The online dating world can be both scary and exciting. But it’s never easy. There are a lot of people to filter through, and sometimes, it feels as though it’s a never-ending cycle of disappointment.
When this guy told his female friend that it must be easy to be a woman in the online dating world, he was challenged to pose as a woman online for one day. This is what he discovered.
Last night I was bored and was talking with a friend on Skype about her experiences with online dating. I was joking with her that girls have it easy on dating sites. I had never really done anything in the online dating world but I had set up a real profile a few years back and didn’t use it much aside from getting a few nice messages and decided it wasn’t really for me.
But, as I said, I was bored, so I decided that I would set up a fake profile. I set it up as a gender-swapped version of myself essentially to see what would happen. So I made a username, and I was up. Before I could even fill out my profile at all, I already had a message in my inbox from a guy. It wasn’t a mean message, but I found it odd that I would get a message already. So I sent him a friendly hello back and kind of joked that I hadn’t even finished my profile, how could he be interested, but I felt good because I thought I was right that girls have it easy.
I finished setting up my profile, used a picture of my friend for the profile pic with her permission, and said I was interested in long-term dating/short-term dating and was good to go. I thought I would check on it in about 24 hours. But before I could even close the tab, another message was received. It was another guy who seemed nice asking how I was doing and I messaged him back staying as neutral and as uninterested as possible without being mean. I was about to leave again, but I was kind of curious now, so I waited another minute, and sure enough, a third message popped up (also I feel this is a good point to say that my friend would be the first to say she’s a pretty average looking girl).
I messaged him back, but before I could send, I had gotten a reply from the first guy, so I had to do that, then a reply from the second guy. So fine, people are interested in going out with me. Then I got another message that opened with a line that while not wholly vulgar, kind of came off as a little strange. I ignored it and went back to send the message to person three now.
Continue reading on the next page!
Before I could send it, I got a followup message from Mr.4 which was needlessly sexual in nature. I continued to ignore him and finished. I then began to have some small-talk with some guys (remember this is like minute 20 of having the profile up) and all of the conversations kind of get weird. One of the guys becomes super aggressive saying he is competitive and he will treat me right, the other is asking for my phone number telling me he is lying in bed and the conversation (without me steering it) is turning increasingly sexual though I tell him I’m not comfortable with it. Then I got the No-Strings-Atttached messages, with multiple guys sending me messages asking me to watch them cam, or meeting up with them within the hour, or talk with them on the phone or cyber. I would say no and they usually didn’t take it too well.
At first I thought it was fun. I thought I would mess with them or something and freak them out and tell them I was a guy or something, but as more and more messages came ion (either replies or new ones – I had about 10 different guys message me within 2 hours) the nature of them continued to get more and more irritating. Guys were full-on spamming my inbox with multiple messages before I could reply to even one asking why I wasn’t responding and what was wrong.
Guys would become hostile when I told them I wasn’t interested in NSA sex, or guys that had started normal and nice quickly turned the conversation into something explicitly sexual in nature. Seemingly nice dudes in quite esteemed careers asking me to hook up and send them naked pics of myself despite multiple times telling them that I didn’t want to.
I would be lying if I said it didn’t get to me. I thought it would be some fun thing, something where I would do it and worse case scenario say “lol I was a guy I trolled you lulz”etc. but within a 2 hour span it got me really down and I was feeling really uncomfortable with everything. I figured I would get some weird messages here and there, but what I got was an onslaught of people who were, within minutes of saying hello, saying things that made me as a dude who spends most of his time on 4chan uneasy. I ended up deleting my profile at the end of 2 hours and kind of went about the rest of my night with a very bad taste in my mouth.
I came away thinking that women have it so much harder than guys do when it comes to that kind of stuff.