The horror of dating
I sent a friend this link to a collection of online dating horror stories*, and they replied with this:
There was a thread on SA a while back about online dating and the horrors thereof. Several people created fake profiles on particularly notorious sites and collated responses. Various women in the thread said "seriously, if you want to see how bad it gets, create a female profile on plentyoffish". Curious to see why, I (among others) did so.
Between creating a profile (where I had picked gender as female and an age, I think I went for late twenties) and writing anything ON my profile, my profile had something like 50 views and a bunch of messages from creepy guys. Not automated "welcome to the site" messages either. Oh no. By the time I had a generic one line profile that wasn't especially inviting, I hit about 25 messages ranging from the kinda creepy to the outright abusive or obscene. It went downhill from there and I deleted it about a day later because it wasn't the entertaining kind of thing I had hoped, and my curiosity was indeed satisfied.
Julie concurred that she got the same range from her experiences on online dating sites, everything from unasked-for obscenity to people just being angry and abusive out of the blue.
Makes me grateful I'm a man, and thus don't get exposed to that kind of behaviour. Also that, with any luck, I'll never have to date again.
*Great to fun to go through with a friend discussing which ones were terrible other people, and which ones are oddly picky on behalf of the story-teller.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.
There was a thread on SA a while back about online dating and the horrors thereof. Several people created fake profiles on particularly notorious sites and collated responses. Various women in the thread said "seriously, if you want to see how bad it gets, create a female profile on plentyoffish". Curious to see why, I (among others) did so.
Between creating a profile (where I had picked gender as female and an age, I think I went for late twenties) and writing anything ON my profile, my profile had something like 50 views and a bunch of messages from creepy guys. Not automated "welcome to the site" messages either. Oh no. By the time I had a generic one line profile that wasn't especially inviting, I hit about 25 messages ranging from the kinda creepy to the outright abusive or obscene. It went downhill from there and I deleted it about a day later because it wasn't the entertaining kind of thing I had hoped, and my curiosity was indeed satisfied.
Julie concurred that she got the same range from her experiences on online dating sites, everything from unasked-for obscenity to people just being angry and abusive out of the blue.
Makes me grateful I'm a man, and thus don't get exposed to that kind of behaviour. Also that, with any luck, I'll never have to date again.
*Great to fun to go through with a friend discussing which ones were terrible other people, and which ones are oddly picky on behalf of the story-teller.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.