DATING: HOW DATING ONLINE IS FOR GUYS

Guys are simple creatures. We join online dating sites to meet women. A lot of us (the good ones) already know quality people and have plenty of interesting conversations. The problem is that we don't know many or any attractive, interesting single women. For a lot of us it's the only thing our lives seem to be missing.

Guys join a dating site and start searching through profiles. They want to find the most beautiful, most interesting single woman on the site and get her attention. They find her (or 3-5 candidates--you can't put all your eggs in one basket), study her profile, see a lot of common ground, spend an hour composing what they think is the perfect message and hit 'send.'

They never hear back. That's one night down, 3-5 hours spent on composing messages alone, 3-5 women they really wanted to get to know who haven't responded. Maybe the women aren't interested, maybe they're not single, maybe they don't check their deluged dating inbox frequently, maybe the female sex is flaky and undependable, maybe the suitor is undateable, maybe it's a dude posing as a chick to try to steal your awesome first messages, maybe maybe maybe.

But good guys are persistent and ambitious, so they try a few more times. A few more nights (not days, because good guys have day jobs. He's giving up nights and weekends because he believes lasting love is worth sacrificing for). They get similar results. As the guys move further and further down their lists, they start making choices between looks and interesting profiles. Evaluating profiles takes minutes per profile examined (women write a lot!), evaluating photos takes seconds. They send shorter and shorter messages that are less tailored to the unique snowflake that is each precious female member of the online dating community. They're feeling more and more rejected and retaining less enthusiasm and hope for this, what seems to be their last best chance at meeting attractive, interesting single women.

Good guys can keep this up for a while, but they all soon come to realize that they're doing an awful lot of work and getting barely anything for it. That 20-60 minutes per message thing has to go. They look up online dating strategies, they tweak their profiles and they put together template messages that sound great and can be tailored to a few choice details of a cute girl's profile within a minute or two. By this point they're past caring about the profile itself except as a means to increase the odds of hearing back from a cute girl and getting that teensy bit of validation. What started as a quest for a mate and devolved into a failing attempt at forsaking virginity is in ruins as they seek a few kind words from a pretty face to keep the final ashes of hope aglow.

These aren't just the sleaze balls. These are the genuine catches, too. These are the guys with jobs (good jobs), with values (good values), with brains (good brains), with ambitions (noble ambitions) who just want to find a similarly complete woman to share life with. And this is where the story turns tragic: With the dwindling hope of being with the kind of attractive, kind, interesting, ennobling woman before they die, with the dwindling hope of finding a strong wife and mother who will help raise a family which will reproduce again before the man enters the grave, with the dwindling hope of getting laid, married or not, before turning 40, men break.

A broken man is a man who puts aside his values (the ideals he holds to even when against his short- or even long-term best interests). We still have our jobs, we still have our brains, we still have our ambitions, but we start putting aside our values. It doesn't seem like a big deal to save himself for his wife any more. It doesn't seem like a big deal to seek a relationship based on looks alone. It doesn't seem like a big deal to enter a relationship that's only about sex. It doesn't seem like a big deal to go out on a string of one-night-stands. In fact, a string of one-night stands sounds awesome. And maybe the girls don't even have to be that cute. It's just one night, right? And who cares about their feelings? Maybe caring about the girl's feelings are what got this oh-so-awesome and increasingly narcissistic group of guys into their troubles to begin with. Some men are never good men, but a broken good man quickly devolves into just another jerk.

That's what online dating is like for guys--the genuine catches. The jerks have it easy. Of course, there are two online dating strategies that guys can adopt that don't wear down the soul: One is eHarmony, where for all the hype about matching, I think what they really have going on is their Guided Communication process; the other is to send short messages to a lot of pretty faces that don't say much more than "hi." Don't expect a response, but follow up on the few that do get returned back at you.

If you're still reading this, let me refine and clarify what I sent at 2am the other night.

First, I pointed out a line where you come across as a "lousy, stuck-up bitch." I have no idea whether you actually are one. We've never met, so how could I know? It's a caution that you may not be projecting the best version of yourself.

Second, the guys who really are interested in who women are as people--the kinds of guys whose apparent scarcity frustrates you--they'll look at your profile and really question whether they want to get to know someone who self-contrasts against "the hundreds of ... denizens of OkCupid" by being "a genuine, interesting person" and only answers to messages that don't "bore the hell out of" her.

Sadly, that means that guys who do send you interesting enough messages to elicit a response fall into two categories: Guys who really don't care about you as a person but will pretend to in order to score, and guys like me who are annoyed at how common it is for women's profiles to encourage good men to engage in the self-destructive and life-stealing behavior of laboring over introductory messages to strangers.

There's a Jewish saying along the lines of "those who are kind to the cruel will be cruel to the kind." By putting up "disclaimers" and "spikes" to soothe the emotions of the losers who are crying in a corner because you didn't have time to respond to their messages, you're turning off good guys you actually would want to talk to. I suggest you revisit the decision with this in mind.

Finally, 'da club' is da place you go where da music is too loud and all da people maybe try some dancin' wif' da cuties of da opposite sex. If dey're lucky, maybe dey'll even do some bump'n'grind and maybe even have sex in da bafroom. It's basically Hell for 20-somethings who spurn quality suitors out of ignorance of what it's like to date online as a guy. If I haven't bored the hell out of you still, take my last suggestion: Take out the "bore the hell out of me" line, and the next time a guy sends an overly-tailored message without anything you're interested in, take a look at his profile. If he looks nice and if his profile is interesting, respond to his boring-as-hell message. He's the sort of guy who wants to know you as a person. Better yet, he's not broken yet.


I am searching for my future wife/soulmate. Please stop by again.