Dating sites. Ugh. Creepy. Where the desperate and the truly deprived of social intercourse go… so there I was on a dating site gleefully creating my profile… la-de-da-de-da… and trying to make it say something like, “I’m a fun, interesting, captain of industry who wants to be your teddy bear”. You know, all the old conundrums but in a cocoon of subtlety. I call it the Barry White trap. I’m not sure how you can be a winner AND still need to beg for “companionship” but that’s the play. I have a friend who is strongly opposed to R&B for this very reason. Anyway, the honeys will flock to me like flies to… errrr honey? 😀
But how did I get here…
[if this were a sitcom the screen would get all wavy and my character would look off into space]
I went to a singles meetup one Friday night. Now, I’ve been to plenty of meetups that were related to my profession or my hobbies. I figure if you’re there for purely social reasons then you already have something in common and it’s easy to start a conversation. I really don’t have a plan or game other than to go out, drink, possibly make some new friends, and generally have a good time. Anything else is icing on the cake. This time around I went to a meetup explicitly for singles to mingle. I made that sound cheesier than it was. Well, maybe not. The official age range was from thirties to fifties but how many thirty year olds do you know that want to hang out with fifty year olds!? So, no, I don’t think I saw any thirty year olds.
The bar, man’s best friend
I got my hand stamped by the cute twenty-something hostess as a sign that I was too old for her but just right for the event’s discounted drinks. Cha-ching, $6 cocktails! Hmmm… thinking this was going to be a lame suburban event I had arrived late so I wouldn’t have to make an excuse to ditch early. With that obnoxious mindset firmly in place I made a beeline for the bar. I like bars. I like drinking. I would marry my fave cocktail if it were legal. Though I think the babies would be as messed up as a herd of Liza Minellis… I walked past some single people on the way but I only had eyes for the bar. Ordered my drink and struck up a conversation with a significantly older woman on my right (as a warmup, I assure you) who, come to find out, was not there for the meetup, was half in the bag, and was thoroughly confused by my asking.
“A what, what?”
“The meetup. You know, meetup.com?”
“Oh, I think they’re upstairs.” Cackle, cackle, cackle.
All right now, drunken grandma, stop eyeballing, I’m moving on. I walk back to the cute hostess, my liquid love in hand. My drink, that is. I don’t know what the hell’s going on and my next step is to get something going or bolt. Long story short, everyone at the bar except the woman I talked to was there for the event. She points out a couple of ladies sitting together and I can tell from twenty feet away that these women are definitely there to meet a guy like me. Like me but taller, better looking, and probably wealthier. I swaggered over (not too much swag, might spill ma’ drink).
Timeout: I’d like to state that I don’t go out wearing a silk shirt unbuttoned to my navel with a large gold chain. I dress kinda’ ok without wearing suit separates or khakis. I’m not trying to look like an anchorman or a cube farm dude. It’s a ‘burbs thing. I’m blowing my own horn but I’m not terribly ugly and I’ve been told that I look much younger than my age. Put some offbeat personality behind that and you’ve got a sexy recipe for… disaster? Yeah, that’s how I roll, dangerous baby, meow. I thought of swaggering right past ‘em so they could check out my caboose… but decided to play it a little close.
Nice and easy like I say, yo ladies, sup, sup and give ‘em the head nod and the pursed-lip-push. To them it may’ve sounded like, “Er, sooooo, you guys come out for the meetup?”, as they watched me nervously clutching my whisky pacifier. These chicks were hot! Not in a twenty year old clone-like supermodel sort of way, but in a forty year old, I got the skillz to pay my own bills and if you play your cards right I might teach you a few things, kinda’ way. I felt like a field mouse nibbling grass in the growing shadow of a hawk… sweat trickled down my ribs and a faint squeak escaped my lips… then, unlike almost every other time I go out to a local bar (versus NYC), we hung out, drank, and talked until closing time! Yup, Mr. Snooty was proved wrong! There are fun women, not just girls, out in the suburbs and I gotta’ find out where they’re all hiding real fast. The pool’s not so big and these chicks are getting snatched up real quick! 😀
And thus ends this cautionary tale.
Ok, it doesn’t. One of the ladies turned out to be suspiciously unavailable within days of me meeting her… hmmmmm… but turned me on to a dating site she’d used that had also advertised the meetup. A free dating site. She was rather insistent that I check it out so I let her boss me into it. Ok, ok, I liked her a lot and you know how that gets… The super neat thing is she gave a good critique of my profile, it was a little too Alan Alda so she suggested some Mr. T and Donald Trump nuances to punch it up. Tally ho! Let the games begin! 🙂
Steve's Deli 
Flavor. Good episode, haha 😀
“Suspiciously Unavailable” is a typical move women do. Means nothing at all. Keep kickin’ it. Just as quickly as she became UNavailable, she’ll become REavailable if you happen to hit the right notes that resonate with her.
Well put, Bill! 🙂
But I also recognize that it’s not always about getting what I want and I need to respect other folks’ desires. It’s a fine line to tread. I mean, it’s nearly impossible for a dude to stay in orbit without exerting any pull, on the other hand you don’t want to come across as being deliberately influential. Let me put that another way (I also tend to reframe in real life, sigh): You can be the moon, and everyone loooooves the moon. It’s up there lighting your way at night, it persists even when it’s not visible and you know it’s coming back. Conversely, you can be like a black hole, voraciously consuming anything that gets too close and spitting out weird radiation along your event horizon and GOD HELP US ALL GET THAT THING AWAY FROM ME!!! See? lol 😀
lolol, You need to focus on the right thing. Imposing your will on her would definitely be disrespecting her desires. What I’m telling you to do is
Change her desires.
Don’t make me do all the work here bro. Surely there’s a relevant post on your site that can be linked to, no? 😀
Inaresting to read about this social interaction with romantic features thingy seein as how I’ve been banned from the sport for life.
Hi Layna,
Nice to see my “special” friend from TX stopping by! 🙂
Yeah… uh dating sites can be pretty interesting. At some point I’m going to work up stats on return/success rates (need more data) but offhand I can tell you there’s only like a 1:20 chance that a woman will respond no matter how clever your initial message to them is. And I’ll never know why they didn’t. The other bad thing is, unlike going out, I’m not having a fun time while I’m doing it. It’s like writing cover letters for a job. If you don’t get out much it’s certainly better than nothing.
Also of note, a lot of women complain in their profiles about the kind of men they are finding. Obviously that’s one sided. There may be men complaining about the women, who knows, I’m not about to start checking out dude’s profiles like I’m Jane Goodall or something.
My own experience with women in their 40’s has sort of been at extremes. There are normal, flexible, adults, and people who rigidly don’t want their lives to change yet don’t see how that conflicts with dating.
Oddball info, women consider it a negative if a guy’s in his 40’s and he’s never been married. “What’s so wrong with him?” – I’ll see if I can get a friend to amplify on that.
I haven’t spent any time with never-wed 40’s women or heard another male’s perspective on this topic to have an opinion. I may interview some friends who’ve used these sites longer than I have. 🙂
Interesting read. I will say that the fact that you maintained contact with one person after the fact, makes you a success. I have never joined an actual dating site but have met some interesting people on other social sites like MySpace or Facebook and unfortunetly (being that i was a wee bit younger in the mental department) I based my success on one concept… From this place to My place!! It got so that if it didnt jump off that very night, it was a failure and no need to continue any form of communication. Even sites like MiGente would have get togethers/meet and greets whose sole purpose (to every guy and manymany of the females) was to add that particular days notch on the belt. What the success rate is, i dont have the slightest clue but if I said that I met 100 woman I’d have to admit to closing the deal with maybe 4! So that is a pitiful percentage by those standards. I think that maintaining communication past that initial day would have improved my numbers but playing the This place/My place game keeps you in the moment with out the want to extend the experation date on these sites/events.
“I will say that the fact that you maintained contact with one person after the fact, makes you a success.” – Um, I’ll trade ya? 😀 Kidding. I suppose I could say that I am fairly successful when it comes to making new female friends as long as I stay laid back and non-threatening. It’s when I try to play a diff game that the alarm bells start ringing. Once you write your book I’ll have a better idea of how to pull the transition play. 😉
oh GOD! Did he just say MiGente? HAHAHAHAHA oh God! 😀 I think I’d have to plug in the computer I retired before the computer I retired to remember my login on MiGente, but that site was THE ISH, no doubt! 😀 The chicks were DOPE, and there were lots of full-body pics of them so you could tell which ones you wanted to kick it to off the bat. There was always an endless supply of new chicks, too. Damn.. I need to make a new account if that site still exists! 😀
It was wack though that they would duplicate chicks in the search function, so you could be on page 3 and click on the same chick you clicked on on page 1. Waste of time at those slow computer speeds and internet data rates at the time.
Having said that, I’ve never dated anyone from a dating site either. I just go on them to sample the current state of the art in chicks. I assume there’s a really good reason chicks are dating off the internet, such as that they can’t get a date IRL, because everybody knows what they already did and with whom as well as what clinic they went to to try to get cured.
I have a quasi-similar experience to Frank, being that the chick game is completely a numbers game. A low percentage of gals will naturally be attracted to you, so you don’t have to put in any work to get them. There are also a number of chicks that are just basically horny and you get them because you were the first one TONIGHT to suggest it.
As far as keeping contact, that’s zero. Not for the reasons of failure to progress, as Frank mentions, but for the reasons of “there are more chicks”. A couple of nights ago, I invited six chicks to the same hangout, two showed up and I was still looking around to see if any chicks I didn’t already know caught my eye. I think I never heard back from two of them and two of them texted me during the evening but didn’t show up. None of that matters, because I was filling my time for that particular event. As I sit here and type this, not only was I not thinking about seeing ANY of the six of them today, but I had forgotten that I had invited them all the other day.
There are literally too many chicks in NYC to be concerned with what one, two or twelve are going to do on any given day. There’s no reason to stay in contact with chicks unless they represent some format of extraordinary value to you. That’s what would make you call her and make a plan instead of just going someplace that’s likely to have chicks with the body-types you feel like hooking up with and seeing what you can do. So I agree with Frank on the “not mantaining contact” tip… Not because I didn’t get on, but because I didn’t meet them to make long-term friendships with them.
I met them because meeting girls is what I do.