Online dating: Great for women, sucks for men

Online dating is great for women and it sucks for guys. It seems to be a perfect fit for our consumerist society, where only the best-looking or most valuable packages get taken off the shelf.

The reason why it works so well for them is that men typically outnumber the women in online dating sites. With an oversupply of men, they can have their pick of the litter.

Indeed, any female posting a profile to an online dating site usually gets deluged with e-mails from interested men. With so many e-mails and only a finite amount of time to answer them, naturally they will screen in only the best-looking and richest men.

One man posting in an online forum said he found that for every four hundred e-mails he sends to women, he will get maybe one or two positive responses back. Not dates, just responses. One response for every four hundred e-mails? Yikes! With results like that, it’s not hard to see that his chances of actually getting a date are pretty slim.

A number of years ago, German researchers found that people have to date a minimum of thirteen people before they find a suitable long-term partner. Let’s assume the prospective suitor I mentioned earlier does get one date for every four hundred e-mails he sends. That’s four hundred times thirteen, or 5,200 e-mails to find a partner!

I can’t imagine any man having the kind of time or energy on his hands to carry out such a Herculean task.

Not surprisingly, many online dating site operators find, that with such poor odds of success, they have a hard time keeping male customers. So, in hopes of keeping the money rolling in, they send out bait profiles (profiles of women whose membership has lapsed) to men who have signed on for free trials or who have cancelled their memberships.

I personally experienced firsthand the same bait-and-switcheroo. When my match.com membership was active matches would arrive by e-mail. When I logged on to respond, I found that many of the profiles had magically disappeared!  Cancelling my membership only resulted in more e-mails promising matches and entreaties not to cancel. Recently match.com has come under fire from various quarters for engaging in such slimy business practices. As of this writing, a class-action lawsuit has been lodged against match.com; plaintiffs are seeking a refund of their membership fees on the grounds that they were defrauded.

In my travels, I have found that several basic types of women frequent online dating sites:

1. Stuck-up, snooty women who think they are God’s gift to men. With the tons of e-mail they get from hopeful suitors, they acquire both swelled heads and a wildly unrealistic opinion of their market value in the dating world. Women like this are clearly suffering from what I call ‘Princess Syndrome’. A characteristic symptom of the malady is having a stringent laundry list of ‘requirements’ and ‘standards’ few men could ever hope to meet.

2. Attention junkies.

3. Gold-diggers. No explanation needed here!

4. Professional daters who, sucked in by the endless choice online dating appears to offer, keep looking for the Bigger, Better Deal. Ad nauseam. Scratch a professional dater, and you’ll likely find someone with a serious fear of commitment lurking underneath. The type of woman mentioned in (2) above often fits into this category.

5. Teases who get off on rejecting men for sport. These women should have a big “L” branded in their foreheads – “L” for “Loser”, of course.

6. Desperate single mothers. If you ever see a profile where a woman says, “My children mean everything to me”, RUN! This is code-speak that means a woman is basically married to her children, and if you get involved with her, you’ll find that you rank dead last. Right down there with Fido, if you’re lucky.

7. Russian/ Eastern European women or women from other foreign countries where poverty and crime is rife. Probably half of these women are allied with fraudsters seeking to fleece lonely men.

8. Drunks, druggies, other assorted psychopaths.

The strange thing about the online dating sites I’ve been on is that there are few women who could be considered ugly. (Unless of course, they’re the ones who post a profile but no pic).

Confused? So am I. See points 1, 2, and 3 above for an explanation on why a good-looking woman would feel the need to resort to online dating.

Bottom line: Online dating is a bad deal for men. Guys, your money and time is better invested elsewhere.