POF : Social Experiment: Woman seeking Man.
So I’m recently divorced, errrr…. in the midst of a divorce. Anyhow, part of my coping mechanism was to research how people meet now. I’m in my middle thirties and met my wife on Myspace. So obviously things are slightly different now! One of the sites I did remember from way back was Plenty of Fish. So I researched it and landed on this reddit where it seemed like absolutely nobody was having any kind of luck meeting real women whatsoever.
But that wasn’t my experience. I was getting responses. Not all the time but about 50% of the time which considering I’m advertising myself as a divorced father seems to be a pretty good take rate. So I was curious… What is the experience of a reasonably attractive woman on POF. What kind of lines are guys using on her? And so I created Melissa. Melissa surfs, she’s in her mid-30’s as well, she’s single with no kids, she’s pretty but not over the top pretty and she has a profile that you’d be able to pull plenty of material from to comment on.
What happened?
It’s not been 24 hours yet but poor Melissa has received 112 messages. Of those messages the vast majority consist of nothing more than a hi, hello or worse: hello beautiful. In fact, out of those 112 (113 now) messages, 3 of them reference anything in the profile whatsoever. A few of them have told Melissa what they would like to do to her various holes. Several have sent messages only to send a second message 20 or 30 minutes later, another one 5 hours later, etc. The men are typically older, have very little information in their profile, horrible pictures and exude desperation. I’m not a woman but of the 113 (116 now) people to contact her, I would say there are *maybe* three that would warrrant any kind of response at all and even they weren’t great. They only excel by comparison. The bar here is set quite low.
Melissa has 467 people that want to meet her and averages a message per every 30 second when she is online. Melissa is absolutely drowning in mediocrity. For fun, here’s the last 10 messages received:
« Is that in Hawaii? »
« gorgeous!how are you today? »
« Hi there l! Would you like to get to know one another? 🙂 »
« Hi there »
« Do you want to get coffee? »
« Hey there, how are you? »
« Hi beautiful »
« Good evening, how are you? »
« Hello »
« Hi There Smiley »
The common denominator? Mostly closed ended questions and not a single mention of anything in my very interesting made up life. As of me finishing this post I’ve now received 121 messages and 476 people want to meet me.
The lesson here? The bar is set low. In fact, the bar doesn’t even appear to be off the ground. If you say anything remotely witty, touch on something in their profile and ask a question that shows serious interest or really say anything other than « hi » or « hello » you’ve got a leg up on pretty much all of your competition.
The other area nearly all these guys lacked in was their profiles. Most just had « ask me » as their about me. Some had a laundry list of demands of what they would tolerate in a mate (sexy!).
Oh hey, a new message: « Hi beautiful how are you doing? Melisa »
Groovy, he didn’t even spell my name right. *facepalm*
By. jonathandoe123
Things I’ve learned as a large woman on pof
1) the bar is so low that sewer lateral drains look appealing.
2) lots of men think that « emotionless serial killer » is a good look.
3) there is no way in hell that many men think I’m cute, beautiful, stunning, or sexy.
4) phone number requests in their second message, after only saying « hey sexy » is normal
And 5) when a fat chick rejects you, the proper response is « you’re fat, I was only doing you a favour »
Am a real POF girl. This is 100% accurate.
The bar is set low but getting noticed in that morass of mediocre messages is difficult, hoping your recipient hasn’t been browbeaten into giving up. I’ll take the positive message though and carry on!
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