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Online personals

Has anyone ever had any luck finding long-term friends or lovers from online personals? I made one good friend through a newspaper ad years ago, and we were good friends for about 7 years. Other than that, I find them pretty disappointing. I don't use the sex ones, just the platonic ones, but people are often not what they say they are, or they're pretty boring. What has been your experience?

Tags: dating, friendship, online personals

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Name Here on December 3, 2008 at 4:08pm

I became friends/lovers with a lady I met on one of those. We were together for less than a year though. On the whole, I thought the entire experience, from meeting her online to breaking up, was a good one. I would never have met her otherwise and have no regrets.

Permalink Reply by Dallas the Phallus on December 3, 2008 at 4:11pm

What about the other responses you got? Or was it you or her that placed the ad first?

Permalink Reply by Name Here on December 3, 2008 at 4:19pm

I don't really remember any of the other responses, it seems like there were only a few, before I met Amy. I couldn't find anyone that I was interested in responding to other than her.

Permalink Reply by Lucy on December 3, 2008 at 4:47pm

I have never had any luck. I tend to find people i like when i come into sites aimed at mutual discussions, such as AN, since i am more likely to meet people who are interested in similar subjects as myself - at least as far as educational subjects are concerned, and since i have many academic interests, i tend to find many people on the same wavelength when i come into these kind of sites.

Other singles sites aimed at just anyone are different since i find that the people on them sites tend to be much more perverted and also seem to want to tell me that they love me after talking for a whole five minutes, that pisses me off. I'm not the type of person to fall in love instantly, i need time to get to know a person before i can actually love them, it is too deep an emotion for me to fall so easily.

I have fallen for a guy that i have met online, but it is not love since i have never met him. I'd love to meet him though and see what developed, we have been speaking online for over two years and i know him very well...at least as well as one can after only conversing through a computer!!

Permalink Reply by V1ktor on December 4, 2008 at 12:28am

It's like gambling. Some people get lucky, some don't. I've met some good girls I liked, but it would eventually because of religion. Met atheist girl once on myspace, but she had to move away from my area.

The only difference from gambling is that you can keep betting, you won't lose money.

v1k

Permalink Reply by Richard Sherrod on December 31, 2008 at 5:27pm

Not exactly true, you can lose money.

Permalink Reply by Jami Blackann on December 10, 2008 at 3:59am

Up until this point, I've only experienced two long-term relationships in my life, and in both cases I was friends with them first before we hooked up. So I'm relatively new to the dating scene in general (and I haven't really been "out" for that long, either). For the past year I've tried the whole online dating thing, and nothing really panned out for me. I had hoped (naively, it seems) that I'd at least make some new long-term friends, but there's only one person out of the lot of them who still talks to me (and she's got a family of her own, so there's not a lot of opportunity to get to know her well).

Right now I just feel too worn out to try aggressively pursuing any more contacts online. To me it seems like so much work with so little payoff. Unfortunately, I don't run into very many atheist lesbians outside of the internets, so it seems like I'll have to return to the dating sites if I still want to find someone.

Permalink Reply by Dallas the Phallus on December 10, 2008 at 8:53am

Yeah, I've had similar experiences with trying to make friends online. It is a lot of time with very little return, and people seem very fickle.

Permalink Reply by Dallas the Phallus on December 16, 2008 at 8:44am

Yeah, I think they should at least respond. I'm generally pretty polite, except when a clearly crazy person contacts me, then I just ignore it.

Permalink Reply by Dallas the Phallus on March 14, 2009 at 2:55pm

Yeah, it seems everyone's experiences are different. I've been posting to dating sites here recently, and had no luck at all. Guys can't even be friendly for the most part, unless they want to screw you.

Permalink Reply by Ronnie on December 22, 2008 at 7:07pm

I've met one friend online who's about 20yrs older than me. I'd probably be head over heals for her if we were closer in age, but even still she's very awesome. She's pretty much done what I hope to do with myself just ahead of schedule.

On the relationship front I've had the best luck with OKCupid. They do pretty good personality matching and are a free site so I'd say that's probably one of the better chances online of finding someone that's a good match. I've seen plenty of people I'd like to meet on there, but few of them live this deep in the southeast. :\ I've talked to a few who sounded good, but they didn't seem terribly interested within the first few messages.

Permalink Reply by Ronnie on January 4, 2009 at 7:57am

It seems like dating sites have a low signal/noise ratio, but it doesn't take much effort to at least put your name in the hat and see who says hi. The way I see it there's probably a better chance of meeting a non-religous person on a dating site than there is of stumbling into one on the streets where I am.