could be because they aren't interested OR it could be because they're expecting to go on a date with someone else and don't want to be courting two guys at once. You'd be surprised how many people forget to take down their profiles when they get hot and heavy with someone new!

ok I used to use dating sites a great deal, hell there was about 5-6 months were I was like baskin robins (flavor of the month).
there are plenty of pros and cons
pros

if you have a hard time getting to meet new people,
if you want to practice your social skills,
if you a horny and lonely and need to find someone else who is,
it can help

cons
lots of fakes, spam, and bs, plenty of opportunities for rejection
lots of ambiguous messages

I have slept with at least a dozen women I have met on dating sites, but in truth, the most interesting and attractive person I have met online came from this site, and a random question to another member.
(mind you now I am trying to talk her into moving, 7 time zones, while i try and figure out how i could afford a trip to Bucharest)

Just noticed this thread is still going ...

Honestly, I wouldn't obsess over this too much, TechStep and others. I think that the variety of responses to things like the photos on TechStep's profile show how highly subjective this is and that almost everyone you ask will have a different opinion.

If you are concerned about tweaking your profile and improving it to meet more people, I'd just ask a few trusted friends who you think have a good sense of how this stuff works, consider their advice and leave it at that. My concern would be that if you over-do it with making your profile more generic in order to play the numbers game (ie. things like taking speakers out of the photo in case some women who view the profile happen to hate music, which seems sort of odd to me), then you might wind up getting more responses, but they may not be from the 'right' people for you.

I'm not on any dating sites at this time, but I'd created two different profiles on two free sites a while back, as sort of a social experiment, as much as anything else. I used the exact same photos in both, mind you. On the one ("Plenty of Fish", I think it was?), I just gave basic info about myself and said many of the same 'types' of things I'd imagine other women of my age and background would say about themselves. On OKCupid, I created a profile where I sort of went the opposite direction with the essay questions. I disclosed my AS and I think actually just said that I'm generally at home reading a book for the "Where are you on a typical Friday night?" question, as opposed to bothering to make myself sound more fun and interesting than I really am.

Now, I recall I ended up getting, like, at least 30 or so messages the first week with my 'social mask' profile, and only a handful with the OkCupid profile. But, you know what? The majority of the ones on Ok seemed a lot better-suited to me than the ones on the other site. Even if nothing panned out, on OK I had a lot of good conversations with interesting people and made a friend or two. Through the other site, all I got was an incredibly awkward first date that ended with the guy shaking my hand, saying 'take care' and never calling me again. My guess is that I did not turn out to be what he'd bargained for, lol, and I felt pretty awful afterwards. On Ok, though, I'd set up my profile to be a little more of a litmus test or ice-breaker, so the people I did end up talking to, I could at least feel more comfortable with.

So, I think it comes down to quantity vs. quality. And, when you have unique traits and are sort of an outlier, going for quantity may prove more frustrating than helpful. Even if it seems counter-intuitive, this might be a situation where the more effort and thought you put into it, the less quality results you'll get. There's nothing wrong with 'putting your best face forward' or whatever, but you just don't want to take it to where you're in danger of overthinking or tweaking the profile into not really being your face anymore. Just my two cents, although I'm admittedly not the best person to be giving out dating advice!!

My previous attempts at online dating have been like the following:

1- A girl messages me. I scare her away with my reply, probably because it leaves no room for a conversation;
2- I message a girl. She replies. Repeat step 1;
3- I message a girl. She doesn't reply, even if she rated my profile before.

The only time I managed to have a nice conversation with a girl and asked her out, she told me she lived across the country (1531 miles away). At first, I thought she was lying, but a quick Google search confirmed her story.

Right now, I went through step 2 with a girl whose interests are uncannily like mine. I have no idea if she's going to reply a second time or not, but after many mistakes, I'm not expecting a reply. When faced with failure, cynicism is the best approach.

And I still don't understand how online dating works. Or normal, offline dating, for that matter, since I've never tried it.

I've tried OkCupid, Aspie Affection, and Craig's list.

My OkCupid account is, "Robot Spammer," I put a lot of creepy stuff on the profile, and the profile picture is of a toy robot. Nobody responded.

I was serious with the Aspie Affection thing, but I have gotten no responses. This is not terribly surprising considering the stacked gender ratio and previous trends, online and otherwise.

The Craig's list ad was supposed to be a joke:

"Horny, nihilistic undergrad in engineering physics. Poor social skills, few friends, no normal hobbies, bad at interpreting nonverbal body language. Ignores male gender expectations. Fond of sex, satires, and pretty much everything nerdy. Cannot pick up a girl. If you are a hot, anti-social, nerdy female between the ages of 15 and 30 and are willing to remedy the situation, please respond."

I got about 30 responses, about 3/4 of which appeared to be fake people trying to get me to join pay porn sites, and the remaining not responding when I said that I was not interested in casual sex.

This is the summation of my online dating experience. I think I'll try EHarmony when I get an income.

I've tried all of the big online dating sites and in my experience you just need a job, a car and your own place for people to be interested in you.