Vanessa Austin Locke: Separating the men from the boys
The next chapter in my journey through online dating is about gender inequality. For once women have the advantage. All you have to do as a woman is sign up and you’ll be asked out. It’s just like going to a bar; in general women don’t have to get up the courage to approach someone if they’re on the prowl because that’s ‘the man’s job’. And in my experience men don’t actually like to be approached first in reality. I guess it’s the hunter/gatherer instinct…
“It sounds disgraceful, but I like to think of it as effcient”
When I first started internet dating I thought it was just like being in a bar, and in many ways it is. I’ve always thought it must take quite a bit of courage to approach a woman in a public place, so I was polite and courteous to those I didn’t want to engage with. It quickly became a full-time job; I was writing charming, personal, yet firm ‘rejection slips’ whilst juggling lengthy conversations with potential suitors and going on the actual dates.
I was getting a bit tired by the whole thing. At one point I actually had to triage dates, with a high (or low) point of three in one day – 1pm, 3pm and 5pm. It got a bit awkward when date one insisted on walking me the hundred yards down the road to the next pub to meet my ‘friend’ aka date two. I know, it sounds disgraceful, but I like to think of it as efficient. I couldn’t get off the wheel because what if the one I ignored was the one?! Pain, misery and despair! Or, I’d never have known…
Anyway, I was knackered, my work was suffering and all my friends thought I was being an idiot, which, to be fair, I was. That was until I got a new housemate… a young male who stayed in his room all day with the curtains drawn watching Japanese porn and surfing the internet. (Lovely chap BTW.) On one of the rare occasions he actually emerged from his room and engaged in conversation he revealed to me that he was online dating too. As far as I was aware he’d not actually been on a date since we’d been co-habiting. But why? I was flooded with dinner invitations. Was this a gender thing? On asking a few leading questions I quickly established why…
His strategy was this: Identify about 20 girls per night that he wanted to sleep with – judged on their profile picture alone; Copy and paste the same (lame) message to each and every girl. At this point his brilliant plan split into two channels of action depending on the response. If the response was favourable (i.e. if there was a response) he would tease them, in an awkward, borderline aggressive and rather opaque style. This generally resulted in an abrupt reaction/rejection at which point he would begin to ‘troll’ them. If he got no response at all… he would ‘troll’ them.
Now, obviously he was a member of www.dateadope.com and I’m certain that he’s not typical of male online behaviour, but it did get me thinking about economics… Men make the first move, women have to wade through the responses. Therefore a man would need to make at least ten times as many advances as a woman to get one result. So the copy and paste method made perfect sense. They were treating it as an exercise in probability.
I tested the theory by getting a friend over who was on the same site as me and logging in together to see how many messages we’d got from the same guys. Turned out we’d not only had the same messages from, and even the same conversations with, the same men but had actually been on a couple of (the same) dates with several of them!
I admonished myself for being naive, logged into my account instantly and deleted every message that made no personal reference to me, which instantly halved my workload. I then encouraged my housemate to pen a personal message to six ladies that took his fancy, only after he’d read their profiles. He had a 50 per cent reply rate and actually got a date!
As for me… well, I got a night off that week with a bottle of wine and a copy of How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days.
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