Bull Run wrote:
Eh, I still think that's a limiting belief. Those things are restrictions just as much in real life game as it is online. There are some men that can talk their face away BUT those are the men that have a much deeper set of characteristics that are appealing to women. Whether they do it online or offline is just semantics. If they can do it in person, they can do it online as well...they just need to learn the techniques required in both realms.
You can call it limiting beliefs, but I call it reality. The friend Triumvirate speaks of is who most would call an Average Joe. He would be Luke Wilson in Idiocracy. He has no unique redeeming qualities, and I mean none. He's one of the most boring habitual people I've known in my life. He goes to work, goes home, plays Skyrim for God knows how long, faps the night away, and goes to sleep. If he comes out once a month to sarge with us it would be a modern day miracle. He probably has a gym membership collecting dust somewhere.
He irons all his clothes on Sunday night for the entire week. It's not because he's too busy to do it during the week, but because he plays everything safe and never takes any chances. He's not rich, he's not poor, he's not anything. Not a member of any organizations, clubs, societies. I think he played recreational kickball once. Has maybe 100 friends on Facebook, and keeps that list short. He basically just exists. I know it sounds like I'm badmouthing him, but this is his life.
All that being said, this guy absolutely kills it on Match.com. Enough so that he doesn't feel he needs to improve himself in any way, or go out with us. Refuses to read any PUA material. Somehow the idea got in his head that he's entitled to decent/good looking girls, even though he hasn't done anything to earn it. He probably gets an average of one date a week. So he's taking one girl out a week...and more often than not, never hears from them again. Or the shit goes quickly downhill from that point. Most likely because they realize how unspecial he is. But they saw his picture online, nothing seemed threatening, so they gave him a chance. He had been telling me for years I should join Match, but I didn't see it as necessary.
But after we both moved to DFW and seeing how many dates he was getting, I said to myself, "Self, you could get on Match.com and kill it just as well or better than him. You're actually cool and have a large network of girls and people in real life. This will be a breeze."
Let me give you a quick background on myself. I was one of the guys in college a lot of people knew (enrollment of 25k). I was a D1 athlete, 6'3", not ugly, an engineering major, minored in Spanish just to meet some non-engineers. Was in three or four organizations. I knew the athletes, I knew the nerds. Modified my car just to learn something new. I slept 4 hours a night just so I could do it all. Went out every weekend if I didn't have games/meets. And when I had time, banged the occasional broads. Our friend from above complained it wasn't fair that he wasn't getting chicks like I was. That was six years ago.
Fast forward to today. I'm in as good if not better shape, put on 15-20 lbs of muscle, still compete at the level I did in college, play in adult soccer leagues, coach kids over the summer, and got my master's degree in a completely different part of the country, just because I wanted to try a new environment. Put some money together, got a really nice car. I'm usually out 3 nights a week, socializing, meeting girls, whatever. I have the tendency to attract people to myself if I feel like making myself seen.
So you get the gist. I don't completely suck, nor am I the spawn of Satan.
Anyways, I signed up for a week-long trial on Match.com. If the turnout was good I'd consider giving it a full month. I didn't half-ass it...I pooled all my resources for this shit. I read PUA material on how to make the most attractive profile and uploaded pictures of me doing anything you could think of. Spent about 3-4 hours a day going through profiles. Maxed out my daily message limit sending a combination of everything: personalized messages, funny and playful messages, straight to the point messages, whatever.
In that week, I sent out a total of 200-250 messages. Yes you read that right, two hundred to two hundred and fifty. And when I ran out of messages I winked the shit out of the rest. I was bringing the best I had to the table. I was killing it in real life, so online was going to be ka-razy! Even if I totally flopped and only managed to meet 10% of the girls, that's still 20 to 25 dates!
I got nothing. Motherfucking nothing.
I amassed a total of 6 or 7 replies, and managed to get the email addresses or numbers of about 4 or 5 of them before the trial ended. None of those turned into meetups. That comes out to a 3% reply rate, 2% number close rate, and 0% meetup rate.
You may be saying "What the fuck IsiMan84? You're like 1000% more valuable than your friend, you should be shutting that site down."
Oh yea, I forgot to mention something about myself earlier.
I'm black.Not 'The Wire' black, not 'Carlton Banks' black, just regular black.
Being black is to online dating what country western is to a young person's music preference: most people like everything but that. A multitude of profiles I went through were looking for only White/Caucasian, and occasionally that plus Hispanic. I saw more profiles with every choice except black checked than ones with it included at all. If not one of those choice combinations then it was 'no preference'. Which means they were just too lazy to check any boxes, or didn't want to look like they were discriminating.
But that's just what I can see from my end. On their end, if they're actually searching (God forbid they don't get 100+ messages a day as it is) they're getting results based on their preferences, so guys like me won't even come up. My picture could have been of me sitting on a stack of money with Brad Pitt while Angelina Jolie blew me for everything she was worth, it wouldn't have mattered. So my only foot in the door is the message/wink I was sending, which is most likely ignored just from looking at my picture.
Oh and I forgot to mention, just based on the sheer numbers, roughly 50-75% of the girls I messaged/winked were white. And of the 5 emails/numbers I got, only one
wasn't black.