The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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> Requests for advice
What's a reasonable "ghosting" protocol when it comes to online dating, assuming that I do want to rescue the conversation if-and-only-if the counterparty dropped the convo accidentally due to Universal Zoomer ADHD?
Trying out OLD recently, finally found what seemed to be a great match locally last weekend, but she went radio silence about 24h before a nearly-scheduled date. Not blocked, still "matched" on the site, and she shows up as "online" occasionally.
Current plan — asking in part for a sanity check on this — is to wait just under a week, maybe till Friday morning to allow for scheduling, then ask something upbeat and understanding like “hey, did you survive this week?” as the last outbound contact before writing it off as an intentional ghost.
Just replying to say: Good on you for representing the entire convo. That's how you get great advice, which you can see consistently reflected in other replies. Onward!
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To be specific, this is probably where you lost her. It went from her inviting herself to, looking into it as a soft exit. You tricked her with the church thing.
Looking up Theosophy, is that it looks odd, and makes you look out there. Likely - She's a Christian and thought you were going to Christian church, then pointed her to an odd pagan church with Nazi-esque logos, and she got spooked out by that. Culturally Christian people don't mind going to a nondenomination christian church to meet a stranger. It would code as a safe place. Rightly or wrongly, going to a non-christian esoteric religious meeting would code as dangerous and weird.
The wikipedia page has a logo at the top with a snake and a swastika thing.
"any of a number of philosophies maintaining that a knowledge of God may be achieved through spiritual ecstasy, direct intuition, or special individual relations, especially the movement founded in 1875 as the Theosophical Society by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907)."
This is a good take. I never even thought to look that up and now that I have yeah, it doesn't scan well.
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I agree with the other posters here suggesting shorter texts (even one sentence or less) are far better at maintaining a degree of mystery (and thus: interest). While laying all your cards face-up on the baize may seem straightforward, honest, reasonable, and even the Behavior That Was Asked For, that's only ever a strategy when teaching someone a new game--and usually what not to do.
Reworking the above:
Friday Evening
Me: … [local rock] concert. Let's do it.
Her: Ok!
or: .....
Either response is fine. As it is it took you several texts and a lot of hope to get to .....
Shorter sentences. Online dating isn't Motte effortposting. No emojis ever, for any reason. No exclamation marks. Suggest something fun. If she doesn't want to do that thing, be polite and move on. She will never refuse your advances directly, it's hard enough to do that in person--online she can just ghost you. Then if she gets bored or lonely she can reinitiate the interaction (Your self-respect should not allow that to occur.)
But again, always be courteous. Be courteous to a fault. Becoming the angry FuckYou guy just reinforces all popular modern stereotypes re: men. Not that you need to give a shit, but courtesy is a good thing.
People are saying church is lame. Why? It was her idea, though you brought it up. I agree church-as-date seems very unromantic and unexciting. It reminds me of that Life in Hell cartoon of biggest turnoffs before intimacy ("Dear father please forgive us for this vile sin we are about to commit.")
Anyway that's a You thing. We don't all run in the fast lane. I guess. The fact that she was responding with such relative vigor suggests she is either keen or mildly neurotic. Safe money on door #2 (see: I can't eat food around humans.)
Cut your loss, which is minimal. Next adventure begins any day now.
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Stop using emojis
Write shorter, more declarative sentences.
Church ... for a first date. Bruh.
Most importantly - Stop using OLD. Go out and talk to people in real life. You will have more success, you will have more fun, you will build interpersonal skills that transcend dating.
I've never understood OLD. If the objective is dating a real person in real life ... go do that. Why is there this odd online first step? It's like saying "Before I jump in the pool, I'll interact with a digital model of water so I understand the water better"
I can match several people this week and set up a date or I can go several years without meeting a single person I'm interested in. Online dating is clearly useful.
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Yeah as a zoomer/current college student this is 100 percent correct. Of the guys in my friend group, the ones with the best success are just the strongest Hinge warriors who are willing to put themselves through the meat grinder to get a date. I've been working pretty consciously over the past month or so to make a serious attempt to talk to a girl every night I go out, but you run into a couple of issues:
-The Venn diagram of women you are interested in and women who frequent your mid college bar doesn't feature a very large overlapping zone, and other means of large-scale socialization are unreliable at best for a variety of reasons (attendance isn't guaranteed, demographics usually skew towards freshmen, often too loud and packed to hold a conversation)
-If you manage to get to the stage where you buy someone a drink, your dog and pony show has to be pretty much flawless or else you're cooked
-There's a weird lack of communication about interest, so you can talk to someone for well over an hour, buy them a couple drinks, have a great conversation, feel like you're in an unambiguous position with regards to intent, and then have them tell you they have a boyfriend (this exact phenomenon has happened to me on multiple occasions)
-Even when things go really well, there's a decent chance that it doesn't click on your end and you're your own worst enemy
Relying heavily on online dating generally mitigates the first and third obstacle, and the other two can be fixed through sheer numbers and persistence. It's a demoralizing process, but the easiest way to hit a bullseye is to throw a lot of darts.
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Alright, I accept this response as a justification for OLD.
I didn't know it was this bad for zoomers. While I believe I've dated a technical zoomer, she was in a social circle that was very millennial (moment of self-reflection: perhaps that was why we got along).
If this is the case, OLD is rough sledding. There's are a bunch of articles that show how messed up the "market" for dating is (your "smothered" comments points at this).
She's probably not. Because she isn't old enough.
Don't take this as me saying she isn't insightful. I take you at your word. But she's not the most insightful person you've ever known. Ask if if she is. She'll say she isn't. Take her at her word.
And then realize that if you still deny reality and message to her that you think she's the most insightful person you've ever known, she'll slowly start to question your reasonable judgement of other things.
Who keeps deleting their posts?
Stop it!
It’s fucking @urquan.
I call upon everyone to fully quote urquan’s comments when replying to any. He’s in this really weird and annoying phase where he just fucking deletes his posts after getting several replies!
The arc of the Doctrinal Conflict turns, and the Korh-Ah are now ascendant instead of the Czer-Ka. Utter destruction rather than containment and preservation is now the order of the day.
Shield up and power through, the weakness of the urquan tactics shall be laid bare! For the glory of Zelnick!
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Straight out of DC comics
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Can't speak for anyone else, but for me there were two draws.
And honestly, it worked well enough for me! I'm pretty sure I would never have met my wife if not for OLD. So I'm glad I gave it a go.
The last time I met someone new that I ended up going on a date with was eight years ago. In that time, I've gone out with at least 60 people I met online. The idea that I shouldn't do online dating is incomprehensible to me. I would love to meet people, but I just don't see how that's possible. It was extremely hard in university (I never went on a date in university) and it's only gotten dramatically harder since, especially since covid.
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She's not interested unfortunately. It's better if you dematch and move on.
In the future, I'd try to make date plans that are less pressure and more concrete. The coffee date was good! Moving it to a church was bad. It's just so much pressure to be with someone you don't know for multiple hours. And of course, never leave it up in the air.
Good: "Do you want to meet me for coffee at 1pm at Northtown Roasters"
Bad: "I'll be at the coffee shop so just hit me up if you're interested"
When I was online-dating, I followed some rules which people suggested to me. It worked well and I eventually met my wife after going on about 20 first dates.
You need to check your photos on a site like PhotoFeeler. Everyone can get at least an 8. Try to get a 9. People are committing dating suicide by posting bad photos. You might not even know what a good photo is supposed to look like.
Treat it like a job. Every day, spend a limited amount of time (maybe 15-30 minutes) swiping and getting matches. Once you get a match, you'll want to send a message soon afterwards. Try to make it good, but don't agonize over it. This is a numbers game. If they don't reply for a couple days, dematch and move on. Don't send 2 messages in a row if they don't reply. Definitely never send 3. Try not to get emotionally invested in people you've never met.
After a few messages back and forth (at most 5-10) but maybe less, assess the conversation. Is it going well? If so, then propose a real life meetup in the next 3 days or so. Good: coffee, a walk, a drink. Bad: anything complicated. After the meetup is planned, try not to text much anymore except you can on the day of the date to confirm details.
Hopefully you'll get enough dates to find people you find interesting and that like you back.
If you're not getting matches go back to step 1. Note: This was 2021 so things might have changed...
As far as I can tell, your first message makes absolutely no difference. I almost always just wri pplte "hey" now and that usually gets a response.
I don't recommend unlatching if they don't respond. One of my exes that I met on Tinder had been ignoring all her messages and then just scrolled through them all and responded to mine a few months after I had sent it.
I think most people are fine with not texting between the planning of the date and the date itself, but I have had people cancel on me because of that.
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She’s not interested lol
Check the ratio… you’re writing walls of text while she’s replying a small amount
Lastly inviting someone to church for a first date seems insane to me… she probably “she’d check it out” just to be polite.
To be fair she invited herself. However even mentioning it was probably a mistake.
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What is OLD? Also, who can't eat in front of people? Huge red flag to start. Who wants to go to church as a date? Red flag for both of you. Why drive all over the place for a date with someone that won't eat food. Red flag for you. So 3 Red flags on this whole thing.
A surprisingly large proportion of women in my experience. Not a ton of them, but enough for me to categorize it as A Thing.
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On line dating.
edit: replied to wrong comment somehow lol
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