(This post assumes you’ve read the link I just shared) muggi’s Big Post on Online Dating: What and Why [hide] To begin, this is by no means a super-comprehensive how-to guide. This is mostly just a few random tips and an overview of how I do things, obstacles I've encountered along the way, and how I've overcome them. Why online dating? Simply put, if you’re actively trying to meet women, it’s the most time-effective method and gives you the most bang for your buck in the long run (pun intended :D). It also forces you to learn how to get girls to like you in under an hour without using alcohol as a crutch. In other words, it’s good for long-term personal development, especially if you’re naturally introverted and shy around strangers like I am. These skills will generalize to other areas of your life, such as job interviews and meetings. It will probably take you several months to get consistently good results, so don’t be discouraged when things don’t work out. Also keep in mind that the "online dating part" ends once the girl is standing there in front of you. From that point on, it’s all up to your personal ability to get girls to like you. But I’ll try to cover that too. Online dating is a numbers game. You can’t be messaging one girl at a time and waiting for a response before moving on to the next one. That will take forever. Similarly, you can’t waste time reading a girl’s profile description—most of the time it’s very short and boring anyways. Really, the only thing you should be focusing on is her pictures. The only “filter” I apply to my searches is to find girls who are at most 1 inch taller than me and “thin”; “athletic”; or “average” body type. If a girl’s ambiguously overweight and her body type says “average,” I try to exercise my best judgment on whether or not I should message her. If I do message her and she replies back, I’ll ask her to send me a full body pic of her before we start talking. If a girl’s ambiguously overweight and her profile says “thin” or “athletic,” I give her the benefit of the doubt. Generally, a girl is overweight if her photos are taken with the camera above her face; if her pictures only show her face; or if she really emphasizes how big her boobs are w/o having full body pics. When you’re ready to start “putting in the numbers,” you’ll want to open up a word document and have a few variations of your opener typed out for easy copy and pasting. Some of the dating sites won’t send your message out if you use the exact same one more than a few times in a row. So you just change a word or two around and then send that “new” opener after you’ve sent the original one out about 3-4 times. Don’t send more than about a dozen openers per day. Ideally, you’ll want to only message girls who are “Online now!” because they’ll be the most likely to see your message and respond back to you. (Optional) After you’ve messaged several cute girls, you go to your inbox and see who you’ve sent messages to. Then you copy and paste their profile URLs into a spreadsheet to make sure you don’t accidentally message them again. On OKC they automatically tell you if and when you’ve messaged someone. On POF they don’t, and your inbox is cleared every 30 days. So after 30 days, it’s OK to message a girl again. Also optional is to track whether or not a girl views your profile (to see if she got your message, but just wasn’t interested), whether or not she replied back to you, whether or not she agreed to a date with you, and whether or not you actually dated her. This is mostly so at the end of the month you can look at the figures and say “OK, I messaged 200 girls and only went on 1 date. I’m clearly doing this wrong.” :) (Optional) I’d also recommend getting apps for the dating sites on your smartphone, and having all of your copy and paste responses saved on there. It’s great for when you’re on the go or if you’re in bed and can’t sleep haha. Next time you’re at the computer, you can update your spreadsheet. Anyways, this looks like a lot of stuff to do but it really doesn’t take much time at all. Imagine how long it would take to approach 100 attractive girls at a bar compared to just copy and pasting 100 messages. It takes very little time, and if you’ve got a smartphone, you can do it while running errands and stuff. So why is it important to put in the numbers? According to my spreadsheet, since I started doing this in August, I’ve messaged 754 women. I’ve gotten replies back from 170 of them, scheduled dates with 34 of them, and the date has actually happened with only 7 of them. Keep in mind, however, that this is the “grand total” from when I started and was terrible. My stats are a lot better these days. Currently, about 1 in 20 girls will schedule a date, and since January I’ve only had about half of them flake (compared to 80-100% of them). So like I said, this process takes a while to learn, and I’m still learning a lot. The good thing is, once you learn how to do something right, you’re generally all set in that area in the future and it will no longer be a problem for you. When it comes to online dating (or any skill for that matter), it’s always best to accept responsibility when you mess up. I think most guys try online dating, can’t get any dates, or can’t get any girls interested, give up, and say online dating’s a waste of time. I would’ve done that too if I hadn’t read about people getting consistent success. So despite lots of failure, I slowly but surely improve and learn not to make the same mistakes in the future. Which brings me to my next point: MY MISTAKES! :D Being a huge nerd at heart, I think of online dating as a video game. Level 1 is getting a girl to read your profile (requirement: good profile picture) Level 2 is getting a girl to respond to your opener and be open to dating you (requirement: good profile description) Level 3 is getting a girl to agree to a date with you (requirement: be interesting and humorous when chatting to her, and pitch the meet as soon as possible) Level 4 is getting a girl to actually meet up with you and not flake (requirement: text her between when you schedule the date and when the date happens, and continue to be interesting and humorous; otherwise, she’ll lose interest and flake) Level 5 is getting a girl to want to meet up for a second date (requirement: touch her) Level 6 is making out, fooling around, and/or having sex (requirement: more sexual touching in private) Most people shouldn’t have too many problems until they get to level 3. In my case, I started in August and... *checks spreadsheet*... messaged 177 girls and had a grand total of 1 date. And the girl wasn’t even that attractive; she messaged me first and I took it as an opportunity for practice. It wasn’t until about two months later in October that I actually started to consistently schedule dates. I did this by overhauling my profile description and making it very no-nonsense and to-the-point. Before then, my profile was too boring. Many girls will reply back to me now and be like, “OMG I loved reading your profile! It made me laugh so hard!” So, that’s cool. :D Anyways, so after I tweaked my profile description and made it awesome, scheduling dates suddenly became incredibly easy. Prior the profile change, I’d scheduled 2 dates after messaging 177 girls over the course of two months. After the profile change, within the first two weeks of October, I scheduled 12 dates! 3 of which actually occurred—and they were all with beautiful women. At this point, I had two new obstacles to overcome: (1) most girls flaked before the first date, and (2) no girls were interested in a second date. According to BD, the best way to reduce the flake rate prior to the first date is through something called “comfort bombardment.” You simply have a conversation with her between when you schedule the date and when the date happens to make her more likely to meet up with you. In December, I started trying comfort bombardment. I scheduled dates with 6 girls and was texting all of them. ALL of them flaked. Why? Because I was terrible at comfort bombardment and I bored the hell out of them because I didn't know what to say. One of the reasons why it’s taking me a long time to learn online game is because I’m completely out of my element. I’m a huge introvert at heart with a good sense of humor. But my sense of humor is very dry, sarcastic, and ironic. In other words, it’s really [bleep]ing difficult to convey via texting. It’s even harder when the girl’s never met you so she has no idea if you’re trying to be humorous or not. For that reason, I generally avoided humor when I started doing comfort bombardment. But after seeing 6 of my dates flake, I realized, of course, that I was doing something wrong and I needed to change my approach. So I said “[bleep] it” and used my normal sense of humor via texting. The result? They love it, lol. I just use lots of smiley faces and exaggerate things to make it as obvious as possible that I’m being humorous. So now we come to January. I’m consistently at “level 4.” Finally, I get to go on some dates for the first time since October. Back in October none of my dates wanted to go on second dates with me. I assumed this is because I never kino’d them at all and because I was still “out of my element” so to speak. As an introvert, I’ve never been very good at “selling myself” to people right off the bat. Most people grow very close to me after being in my presence for a long enough period of time. So this forced me to learn how to be much more direct and sexual right off the bat, rather than let it be a gradual, “natural” process. So in January, I had 3 dates. Two of which, I kino’d, one of which I didn’t. Guess which one wasn’t up for a second date? :P Something I forgot to mention was that all of my dates are at either coffee shops (if the girl is under 21 or doesn’t drink alcohol) or a bar. I sit down adjacent to them a table and relax. They usually do 90% of the talking (most girls LOVE talking about themselves). After we’ve been talking for about 10-15 minutes (and by “we,” I mean “she”), assuming her hand’s close to mine on the table, I gently grab her forearm and pull her arm close to me, and I hold her hand and rub her forearm, and continue talking/asking questions as if nothing ever happened. Girls will usually light up when you do this. Mostly because when you do this, you’re basically telling her, “I HAVE HUGE BALLS CONTAINING A GENETIC COCKTAIL OF SHEER PERFECTION” :D Anyway, the 3rd girl I dated kept her hands in her lap the whole time, and I tried holding her hand but she sort of resisted it. If that happens again in the future, I’m just going to say, “Give me your hand for a second :)” and continue as normal. I think most guys are just afraid of being creepy by touching her. Honestly, as long as you remain relaxed and happy when you do it, she’ll love it. These two posts here and here are really great for getting you excited (as opposed to afraid) to kino. When you touch a girl for the first time, and you see the look in her eyes when you do it, you’ll feel amazing and wonder why you never did it sooner. :) Anyways, one of those girls ended up being overweight and she lived a few hours away and was only visiting for the week. I couldn’t tell she was overweight because she was wearing a big puffy jacket and she had nice legs. Another reason to get girls on Facebook if you can. The other girl had a second date at my place. She cuddled up next to me on my lap while we watched a movie, but the she wasn’t really reciprocating my advances. She was a model, yet she wasn’t wearing any make up or perfume and she was wearing jeans and a hoodie when she came over. Needless to say, after a few failed advances, I kind of lost attraction for her. She didn’t look very attractive and it’s a turn-off for me if a girl’s not gonna try and “meet me halfway.” So after the movie was over I sent her home and texted her the next day, basically saying I didn’t think we were a match. She of course texted me a bazillion times after that, and I just ignored them. Definitely could've slept with her if I wanted since she wanted to come over the next day, but at that point I really didn't want to, and frankly that would've just been cruel to sleep with her and never hang out with her again after that. So right now I’m talking to about 4-5 different girls and I’ve got a coffee date lined up for Saturday. I expect good things to come with this one, I should be reaching "level 6" consistently soon, based on how I've been progressing. If not, there’s plenty of other fish in the sea to learn from. ;) ULTIMATELY, success with online dating (and anything else in life) boils down to: what am I doing right which leads to success? And what am I doing wrong which leads to failure? If I’m doing something wrong, what should I do instead to guarantee success next time? Taking a very logical and scientific approach to this whole thing makes it a lot of fun in my opinion, despite several failures along the way. :) Mostly because it's very exciting to overcome these setbacks along the way and know that you've grown wiser and more experienced as a person. If you're over 18, I would HIGHLY recommend giving online dating a try. It will give you a taste of what abundance, confidence, and carefreeness with regards to women REALLY feels like. It's hard to get needy over one girl when there's 5 other cute girls texting you about meeting up, and you know that you can easily get 5 more cute girls to do the same at any time :) [/hide]