The ultimate Jedi trial...dating
 

So SportsDino's dating dynasty thread provided plenty of entertainment and since it looks like his season is over, I thought I'd start mine.

THE SETUP (Me):

I'm 38, 6ft, have all my teeth, have a very good paying job, been married twice, no kids, had lots of girlfriends and am actually a pretty funny person to be around. However, as I am getting older, I am losing my hair and need to lose about 40 pounds. I played sports all my life (baseball and football) until I blew out my knee and still have the build for it, just with a beer gut now. I don't think I'm horrible looking (maybe a high 5/low 6 on a scale of 1 to 10), but, if I'm not carefull, I will probably end up looking like the dude with the wife beater shirt on Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

I'm a pretty shy person, so it's extremely hard for me to just walk up to some random chick and just start talking. So, random meets are out for me at this point in time. My two resources, for now, are a couple of online dating sites, one free and one you have to pay a monthly subscription.


THE SETUP (Her):

I'm pretty flexible when it comes to what I like in a woman. As long as her weight isn't way out of my tolerance level and her looks are within my tolerance level, her race is a non factor for me. Age has to be nothing too extreme, 10 years + or - with a fudge factor of about 2, maybe 3 years. So, she should be between the ages of 28 and 48 with an extreme of 25 to 51. If she is a diva, lives/breathes/dies by fashion, my dog is my baby, gold digger, dumb, ultra religious are all deal breakers. There's other deal breakers, but, I will deal with those on a case by case basis. All that aside (and maybe a bit contradictory), I prefer athletic to slimmer builds on women, C cup or smaller, but, if they are on the curvy side and they wear it well, I'm cool with that too. Not into BBWs, stocky, voluptuous (women seem to think this does not mean fat), overly endowed in the chest or the rear and can't be overly tall.


GRADING SYSTEM:

My grading system may seem a bit complex like a Kevin Gilbride led offense, but, it's actually fairly simple.

1st: Personality. Can easily make a 5 into a 8, but, other areas may nulify that. Potential points: 1-5

2nd: Looks. I'm a guy, looks are important, period. Looks, at times, will trump personality. Looks are subjective though. What may be a 8 to me could very well be a 5 to someone else. Potential points: 1-4

3rd: Lifestyle. Is she a drunk, stoner, loner, social butterfly, that kind of stuff. Some of it may fit into the Personality column, but, may not. I don't mind a few drinks, but, if you can't handle it, don't drink it. If she seems to want to socialize more with others than me, take a hike. Potential points: 1-3

Given all of that, I reserve the right to make exceptions to any of the 3 fields above, depending on strength of schedule, holidays, horniness (not to be confused with desperation), and any other thing that may affect my prospects.

I know the points add up to 12, but, if she reaches 11 or more, it's automatically a 10.



ROUND 1:

Lady #1 - She initiates contact with me on paid for dating site. Age 31, white, likes sports, likes beer, seems to have a pretty good personality, picture is cute, dark hair (a plus), has a little extra meat on her though. Hard to tell by how much from the pictures. Pre-Meet Score: (7)

We exchange a few emails back and forth for a few days before I offer to give her my phone number. She excepts (woohoo) and our first phone conversation lasts a couple of hours. We talk for a few more days and she suggests a meeting. She lives rather far from me so I ask to meet some place that is about half way for the both of us.

We meet at a bar/restaurant, nice place, not a dive. Ok, wow, tall, too tall, taller than me. Much more weight than pictures led on as well. Still very cute face and still a great personality. I know this will be a one time meeting for me. We have a few beers and then part ways.

This was a big girl. Taller than me by about 2 inches and built like a tight end. Just not what I'm into. Great conversations with her and she was pretty cool. I could see being friends, but, nothing more than that.

Post Meet Score: (low 4)


Lady #2 - She contacts me on paid for dating site. Age 33, white, local, a bit on the christian conservative side, blonde hair, 2 kids. From looking at her pictures from her profile, she is not my type. A bit too beefy for me and not really attracted to her face. Pre-Meet Score: (4)

We exchange a few emails back and forth, but, I'm really pushed away with how much she pushes her kids. I just find it odd that you would disclose so much to a stranger about your kids. I didn't ask, so don't tell. She asks a couple of questions about me being an athiest and she seemed pretty open to my answers. The emails go on for a couple of weeks, but, I keep my responses as non interested as possible without being a dick. She keeps talking about her kids and her mom now. I do not offer her my phone number. Finally, I think she gets the hint that I'm not interested and the emails stop coming from her. No Post Meet Score. So, I'll give her a final score of (3) because of the kids thing. Just creeped me out.

Lady #3 - She initiates contact with me on paid dating site. 35, black, lives kinda far, cute pictures on her profile, can tell she has a little extra junk in the trunk, says she likes football and baseball, no kids. Pre-Meet Score: (6)

Again, there's a couple of days worth of emails back and forth. Find out that she really doesn't like baseball or football, but, just goes to hang out with friends and drink wine. No biggie. Says she likes camping and hiking which is cool with me as I like going camping too. She's pretty quick to cut to the chase and says that she doesn't like long email exchanges and likes to meet pretty quick. No problem with me. I give her my number and she gives me hers. She asks if we can meet on Friday (it's Wednesday), I say Saturday would be better and she said that works out best because she has birthday party in my area to go to.

We meet at a local bar/restaurant, more like a brewery like BJs or any other local chain place. Very pretty face, nice boobage, pierced tongue, but, an extra large caboose, ouch. We sit at a table and right away, she seems a bit 'off'. The closest I can say is, suspicious I guess. I just chalk it up to meeting a stranger for the first time, no biggie. We talk for about 2 hours before she says that she is getting tired and should go. I'm actually ok with that, because during our conversation, she seemed rather pushy, coming off as too domineering. I don't like that. I like more mellow personalities. I pay for our drinks, get a hug from her and I was on my way home. Post Meet Score: (4) She loses points for her personality. I'd be ok if I didn't hear from her again.

So far after the first round: 0-3. Putting aside what the women think, not one of them I would want a second meeting/date with. I'm not looking to get laid on the first meeting/date, but, someone I'd actually want to talk to again or meet again. Plus, there's been zero prospects from the free dating site. I've contacted a few women on there and have gotten zero responses from them. I've had 'winks' sent to me from women on both sites, but, all of them have not even been close to my type.

I do have one 'on-the-side' prospect. She's a friend of a friend. I've met her before a few times at parties at my friends house. Very pretty, nice body, I've actually enjoyed the few times I've talked to her. She's 47 and smoking in my opinion. Stay tuned for this one...

Well, that's it for this Round. Hopefully I will have more to tell next Round.

Sounds promising -- I'll be following. :)

Hopefully I will have plenty more to share in the near future.

Good luck!

Thanks SD

Good luck to you. How I met my wife and definitely had to weed through alot of odd ones like you are doing.

Sounds like I'll be you in 8 years...without the marriages and the string of ex-gf's.

Thanks Mustang. I can tell this is going to be a long season...


Why wait 8 years? Sign up today and let the fun begin! :)

Nothing new to report other than me being 0 for 5 on getting any email responses from women I've sent them to.

There also seems to be this need for women to post pictures of buildings and sunsets, in addition to their ugly little chihuahua dogs, instead of pictures of themselves and then when they actually do post pictures of themselves, they are these freaking tiny ass pictures that you can barely see or they are in a group of friends and you don't know who is who.

Probably to hide they ugliness.

Interesting stuff, I actually met me wife on a paid dating service. I needed to expand beyond my normal circle of contact and had done work and club dating. Had lots of fun and fit my needs when I was not looking for a long term relationship after getting divorced.

After I decided I would be open to something more serious I joined a service, but didn't pay and just browsed for a couple of months as I was skeptical. I kept coming back to my wifes profile and finally paid and emailed her (the only one I sent) we talked for about an hour the first time, met for lunch 3 days later and have been together since. Hearing what others have gone through I know I got extremely lucky, but I just had a feeling about her. :)

Anyway, good luck, will be following along.

Haha! Yes, I do believe that is true for some of them.


That's pretty cool BYU. :) Thanks and I hope it won't be a long drawn out dynasty.

I think it's the area that I'm in. It's 'tech central' and just not a whole lot of ladies here. So the numbers are not in my favor.

Posting to wish you luck!

Good luck in your findings, i'll be following.

Thank you DC and Icy!

So dusting this old thing off...

Since the last update, I had subscribed to eHarmony, Chemistry and Match.com.

Dates procured from each:

eHarmony - 0
Chemistry - 0
Match.com - 2

I've since cancelled eHarmony and Chemistry. Come to find out, Chemistry is just a match.com off shoot, with an even crappier search tool and eHarmony thinks that since I'm overweight, that I only want to date overweight women, women close to my moms age or they live 900 miles away. So those two sites are done and gone.

So, had a date a couple of months ago with one lady that was 38, had an awesome personality, but, I just was not attracted to her physically due to her weight. I'm not looking for a super model (I actually like a little meat on the bones), but, it was just too much unfortunately. Went out a couple of times with her, but, just did not have that attraction to her.

The second woman from Match.com, had the physical attributes within my range, but, pushed the teeth/gum ratio* a bit. Had an ok personality, but, was a bit too much into her pets and San Francisco. This one did not get off to a good start where she canceled our first two attempts to meet at the last minute and on the 3rd attempt, she gave me the wrong address and then got mad at me for not showing up. We finally met up this past Saturday and while she was cool, I could tell something just wasn't there. I'm glad she texted me the next day and said we weren't a match.


I have to say, I'm really disappointed in the women in the Bay Area. Of course, my pool is from a limited source, so I'm saying that based off that parameter. With the exception of a few women, most seem...'off'. I hardly read any profiles where the woman seems genuine or down to earth (even though they repeat those two terms quite frequently). Most seem like they are stuck in resume mode or business mode and it is very off putting. Plus, I get it that you 'just LOVE, LOVE, LOVE...' your dog. The problem is, I'm looking for a human, not a dog. Actually, I understand why you love your dog, because you can't function in a normal human to human relationship. Which would also explain why, at 39, you have never been married. You're not picky,you're living in fantasy land.

Needless to say, it's been rather boring in Jedikooter land. I'm open to any hints and/or suggestions.



*Teeth/gum ratio: The amount of gums in proportion to the teeth. Think Mr. Ed or a chimpanzee. The more you look like Mr. Ed/chimp, the higher the Teeth/gum ratio. Too high of a number, equals disqualification. I don't know why this bothers me, but it does.

Eharmony worked for me. Never tried anything else. Thinking I'll be engaged or married this time next year.

You need this on your profile then.

At least it worked out for you. It was a horrible experience and waste of money for me. Same with chemistry.com. Also with eharmony, maybe 50% of the women actually had photos posted, so I had no clue what a lot of them looked like.


Well, it was the site picking them. There's sliders for questions like: "How important is body type to you?" and you can slide the slider depending on how important/not important it was to you. I began to think that the sliders were done by EA. They were not very accurate.


I've found that with match.com, as crappy as their search algorithm is, it is the least restrictive of the 3 sites that I've tried. So you can at least get somewhat close to a group of search criteria that will work. You can filter out the profiles that don't have pictures. The one search criteria I wish they had was for when the last time someone was on. Waaaayyy too many profiles that say the last time they were on was more than 3 weeks ago. It is obvious that match.com does not delete inactive profiles. There also seems to be this phenomenon with women and their pictures on match.com. I group them into 3 categories:

1. All are group photos - Good luck picking out who she is if she's not the only woman in the picture. (They may have captions for the pictures about 5% of the time telling you which one they are)

2. All the photos are of places they've visited (mostly pictures of a beach), except for one tiny thumbnail picture of them.

3. All the photos are of their pets or some random picture of food.

Don't get me wrong, there are ladies that do post pictures of themselves and I appreciate that. However, they are not in the majority. Bottom line is, I don't want to see your pets or the places you've visited or the food you or someone else ate, I want to see you. All those things are for a future conversation when we are trying to get to know each other better.

I typically ignored any woman that hid their photo. I ignored any woman that couldn't spell out simple things...like their occupation.

There are sliders in the settings to help set importance on things. I can't recall weight being in there, though. I tell you what, there were plenty of water buffaloes in there, but it was worth it to find the right one.

I definitely ignored the one's without photos or hidden photos. I mean, it's a dating site, um, kind of an expectation there to see what the other person looks like. Yes, atrocious spelling and punctuation are big turn offs as well. It's different if English isn't their first language, but, if it's a picture of a white girl wearing a Steelers jersey and she spells worse than 3 year old, I'm sensing red flag.

It may have been more general like: Physical attributes or something, I really don't remember. It's been a while. Some men like bigger women, that's cool, I do not however.

I just went out on a date the other night...met her off of all places, craigslist..LOL!

Anyways, I had heard of Plentyoffish.com but never used it...she is 43 (7 years my senior) and a confessed "dater" she said it was a solid site. Just signed up today and I will let you know how it goes...

You are one brave man. I do confess to looking at Craigslist and here's what I see: 55-65 single women and 18-22 single women and maybe 1 or 2 in the age range that I'm looking for. BUT, and they usually are a big but, most of them are what they like to call themselves, BBW.

I have heard of Plenty of fish as well. Haven't checked it out though. There's also another site called OkCupid.

So you went out with a cougar huh? As long as you're having fun, nothing wrong with that.

I've done OkCupid and I used to get responses.

Until I put my picture up.

Since I've done that, not one single person has responded to me.

So yeah, the no/hidden pics thing is a good rule of thumb to go by when screening out women, cuz they probably hairy like me.

So I guess the BBW stands for: Big Beautiful Wookiee?

Of course...It depends on your circles though!

So...any other news?

Big Buffalo Weaksidetackle.

Nope, no other news. Just not really impressed with Northern California women at this point. If I was back in So Cal, this would not be a problem.



Do they come with a side of blue cheese?

I think they bring their own blue cheese.

Whoa. I just lost my appetite.

Jedi mentioned he'd like to hear about my experiences in another thread, so my recent dating experiences:

I've been out with 2 girls post-divorce, both met from Match. The first one was a dud. She was moderately attractive, but no chemistry between us. The 2nd one was a grad student (Ph. D.) who is only 26. She is very attractive, interesting, and intelligent. One of the best first dates of my life. 2nd date was 2 days later and we had a good time watching football - very chill. Since then, I've been on 4 more dates with her over a period of 3 weeks. I've heard things about her that set off little alarms for me. So, I find myself debating on whether it is time to cut bait and run. On one hand, she is attractive and smart. On the other, I think she is a little too aware of how attractive she is and she has some personality issues that I'm not sure I want to get past. We'll see. She just texted me (in last hour) and says she wants to come over to my place to watch some movies Saturday night.

Umm...wait..I must have missed the divorce thread or you talking about it...I am in shock right now...

I don't think I've ever posted a divorce thread.

I'm just saying I missed you bringing it up somewhere else and a little stunned is all.

This.

By the way, I'd keep going a bit longer with this PhD student to see if these issues are things you can work past.

At least get a couple of pokes from her. ;)

One of her rules is no sex for at least 90 days. She "is tired of guys just wanting to use (her) for (her) body and not getting to know" her.

Cut and run.

That's usually a red flag for me too. But, not knowing what some of those personality flaws are, hard to see if there's a connection. Proceed with caution EF27.

I can understand someone wanting to take things slow, especially if she has been burned by jerks who just want to bang her and move on.

It's also my observation that if a woman has this rule, it's usually just to see if the guy sticks around. This is the first rule a woman throws out the window if she actually likes a guy enough.

+1

The 90 day rule isn't even one of my concerns, I can respect that view point. Although the underlying speech that all guys are jerks bothers me a bit. It's other stuff that concerns me. I only mentioned it because of the comment.

What's this other stuff that concerns you? This sounds mysterious.

Or do you not want to share?

To clarify, I never paid to try anything else.

At the time I wrote this, I thought it was a true statement. I totally forgot I went out on a date with a woman from Plenty of Fish (free). However, my morals/standards/whatever you'd like to call them didn't lead me to a lot of success in that realm. POF brought two types of women to me: Reasonably attractive ones that still wanted to party but "was tired of the bar scene and wanted to find a good guy and settle down" or the not so attractive women that may (or may not) have a good heart. With the past history of my ex, I was not interested in the former. I don't need to say much more about the not so attractive ones.

I used the site immediately after the divorce and didn't go on the first date until about 2 months later. It went ok, but she had a few issues. I was at a point in my life where I wasn't going to deal with an issue...any issue.

About a month later I was on eharmony.

I'm probably going to pop the question at my youth football banquet November 6th.

EF, I'd like to offer my condolences or congratulations (depending on how you currently see it). While I fought to keep my marriage together for years, I realize now that the divorce was the best thing to ever happen to me.

I will take congratulations. I fought for several years to keep a progressively bad marriage together, but now realize divorce has made all parts of my life so much better.

As far as her personality issues without being too graphic for the board. She told me she is into rough sex which is not my thing. Also, she has been burnt by guys and seems to view us all as jerks and I feel like she is testing me at times. She also mentioned she always keeps her friends, work, and boyfriends separate and they never should meet. Most concerning is her ex husband was in his 50's when she married him and she was 21.

those all sound like huge red flags for me. i'd run.

Yeah, big red flags there (although the rough sex ..... well anyway). The whole thing about keeping friends totally separate from boyfriends and that you could never meet them is either a sign that she actually has no friends or that her friends are dudes that she fucks on the side. And yeah, "all guys are jerks" is something you'd be tasked with disproving every day of your life with her.

And she has daddy issues on top of all that.

My vote (if you care): Sever.

Yeah - i had a longer post that my browser ate where i went into more detail on all of them and was okay with just the rough sex part, but it got eaten, so i went with the shorter answer.

Exactly what you said about the friends/work/bf thing too. if she wants to segregate you it's just so she can fuck around with other dudes in other parts of her life. Particularly if she likes rough sex...you can bet she's getting it from somewhere.

In my decidedly uninformed opinion, girls who like rough sex aren't likely to settle for periods of abstinence.