any women here who have never dated, never had a boyfriend?

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[Furrows brow, widens eyes at non-sequiter]
[Looks at bottled water for clue, like what drunks in olde time films do]
[Wonders when he started drinking bottled water, realises he's basically a yuppy now and has become everything he ever hated]

Damn, I'm tired.



Next from The Nice Guys: "Look, we're not saying we'll start a violent and terrible bid to create a Thousand Year Reich but, if you know your history, you might want to reconsider your options, milady."

Though come to think of it, that was basically that Elliot kids big idea. It really is a fallen world.

Well obviously!

hey-ho the don quichotes

as soon as possible, it's about your fights again

In fact a lot of guys here think in this way, and some women find this reasoning sexist (ie. the same exact reasoning you said above)- radical feminists find the whole evolutionary psychology as evil and misogynist, so they wouldn't agree with you at all.

Don't you just love how when women get emotional it completely invalidates the content of what they say? It's so handy for discarding their opinions about things, because they're always so emotional. All those lady-hormones make the lady-brain no worky rite.

Stay in your vault, it's already a radioactive wasteland out there.

Well, I went to sleep and woke up thus morning and boom, thread explosion.

Wow, Hopper, that's how some of my friends feel. Nicely written.

I'm intrigued that my response to Spiderpig got totally ignored by everyone

I think because he didn't respond himself it got lost in the shuffle. It's like 5 pages back, now.

Which is ironic because he asked for clarification because he thought I was incoherent. [note to self using caps doesn't highlight the point it makes the rest of your text invisible] Actually Orieliom did highlight it. I forgot. But then there was mention of standards and i feel like my point was ignored.

I was pointing out that "standards" aren't what I mean when I talk about compatibility.

If two people meet and they like each other, but find out quickly that one wants kids and the other doesn't or there are compatibility issues with religion as in Boos case, or they live too far away from each other. that's not about having too high standards, it's not like saying the man must [insert trope about high standards]. It's about the practicalities of how you're both going to live your lives together or rather the lack of practicality.

Depends on just how flexible or rigid you are.

It wouldn't work because X isn't always the case and very well may work sometimes with enough compromise, and some may very well nitpick and grasp at straws for weak examples of 'irreconcilable incompatibilities' as an excuse to reject the person and dislike them.

For instance, a man wants 2 children maximum, a woman 5. Two very flexible people may very well both compromise and still date anyway, having 3 kids in the end.

I ignored it because I found it irrelevant, sorry.

Saying these women just don't want to use online dating is like saying they don't want to meet men in a bar or club or some other major social setting.

I'm not sure about the women, but as for the unsuccessful men in this forum, their lives changed when they started online dating and started getting good at it. Why exclude it as an option? That's honestly sounding unnecessarily picky to me.

That and, lots of people do everything online now. At one point when I had a group of friends who would go out and do stuff, all of their events were on Facebook which I hated. I still went with their methods though, because it would have been almost snooty not to, and kicking myself in the foot.

My example, and lots of dating examples on this forum are no exceptions. Online dating and networking are highly valuable tools.

Thank you. Even if you disagree Smudge you're adding to the conversation.

I just don't think online dating is comfortable for everyone.

Oh, is that what you said way back?

Sorry, I didn't see it and only went off what you said on this page about the previous post.

Well I know exactly how that feels then.

I detest, loathe and hate using the internet for socialization beyond acquaintances.

I have no friends that I met purely online, and prefer it this way.

I only use the internet to maintain contact with current friends that I had met in person first.

This makes me forming any sort of connection online exceptionally difficult.

For example I do hear of some people on dating sites getting rejected who decide to be only friends with the person who did so, and eventually they could possibly meet with this new friend, and this new friend can introduce them to mutual friends. I'm incapable of this.

It takes A LOT of mental effort to build ANY sort of motivation whatsoever for me to be engaged in online conversations with a stranger on the internet.

I almost can't feel emotions purely from text on a screen. I prefer real, human emotions. Seeing someone's smile, hearing their laugh, etc.

Forums like this are a little different. For me it's the online equivalent to conversing with a group of friendly strangers or at a real-life discussion based meetup group.

^ that's interesting. for me it's almost completely opposite. all my "real-life" friendships throughout the years have been disappointing or very hard to maintain in the long term. life changed dramatically for me after my best friend of more than ten years decided i wasn't good enough for him and his new friends. and among any groups of friends i happened to be part of, i felt like i was the outsider among the outsiders, so any connection was gone as soon as the original context (high school, for example) was gone. i had a very troubled relationship with my family, and now there was no anchor in friendship for me anymore either

i'm a pretty "intense" guy. not opening up means i feel like i'm just a hologram of myself, which makes me wish i was alone instead. but opening up irl means it gets emotional and it gets awkward. it doesn't leave much room for "just hanging out". meatspace is just not good for opening up. and i couldn't "produce" another friend who would know me as well as my former friend did, because my teenage years were over. now real-life was supposed to be all about the rat race (americans seem to associate "college" with parties and sex and overall "being young and irresponsible", but in my country, or at least in the university i went to, people are concerned with their career first and foremost)

the solution... text-based communication and forums and stuff, where it's normal to talk about "deep" things. it normalizes my intensity and alienation and eliminates most of the awkwardness from it, because it's the common denominator to begin with. i have two stable friends right now. i met both of them that way

one has been my friend for four years now. she might stop emailing me for a while at some point (which has happened more than once before), but i would just see it as a "hiatus". she has been been through some pretty huge changes in her life, and so have i, but we're still talking. it makes me happy that someone is witnessing my life for so long. it helps me feel like a person. we share some important values that most people don't, and i think we both gain confidence from staying in touch, and it gives me more faith in a future i could build for myself. sometimes we talk more often, sometimes not so much, but we keep each other up to date on what's going on

the other one, i had interacted with her briefly a few years ago, and we both liked each other's posts. then i started talking to her regularly some two years ago because i was going through some difficult things and didn't know who to talk to, and i was alone in a foreign country and there was a chance i could visit her soon. she was very welcoming and friendly and helpful, and i did get to visit her a few months later, which was awesome. meeting in person was awkward for maybe five minutes, if that, and then it felt perfectly natural. we had very long conversations that felt pretty much like an "augmented" extension of our previous text-based chats. she's still part of what makes me feel like i'm "home" most days, and i have no reason to believe that this friendship has an expiration date

what i wonder is: is this a difference of personality/temperament? or is it more of a difference of age? after all, your teenage years aren't over yet. when i was your age, the internet was already part of my everyday, and i did talk to strangers online sometimes, but "friends" were necessarily and exclusively people i knew from real-life

edit: or... come to think of it, actually not (i was just confused with my math). but that's because i always had this distinction between "hometown space" and "foreign space". the thought of meeting someone local through the internet is still very odd to me. but then again, by now, the very thought of meeting someone local, period, is very odd to me

The problem with evolutionary psychology is not that it's particularly evil or misogynist, but that it's stupid. It's reductionist, teleological and relies on circular reasoning. Even professed Darwinians don't seem to appreciate how radically unteleological Darwinism is. I think it's why Intelligent Designers get a) confused and b) traction.

The obvious biological difference is that women can get pregnant. No need to invoke some hereditary instinct, honed through Natural Selection on the Savannah, to understand why a woman would be concerned about an unwanted pregnancy, and so perhaps a little more cautious when jumping into bed with a fella. What's remarkable is how many women, post the contraceptive pill (and before, come to that, when even the possibility of dying in childbirth and the threat of the full force of social opprobrium for being an unwed mother couldn't keep them from jumping bones), are not actually as cautious as they are supposed (as in, as is supposed of them) to be.