Sputnik, I'm 36 and the guys that have pulled this (its happened a few times actually!) are, 35, 40, 42, and this latest is 38. Very much old enough to know better than that, and only one was divorced. The age range I'm looking at is 32-42, so not like I'm going after the young 'uns lol.

_________________
~Calm like a bomb~
"Don't wanna take it slow, I wanna take you home
And watch the world explode from underneath your glow
I wanna watch the way you creep across my skull."

Dear lord, REALLY? TLSP, what rock did you manage to dig that guy out from under?

This is why I'm not in any hurry to jump back onto dating sites. And FB wouldn't work for me because I'm very protective of my profile ... if I'don't know who you are, you can't message me, and I'm not going to respond to you even if you could.

_________________
"Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes the reason is that you're stupid and make bad decisions."

Well I got joined.. there were some people I needed to reconnect with anyway and it sesems Facebook is the only way to nowdays. I'm not interested in having my information out there for everyone to see, but at least so far it's pretty generic. Anyone wanna add me send me a PM!

That is depressing. I met my S.O. on Match, but I also vetted him carefully. I'd joined the site a couple of times before, with no luck. He was the second guy I went out with (the first wasn't too shabby, but he was a single dad w/ two teenagers at home). S.O. is also not from this country, so his sensibilities are a little more "old school."

I have a theory. I think that way back in the days when online dating hadn't yet caught on — back in the mid to late 90s — sites like Matchmaker were like mom n' pop boutique stores. In a city the size of Austin, you might only find 30-40 people who met your "requirements," and only very broadly, e.g., age range, distance they live from you, etc. Most of these people were really computer savvy and worked with digital data — a sort of meet n' greet for cute geeks and university professors. It was easy to narrow it down to one or two people who you really wanted to meet and/or get to know.

By comparison, Match, EHarmony, etc., are more like Walmart or Target. Now everybody and his/her dog are on there, not just the early techno-hipsters. And I think that have so damned many choices imparts a "Walmart shopper" mentality. There are simply too many, and men (and some women, too) begin to think of profiles as commodities, and very common ones at that. Sort of like the breakfast cereal aisle at the market, something for everyone. The medium is the message, and the message is that everyone is expendable.

I hypothesize that this glut of people, all looking for someone, makes us, in fact, treat each other poorly and disrespectfully. It doesn't help that some women are trying desperately to prove that they can have sex just like a man (e.g., fuckbuddies, one-night stands), and the men get spoiled to this.

Again, all just mental meanderings. But I think I might be onto something ...

_________________
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live.”

--Charles Bukowski--

Pikasam, that's the thing! These guys are decent looking guys with profiles that are fairly well written. None of them gave any prior indication that they were douche canoes.

Sputnik- you may be onto something. Everyone seems to be so impatient and "I want what I want and I want it now!" Nobody seems to want to actually get to know anyone, at least that's been my experience so far. I've met 10 men from dating sites and only 1 turned into a relationship, and that only lasted 6 months. The rest never went beyond 4 dates.

_________________
~Calm like a bomb~
"Don't wanna take it slow, I wanna take you home
And watch the world explode from underneath your glow
I wanna watch the way you creep across my skull."

I've been trying to keep up with this thread every few days or so, but it keeps moving too fast . This is mostly regarding what TheWriteStuff said back on page 36...

TheWriteStuff - Based on your description and your report of the person's age who is being clingy, it seems pretty clear what may be going on there. In my first doctoral program I studied relationships and there is something called positive illusions in romantic relationships. It is something that is fairly common, though individuals will differ in the degree they experience it. What the research has steadily shown is that there is a certain amount of idealization that goes into romantic relationships, we tend to see our partner in a very positive light and are very motivated to maintain that perception. As I'm sure you can recall, we are all a bit idealistic at the age of 18-19 as the young woman you describe currently is. So, I'm guessing she has a little too much of the idealization going on. The friends you have that have maintained their identity may still be idealizing their partner (it was a pretty robust effect), however, they have not lost sight of themselves in the process.

What also sounds like is happening is the person is substituting their relationship for a sense of self, also something we tend to do when we are younger, chronologically or emotionally. I have no doubt that if you don't want to lose yourself in a relationship, you won't. Now that's not to say there isn't something romantic about losing yourself in the moment (not talking about sex either), but more becoming very present and mindful of what is happening now. You sound as if you have some good ego strength (e.g. strength of self), you won't lose it if you choose not to. I would agree that a healthy relationship is one where there is some overlap of seeing the other as an extension of the self, but also remaining somewhat distinct.

Oddly enough, the research we did also showed a pretty consistent effect that women tend to feel closer to their partner if lead to believe they are being mistreated. We never investigated it further because my advisor said she didn't believe in gender roles. It even came out in the crappy data we had to throw away! (one of many reasons I transferred out of that program).

Viola also has something there in her reply....losing yourself in a relationship can be a way of avoiding the self, especially if you have a low appraisal of yourself (commonly referred to self-esteem, but there is a lot more to it than esteem). We do tend to avoid uncomfortable emotions and if we are not happy with ourself, it can be very uncomfortable. It can also come from trying to use what is external from us to satisfy our internal desires. So, to use a childfree example, having children to make you feel fulfilled or have purpose in life...its a similar thing to use a romantic relationship to do so. This is not to say there is something really wrong with external things meeting internal needs, for example, we all have an internal need for a certain sense of belonging and relatedness to others. So we are more talking the degree to which that external thing is used to satisfy the needs we have. Gee I hope that made sense, been a while since I talked about this stuff.

It is very normal to have anxiety about a relationship...I have many and that anxiety only serves to keep us from what we desire....the relationship. You sound like you know what you want, or at least have some clear feelings about your boundaries and at least what you don't want in a relationship, which is a good place to start. I think one thing we all have to remember is that we can't plan it all out before jumping in....though that may be more a reflection of my own anxieties rather than what you were saying I can try to make sure everything is perfect way before hand...which doesn't work too well...as then nothing actually happens other than a lot of thinking that has made things way more complex than it needs to be, perhaps like this post

I hope that is at least somewhat helpful.
Namaste

Some recent research I read about lately speaks to this. There are so many options that it actually becomes less efficient in searching for someone. We are easily distracted by those options and we tend to make judgments about others (usually deleting them from the list of possibilities) that we would not have made if we met them offline.

Statistics do also play a role, I think. When I lived in Maryland back in the mid-late 1990s I met someone online in a chatroom, not on AOL, just a web based kind of community. We hung out in Baltimore a few times, but things didn't really click. When it came to people online, there weren't many at that time. Now that the overall general public can easily gain access and enter a credit card number, the average joe (good and bad) can now be online and trying to message you. I think people can also feel as if the people are not real due to the annoymous nature of the internet, or are somehow disconnected and then tend to behave more primitively.

I would agree that as quantity has gone up, quality of matches goes down. I have been reconsidering Match.com myself, but just don't feel like paying for garbage.

@Sputnik: I think that's completely accurate. I think it's like buying a car. People are dehumanized and distilled to a set of statistics--income, height, weight, age, number of children, and then a set of pictures. Actually, I'm pretty amazed at how similar carmax.com is to online dating sites. My wild guess is that auto dealer sites and online dating sites originated from the same set of algorithms years ago. The thing is, people are not cars.

Never again. Not even the free ones.

I liken online dating to livestock auctions. They're cataloged pretty much the same, except on dating sites the people don't have hip numbers lol.

_________________
~Calm like a bomb~
"Don't wanna take it slow, I wanna take you home
And watch the world explode from underneath your glow
I wanna watch the way you creep across my skull."

I can't say that I blame anyone for feeling this way. Not in the least. I think that the early online daters had a certain advantage because the means of meeting new people felt novel, and the sheer novelty of it didn't go unappreciated. I mean, you had to have a certain level of interpersonal savvy (employed, intelligent and sane). Also, even back in the mid to late 1990s, not everyone owned a personal computer, or a modem. There was still a certain "mystery" associated with the online world.

I know one of the original programmers for Match.com, BTW. He told me that he was instructed to design the site so that people wouldn't meet the love of their lives, that they would keep their memberships active. And it makes sense. If 25 percent of people who join Match meet someone and cancel their accounts, and they're replaced by another 25 percent, the business model remains stagnant.

_________________
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live.”

--Charles Bukowski--