Take the OKcupid plunge?

[kimber607507]

Thanks all for suggestions and feedback
I opened a profile on Ok Cupid and no worries, no pressure, no tedious emails to go through...*crickets*
LOL
No emails, nada, nothing..BIG zero!

*sigh*

Ok back to the drawing board..Kim

[nycindie]

Originally Posted by kimber607507

Thanks all for suggestions and feedback
I opened a profile on Ok Cupid and no worries, no pressure, no tedious emails to go through...*crickets*
LOL
No emails, nada, nothing..BIG zero!

*sigh*

Ok back to the drawing board..Kim

You only talked about starting an account there yesterday. It hasn't even been one full day. It could take months to get any responses -- it isn't as if people are there just waiting for you to join. And if your profile is as a couple, you will not have as many responses as a single person looking for monogamy. You have to be patient. It could wind up being very fruitful for you, but will likely take a lot of time before that happens. That is why I said to have no expectations.

[kimber607507]

I know..was only kidding
Plan to keep the account open and do my own work/digging

[nycindie]

Oh, well, good for you then! I look at OKC as something to check every now and then, and to do some searching only when I really have the time. Good luck!

[wokeupconfused]

With OKC, I find I have to be the initiator of any contact. I do searches with keywords like open, poly, etc..

I am currently talking to a lady through messages. We may meet later, depends on how this intial feeling out process goes..

Good luck, it can be disheartening at times, if you let it.

[Helo]

I've been on OKC for about eight months with mixed success.

I've met a couple of great people there (we haven't ended up in a relationship) but for the most part it kinda seems like throwing bricks in the Grand Canyon. It also leads to an absolutely maddening occurrence where you meet someone that seems as close to perfect as you could reasonably ask for....and they're monogamous with absolutely zero plans to think about anything else.

Online dating in general seems to kinda suck. It makes people over-picky and everyone thinks they can gauge a person's true personality and intentions from a two paragraph entry.

I've actually had some open hostility on OKC, which I was not expecting. Two were people who were responding to messages I sent and one guy just messaged me out of the blue saying I needed to find another "more appropriate" site if all I wanted was group sex. None of them sent more than one message but it was still unexpected from a site that, I've been told, is one of the few places to go online to meet poly people in number.

Sadly there arent really many other choices. There's a poly dating website but it has MAYBE a few thousand people on it. I only found five other people in the Los Angeles area on the site. There's another site that claims to be for poly dating but seems to interpret "poly dating" as "lots and lots of fucking."

[SchrodingersCat]

Originally Posted by Helo

It also leads to an absolutely maddening occurrence where you meet someone that seems as close to perfect as you could reasonably ask for....and they're monogamous with absolutely zero plans to think about anything else.

You must have missed some key personality questions, or else not put enough importance on the answers. I've answered a ton of poly-type questions and made all the "Answers I'll accept" be "Mandatory" and so OKC doesn't match me romantically with anyone monogamous.

For example, one question is "Would you date someone who was already in a committed relationship with someone else?" Options are:
Yes, even in secret.
Yes, but only if everybody knew.
No, but I don't think it's inherently wrong.
No, it's wrong.

Well, since I'm in a committed relationship with someone else, and I don't endorse lying, I chose "Yes, but only if everybody knew" for my own answer, as well as the only answer I would accept. Then I set that answer to "mandatory" for matches. Anyone who chooses another answer is completely unavailable to me, so why waste time? And since that's a dating question, it's not factored into friend-matching.

OKC has a very smart scoring algorithm. It assigns points to answers based on your importance. "A little important" is worth 1 point, "Mandatory" is worth 250 points. So someone would have to agree with you on 250 minor things to override one mandatory thing. Since I've answered at least 10 poly-questions as "Mandatory" that makes it more like 2500 minor things.

Msg me if you want my OKC profile name, and you can go to my "Dating" questions and find some poly-friendly questions to narrow the field.

[Helo]

Originally Posted by SchrodingersCat

You must have missed some key personality questions, or else not put enough importance on the answers. I've answered a ton of poly-type questions and made all the "Answers I'll accept" be "Mandatory" and so OKC doesn't match me romantically with anyone monogamous.

I've found a lot of them and answered them accordingly. My matches are still generally astoundingly bad.

[MoonBright]

OKCupid changed their matching algorithm awhile back to create more high value matches.
Personally, I found it a horrible decision. Those people really aren't good matches for me, so I much preferred the previous algorithm.
Now, I mostly look at the friend #, rather than the "match" #.

[SchrodingersCat]

Yeah, not everyone that matches highly is really a good match for me. Love isn't logical and expecting any kind of mathematical algorithm to accurately reduce romance to a single percentage is preposterous.

Even though I met my girlfriend through OKC, I honestly think it was more of a fluke than anything. I've met about half a dozen people through OKC, all matched over 85%. She's the only one with whom I wanted so much as a second date, never mind a romantic relationship approaching the 1 year mark.

But then, that all comes back to being in the right head space. You're much less likely to find someone when you're desperately searching. If you go out only looking for friends, you'll have a more open mind about what people are like, and hopefully be less likely to write off people who seem less than ideal at first impression.