I'm a big baby. Burn me down.

I've copy-pasted this entry from my incredibly stupid OK Cupid profile.
***
I have more or less decided to stop initiating contact with you, ladies. I can, so far, predict with 100% accuracy what will happen when I initiate contact:

1. Nothing

or

2. A perfunctory reply intended to discourage further contact.

I have had some very interesting conversations with a few of you (all of which were initiated by you, the ladies, I might add) wherein this topic came up. It was several times suggested that I was "contacting the wrong women". Well, no shit. But the implication was that I was only contacting the "hot" women. This offended me because I've been fairly careful about who I was attempting to contact and it also assumed some very stereotypical things about me as a male.

Of course I appreciate beauty, but I also appreciate beauty in its many and varied forms. Besides all of that, the commercial ideal of "hotness" is mainly irritating to me; it mostly doesn't exist in reality. On top of that, most of the girls I've met who fit (or tried to fit) that ideal were insufferably unpleasant and conceited. They knew they were "hot". That kind of thing comes through pretty strongly in profiles as well, I've definitely seen it and avoided it (interesting aside: they were all low-percentage matches). But this site is positively loaded with beautiful women of all types. However, in spite of your profiles, you are wholly inscrutable.

I don't assume that you need (or even want) a run-down on how I went about deciding who I should contact, but the broad strokes are that I was only contacting women with quite high match/friendship percentages (both apparently wrong). I've had some experience with low-percentage matches and I think the algorithm is fairly accurate in this regard*. Anyway, I would further refine the options by who seemed not only most approachable, but also who had the most common interests and who wasn't an obvious mismatch. To wit: ladies who describe themselves as "fit" are automatically passed over; I just can't imagine that I wouldn't be a disappointment to them somehow (you see? I try to consider you in this; I don't want to waste your time). Likewise with ladies who make a lot of demands; every man who tries to date them is doomed, I think.

This all sounds very mechanical and coldly analytical, but I assure you that it isn't. I try to figure out who I think I would get along with, who I wanted to get along with, who I thought would enjoy my company. I imagine that almost everybody does this, but what do I know? Maybe some women only look at the body type or income fields**.

I tried to compose my messages like a sane, adult person would. I consider myself a gentleman and I use complete sentences, but I've heard horror stories about guys who try to start off a conversation with the most lewd and disgusting comments you can think of. These people exist! It's crazy! I try to make it as clear as possible that I'm not one of them!

What remains is the likelihood that women on OKC are either constantly inundated with horrifying messages from which mine are somehow indistinguishable, or that the very act of trying to contact them places me in a submissive position which turns them off no matter what I've said. Surely there's more nuance to it than this, but I never get any feedback upon which to base new suppositions.

All of that, or I'm just that unappealing (which is a distinct possibility). I suppose it's possible that women on OKC don't know what they want, too. Or that they're waiting for Mr. Perfect to come along and digitally sweep them off their keyboards. In any case, I ultimately feel like I'm the problem.

I very deliberately wrote my profile (which I've since taken down) in a way that introduces me in an honest and (I thought) approachable way. I wanted women to know that I was a real person and not some repressed creep looking for a hook-up or getting thrills from your disgust. The hope was that it wouldn't feel like such a risk in contacting me. I have met some great women (some not so much, but that's the way of it) this way. But exactly none when I initiate contact.

How do other men do it? Are they so overwhelmingly confident, optimistic or attractive that women just can't say "no"? Does the shotgunning of horrendous comments (like lascivious construction workers) eventually yield some results? I must be doing something wrong.

Whatever the case, I'm pretty much done initiating contact. I've had far better luck with letting dating come to me than going in search of it. That said, it will probably stop altogether now.

Let the flaming begin! (Assuming that anybody reads this)



* Do you know what a "palooka" is? An inexperienced or incompetent boxer. A person you "work out" on to hone your chops. I have most definitely been a palooka for women angling to improve their dating "skills" (and get a dinner or two). The dates really had nothing to do with me apart from me being the dinner-donor.

** I swear on a stack of holy books of your choice that this really happened. I was on a bus and a 20-something girl was complaining loudly on her cell-phone that "some ugly guy was looking at me and it grossed me out!" How dare he! Just a moment later she was asking her friend why more hot guys weren't checking her out. Hard to say, maybe they heard her coming.