A sad woman left the following comment (scroll down) to a post about an OkCupid experiment in dating profiles which CH covered in detail here.
An even more insightful “study” would be to do the same thing but use people of similar attractiveness but different ages. I am in my 40’s and I receive virtually no messages. I did the Match thing for six months and sent over 200 messages, all of which were “custom” to the guy I was contacting. I can’t stand cut and paste emails, not to mention they’re obviously cut and paste. I got fewer than 10 responses. In six months. What I have taken away from this whole experience is if you’re female and your age starts with a number equal to or higher than 4 (I’m 45) it is not going to be a great experience. And if, like me, you’re tall (5’11″) it’s going to be even worse.
Dating sites exist to make a profit, and that means by necessity and in accord with the nature of their market and consumer sentiment they must push a silo full of pretty lies. If they were to come out and say “ugly, fat and older women and boring, poor and loser men need not apply”, that would cut into revenues. And probably provoke an idiotic discrimination lawsuit which serves the betterment of absolutely nothing.
So dating sites package their pretty lies in pabulum like “customization” and “29 dimensions of compatibility to find your perfect match” that specifically ping the hopefulness radars of lovelorn women and the men who follow where those women go. Keep hope alive, because when you can’t find a date in the real world, hope is all you have left.
Never are the inherent limitations of online dating sites more apparent than when the eFallacy marketing fluff meets the massive edifice of the Wall. The Splat Protocol is that event horizon when aging beauties become like the beta males they ignored in their youth, now reduced to spending hours and hours working feverishly on their arid, online dating profiles only to be rewarded with crumbs of lackluster attention from those very same men.
The lesson here is that cultural leverage in whatever form has to be brought to bear on the inflated egos and runaway narcissism of American women to guide them to wise life decisions. This wisdom would include reminders to settle down young while they still have the glow of natural rosiness in the cheeks, and warnings against imagining internet dating is some kind of reprieve from the merciless judgment of the God of Biomechanics.
when the wall… comes rising into view
when the wall… comes closing in on you
when the wall… is looming all arouuuund
– Jane “Cougar” Mellentramp
UPDATE
Commenter Wrecked ‘Em (rectum? I nearly wrecked em!) writes,
And on the flip side, 50 y.o. friend changed his match profile to imply that he looks younger than his age, has younger friends, that women his age can’t hang, and finally listed his real income, which is over match’s top spot of $150k/yr… then dropped his minimum age on “looking for” to 28.
He then proceeded to like photos and favorite plenty of women in the 28-32 age range, wholly ignoring what age of man they were supposedly interested in. Based on the response he’s seen thus far his new theory is that the hotter the girl is the more likely she’ll respond. He’s swimming in it after only a week of this.
Given compensatory attributes (game, wealth, looks, overconfidence, preselection by younger women/friends), a man can easily date women significantly younger than himself. Women, in contrast, have little ability to compensate for their aging.
The Wall comes to all, but men have the option to outflank it for a while. Women can only watch in horror as it bears down on them.
[crypto-donation-box]
