The #1 thing that keeps me from contacting a woman is lack of information in her profile. This is a problem I've seen on CDFF, Connecting Singles, and Christian Mingle. This is the reason I like OKCupid best -- women tend to write longer profiles that actually help me to get to know them. When profiles are too short, as most are on CDFF, there's nothing to entice me to write. I want to know what the woman is about (interests, tastes, what's important to her, etc.) and I want to have a sense of her personality. Two or three sentences doesn't do it.
I can't speak for others, of course. Dating expert sites all say keep your profiles short. I guess it depends who you want to attract. It won't attract me.
I will not even consider writing to someone who doesn't have a picture, and the more pictures, the better. There should always be at least one full body shot. I have abided by this in my own profile.
Pictures are important. A woman doesn't have to be beautiful, but she has to be someone I feel is my type. Hairstyle, clothing, and all of that are clues to how much she may be my type.
Your experience is typical to online dating in general. OKCupid is a free dating site (with 1,000,000 members) and they do research on their site and report on some interesting things. They report that the average response rate for men is 1 in 4 messages sent. So in general, it's hard to get a reply at all. In personal experiences I've seen reported by others on various web forums, many men get few responses. One poor fellow said he had written to 104 women, all messages carefully written to reply to specific things in the women's profiles, yet he had not received a single response.
On CDFF, nearly everyone who has written to me is from the other side of the world. A not-small percentage of them have later been banned by CDFF.
I have only been on CDFF about a month. I have written first to anyone on this site yet because most women's profiles have too little information in them. For me to write someone, I have to have a good sense of what they're about and what their personality is like, but when they only write two or three sentences that don't say anything unique about themselves, it doesn't entice me to write. So I have no report of my response rate on here.
In the article, "The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures," on OKTrends, the blog by dating site OKCupid, where they do all kinds of statistical analyses of their users, they found that the "women met per attempt" for men who didn't smile in their pictures far exceeded the number of the men who did smile in their profile pictures.
Personally, I like pictures of women who smile. And I smile in my pictures because it seems the most natural thing for me to do. But I have heard from women that too many men don't smile in their pictures. So anecdotal evidence I've heard suggests women like men who smile, but statistics -- at OKCupid at least -- show men who don't smile in their pictures get more responses from women.
Most conservative state and most conservative country?
Posted : 1 Oct, 2016 07:56 PM
There are different ways to define conservative. Let me give this example. I once read that the MPAA, which decides ratings for movies, sometimes has trouble deciding on ratings because of regional differences. In the South, profanity was least acceptable; in the Midwest, it was sex; in the East, it was violence.
People think of the South as being conservative, but I was talking to someone who grew up in Georgia and felt that people in Ohio were too uptight about things, too conservative. So it's not quite so simple.
Though the South is widely seen as being conservative, I would like to add one Midwest state: Indiana. It seems to be considerably more conservative than the states surrounding it...according to my definition of conservative. ;-)
The first is the dress code. He attends a Fundamental Independent Baptist church. To a church like this, dress codes are important. Unless you are absolutely certain that you could spend the rest of your life enjoying dressing the way the people in his church expect, then don't enter a relationship with him. This issue will not go away. It will be a constant point of tension. If you think you can change in order to please him, think again, and make sure you really can, forever.
The second issue is one you noticed -- it's odd that even though you had pictures of yourself in jeans, he contacted you anyway. The fact that he is expecting you to change and conform to his ways from the outset does suggest a controlling person. You can't change controlling people. They will ruin your life. Run away as fast as you can.
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I realize it's almost a year since the original post, so this issue has probably been resolved, but I wanted to post in case someone else was facing a similar issue and came here, but didn't want to publicly ask about their own issue.
