Is It Okay To Act Desperate?

Depending on sample size, location, and attractiveness, the average match ratio for men on Tinder is typically under 10%. In densely populated areas, it generally drops to less than half of that. With all things considered, it’s easy to get desperate like Pepé Le Pew if these are your odds at just landing a match; let alone a reply; let alone a conversation; let alone a date; let alone a relationship. It’s helpful to set your expectations way down low and not respond like this dude:

However, knowing what it’s like, I don’t blame this guy one bit – maybe go easy on the CAPS lock next time though. Just a thought.

Here’s to all the Pepé Le Pew’s out there. I feel for ya!

I’m right there with you – sort of. Dammit, you know what I bloody well mean.

-Single Guy in NYC
@SingleGuyInNYC

What Connects Us

To be perfectly honest, I don’t know. Is it my lurid sense of humor? After all, who wouldn’t embrace the gentle warmth of a stranger’s hand as you ascend to the gallows? Are you a vagrant and see that in me as well? I’m not the best looking but compared to old Boxcar Willy, I suppose I can hold my own. Maybe it’s a different flavor of independence; insolence and dissidence. Both kinds are easy to spot out – no need for smoke signals when there’s a fire of visible grandeur. On the contrary, perhaps you see something that isn’t there – a quality I’ve never possessed – and you’re unequivocally convinced it’s the answer to all your prayers. Who needs a God when there’s a temporal resource on speed dial? Number 4, to be exact.

Or, could it be that you’re attached to my illusive traits? Although mercurial and tacitly agreed upon, it feels like a blood pact. Meredith Brooks cashed in on being a “bitch,” so it’s been proven in theory and practice. Chaos can be, and often times is, majestic. That said, everyone has a threshold and, consequently, an end date. I just hope we can speak candidly when that time comes. To revise, and partially reverse, a pithy sentiment: Second chances should be given to everyone who deserves them.

-Single Guy in NYC
@SingleGuyInNYC

Thoughts On White Women Stereotypes

Let’s face it, some stereotypes exist for a reason and white women are no exception. Since this is my general demographic, it would be idle to deny it as a factor in how I approach, talk, and date them.

For example, it’s in my best interest to assess how close they may be to the suburban/privileged white girl stereotype. Red flags may include, but not limited to, the following:

• Hiring someone to walk their dogs – in a kid’s stroller
• Dealing with the same adversities you dealt with when you were 15
• #Blessed or “everything happens for a reason“
• Making a duck face while posing for a photo
• Talking in acronyms – “O.M.G. this is, like, my jam!“
• Claiming to be a nerd b/c they once read a graphic novel
• Saying “if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you don’t deserve me at my best”
• Or “I love nutella, uggs, leggings, Victoria’s Secret bags and Katy Perry“
• Complicating Starbucks orders
• Facebook check-ins
• Googling themselves

I hate to sound fatalistic but I’m quite confident that if I bring one of these gals back to my neighborhood, they would think differently about the relationship. Now, I’m not exactly saying I live in the ghetto but my area has a few salient traits that rub some folks the wrong way. Last week at midday, I went to get my mail and there was a man in the dirt speaking absolute drivel to himself and smoking a glass pipe, possibly crack but I’m not sure. Remember,this was in broad daylight, he doesn’t live in my building and is a complete stranger. My neighborhood isn’t dangerous but if you’re not accustomed to these types of areas, it’s easy to become disillusioned.

Recently, I invited a woman over for dinner. Like me, she’s a NYC transplant. Dinner was great but it was obvious from the few palatable comments she made about my street that I was going to have to walk her back to the train at the end of the night. And, I did. It’s never elucidated but, instead, tacitly agreed upon that she won’t be coming back here again. So much for my bachelor pad.

Full disclosure, I’m not saying that I don’t embody a few lame stereotypes myself (after all, I do author a blog) or that any of these traits are intrinsically abhorrent. Only some of them are.

-Single Guy in NYC
@SingleGuyInNYC

Dating Websites (Part 2) (Girl Fail #9)

In 1979, the trial for a convicted rapist and murderer by the name of Ted Bundy began. Despite the fact that all of his victims were women (some say as many as 100 victims), he received hundreds of love letters from deranged female “fans.” Fan mail included nude pictures and even marriage proposals. In fact, dozens of his female “fans” attended the trials and made an effort to resemble those he had murdered. During this time, I bet every single guy in America shared the same sentiment as Bill Hicks:

Why am I telling you this? Well, it’s complicated. I’d suggest starting from the beginning, which is actually my previous post (click here). Carrying on…

Believing it to be a massive cop-out, I swallowed my pride and, reluctantly, joined OkCupid six months ago out of sheer desperation to cast a wider net and to increase my visibility (at least, electronically). My naivety regarding dating sites encouraged me to rely on the rumors and stereotypical experiences of others. I thought, with all the schmucks out there (with their pompous bios, their idiotic poses with tigers, their belligerently perverted openers, and their superfluous dick pics), at least one date would spawn from this online platform. This had to auger well.

450 messages later, nothing. Not one date. Not one friend. Nothing.

Compounded frustrations + a dark sense of humor = laughing in self-reproach at the photo above. It honestly did leave me wondering if those that I contacted went on a date with a misogynistic womanizer and/or jerkoff instead. Although difficult to say, think of all the dating blogs out there, most of which are maintained by women. Of those, many are reflections on terrible OkCupid or Tinder dates.

But fear not because this wasn’t all in vain. I created a fake female profile to compare and contrast my experiences between both sexes.

The Profiles

Pictures:  To make the experiment fair, both profiles had to be appealing on all fronts. Thus, I wasn’t going to pick a photo like this one for my fake account.

I’m a physically fit guy with a six pack, toned body, relatively white teeth, average height, skinny, decent but not perfect complexion, a few gray hairs and a bald spot. With this, I consider myself to be in the “average looks” category – nothing that will get the attention of the nearest Abercrombie & Fitch store but satisfactory to those I’ve been with. Appropriately, I used photos of a girl my age in the equivalent “average looks” category for the fake profile.

Profile Content: Maintaining the fairness of this ploy, the text of her profile had to be equally engaging. A joke for a joke, the same type of vague self-summary spiel, and no interests that could be deemed superficial. Any text that had the potential of being perceived as a flirtatious invitation were edited out of the fake profile. Just so you know, I didn’t list myself as someone looking for casual sex or anything like that either.

Questions: Much of the questions were answered the same way, which renders similar “personality” stats.

As a final test, my friends (both male and female) reviewed each profile and gave their reputable stamp of approval.

Results

Jewish women don’t masturbate on OkCupid

Real Profile: I visited over 600 profiles and sent about 450 messages over the course of six months. Out of those 450 messages, I only received 5 replies. I’ll  reiterate that in case you’re reading too fast. That is 5 out of 450. That equates to about a 1.1% success rate, where success SOLELY means getting a reply. I only received 1 unprompted message but she didn’t seem mentally stable. No one that I visited ever messaged me. No one that visited me ever messaged me unless I messaged them first. I only had 10 quickmatches and, oddly enough, half were overweight bisexual black women (maybe that’s my market?). I averaged about 70 visitors per week for the first month but this number slowly declined. Now I average about 8 visitors per week.

Fake Profile: I visited less than 100 profiles and sent 0 messages. This had absolutely no impact on my ability to get visitors or messages. In fact, before I had ANY content in my profile (only had a couple of pictures), I received 5 messages in an hour! I had equaled the number of replies that took me six months and 450 messages from my real profile in just one hour of creating my fake one. In total, I received 323 messages over the course of six months – all of which were unprompted. 1/10 of the men I visited sent me something. Compared to my 10 quickmatches from my real profile, I had a whopping 1,183 quickmatches in my fake one. It was effortless to maintain about 120 visitors per week for the first three months or so. This number has since decreased to around 50 per week, most likely due to my inactivity.

Discussion

Did the extent of this rough data despond you as much as it did me? Probably not. Most people already know that if the object of the game is to get messages, males must be more exigent with their profiles and more charitable with reaching out to others. These are the unfortunate circumstances – I would argue – that arise from social norms, which cyberspace, as we just witnessed, isn’t immune to.

How about the quality of these messages? I’ll confess that I made the mistake of sending the stereotypical “Hey, how are you?” openers a few times but I quickly made a habit of reading a women’s profile in its entirety and conceiving a unique, dare I say charming, message. This approach, deemed the most chivalrous, takes about 15 to 25 minutes depending on the profile. I did this about 300 times before I lost all hope. I’ve heard the opposite sex say that “no response is a response.” If this is true, I wonder if I was being treated with derision. My last 150 or so messages derived from whatever short, witty thoughts or questions I had after a 5 minute browse of their profile and pictures. Since almost all of my approaches were ignored, I’m counting this as Girl Fail #9.

The most ironic aspect of this experiment was the messages my fake account received. Although, I got the gamut of openers, from magnanimous compliments to sleazy invitations, the vast majority of them were perfectly fine and often times funny. No one tried to romance me with “I want to fuck you in my station wagon” but I did get “…so for me intention wise….Honestly….nothing too serious….a fun friend really. With benefits situation is what I’m open to at the moment. Not looking for anything serious at the moment, but having it with someone fun, easy going, funny, witty, smart….sexy goes without saying. What about yourself?” Maybe I was lucky but I didn’t get any vulgar messages nor dick pic offerings. The flood of compliments I received actually boosted my confidence until I reminded myself that I was acting under a pretense.

My personal favorites:

• I’m just going to completely cut the b.s because you’re the cutest girl I’ve seen here. Let’s get coffee, possibly share orgasms, then get another coffee. So much energy
• I’ve never met (or read to profile of) anyone with favorite movies including ####, #### and the goddamn Blues Brothers. I normally wouldn’t put so much stock in this sort of thing, but, wow, we should meet. Plus, I’m a huge fan of too many books to list.
• Hello I’m #### glad to meet you! I read your profile and think you are really great person and I hope we can talk and get to know each other better. I am attending graduate school to obtain my Masters in Forensic Science. I hope you message me back because you seem like an amazing girl with great qualities, and I would like to get to know you if you so choose to get to know me and you are really cute
• OHHH MY GAAARDS!!!!!!
• Random personality question – how do you feel about PDA? Write back.
• Soo..um this is like ridiculously random and may come off as strange butt,hello there gorgeous lady! 🙂 I have the urge to get on my knees and kiss your feet. haha is this a bad thing?
• You seem like a cool girl, but there is only one way for me to tell… and that is if you take this little quiz of mine.  (provided a 10 question quiz)
• After wading my way through a river of 18 year old college students you seem like an actual person with their shit together. What’s up?
• let’s be a power couple

Did you expect these types of results? What OkCupid stories do you have?

Guys, if you can’t resist sending pictures of your junk, at least do it the right way. Click here to learn more.  :p

-Single Guy in NYC
@SingleGuyInNYC

Dating Websites (Part 1)

This post goes out to anyone who has ever used OkCupid (or OkStupid to those who are punny). Take notice folks, income inequality is expanding like peeps in a microwave and the dating game is changing. So, why not check out a free dating website? I’ll tell you why not as well as why I capitulated. 

Unless the website is for those in a difficult predicament (e.g. single parent, divorced and over 40, etc.) where it’s more appropriate for you to disclose facts about your life and what you require in a partner, I believe that, for the most part, dating sites are a contemptuous platform to meet others and a hindrance to how we socialize in society. Who wouldn’t prefer an enamoring romance story of how a couple met over “I swiped right and we took it from there”?

Two Big Downsides:

1. It makes men lazy and asocial
2. Encourages women to have unreasonable standards (aka requirements)

Now before you stop reading and call me a naïve bigot, I do understand that there are benefits and that it doesn’t have this affect on everyone. Just hear me out, okay?

To my first point, I’ve seen men on OkCupid, Tinder, etc. while at a bar surrounded by women. I get it, I really do. It sucks more to be rejected in person vs being rejected online but there’s more guts and glory associated with the old fashioned, “Hello” to the pretty lady sitting next to you at the cafe.

To my second point, this is both a good and bad thing. It gives women more options than ever because most women on dating sites have their inboxes flooded with messages, although not every message comes from a sane, non-perverted man. However, having skimmed through more than 600 female profiles, I could not believe what I was reading. It’s good to be upfront with people but a lot of these so called “requirements” were fatuously nonsensical and absolutely ridiculous.

List of Actual Requirements:

• “I’m looking for the male version of myself. If you’re not that person, GO AWAY”
• “Don’t message me if you are not a feminist”
• “Don’t waste your time if you don’t have a beard”
• “Must be able to drive stick”
• “Must be over 6 foot”

The most popular is the height requirement. But did I miss something? Are we at Disney World and you’re a world famous roller coaster? Didn’t think so. Not to say that men can’t be shallow as well but it did surprise me how many profiles were outright shallow. To me, these are equivalent to the dick picks that moronic guys send to women on the internet – a phenomenon that I don’t understand.

Further to this, when you’re in a large city and you get hundreds of messages online from men that like and desire you, as well as getting hit on in person when you go out, how could you not feel like you’re at the top of your game? I know I would. If this is a reality for you, how could you not enjoy the single life? As your insecurities start to diminish, you inherit more confidence. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous. You get to pick through the weeds and have your choice at a selection of attractive flowers. You’ll have your share of bad dates but at least you’ll get date. How novel! Using dating websites to cast a bigger net seems to be more rewarding for women than men. According to Christian Rudder, the co-founder of OkCupid, women tend to be more superficial than men. Though, I don’t necessarily believe that one can derive that correlation from his statistics. Click here to be the judge.

So, with a heavy heart and much contemplation, I made two profiles on OkCupid to host my own social experiment. One profile was for myself and the other was a fake female profile. I’ll fill you in on my results in my next post.

Thanks for reading and make sure to comment if you disagree with me. Otherwise, I’m just chatting with myself.  :p

-Single Guy in NYC
@SingleGuyInNYC