How to tell if she's high maintenance

I don't enjoy dating women who are high maintenance. If you do, stop reading now. If you are like me, and you just don't think high maintenance women are worth it, read on. What is high maintenance? Well, in short it's someone who creates more problems than they solve. But I'm sure I didn't have to explain this to you. But how do you tell if a woman is high maintenance, particularly when you're dealing with an online dating situation? I'm glad you asked. Here's how you can tell, BEFORE you invest your time and money in meeting her:

1. She says "I'm not high maintenance." This is the biggest red flag you could possibly imagine. Run away. Run far, far away. Think about this for a second. Why would someone say she is not high maintenance? Because she feels that she needs to defend her high maintenance behavior! Either she has already done something to annoy you, other people in her paste have called her high maintenance, or she just knows deep down inside that she's tough to deal with. Like I said, run!
2. She makes things difficult. Look, I've met a lot of women online. Heck, I wrote a book about it. For 90% of them, the following is perfectly agreeable: We send each other a few emails, I ask her out, she says yes, I ask her to text me, she does, we arrange to go out for a drink. If a woman has a problem with any of this along the way -- for example, she doesn't accept a date invitation after a few emails, she wants to talk on the phone rather than text, she wants something more elaborate than drinks for the first date -- she's not worth it. Move on. She's telling you something, and it's only going to get worse.
3. She has a list of requirements/demands in her profile. Did I mention making things more difficult than they need to be? I feel like I did.
4. She uses the word "gentleman." When a woman uses the word "gentleman," it means she has some fantastical idea of what she thinks an ideal man should be. Be prepared for her to constantly expect that you conform to her ridiculous romantic dream. Sounds like fun, right?

Three more reasons why Tinder sucks

You already know that Tinder sucks. But if you're still not convinced, here are three more reasons to prove my point:

1. It's only on your phone. Don't get me wrong, mobile apps are great. Particularly ones like tinder than are very simple to use. But the best apps offer BOTH mobile and web based functionality. Tinder doesn't. I'ts only mobile. Which really, really sucks when it comes time to actually converse with someone. Ever try cutting and pasting a text message? Kind of a pain in the ass. Do you enjoy typing on your phone? If so, you will love Tinder.
2. There's no way to recover from an "accidental swipe." You just saw the love of your life, but oh, too bad, you accidentally swiped left instead of right. I guess there's nothing we can do. Sorry about that. WTF? How can such a common and obvious problem not have a built in solution? As if that wasn't bad enough, the "I don't like this person" swipe is EXACTLY THE SAME as the "show me the next picture of this person" swipe. It only depends on whether you give a single click before swiping. Again, WTF? Was this app designed by morons? You don't have to answer that.
3. It's way too difficult to "hide" someone. Let's say you've decided that you don't want to see a particular profile anymore. Maybe you've emailed them already and don't want to keep seeing it. You don't want to "block" them, but you don't want to keep seeing them either, not wanting to accidentally email them again or keep pining over them. There's no way to do this, other than creating multiple lists, which is just cumbersome and complicated.

So yeah, Tinder sucks. But you already knew that. Stop messing with Tinder and read my book.

Do women from OkCupid put out more, and does myBestFace work?

Anonymous writes:

I love your book: short and sweet. I came to the same conclusion on sending a generic first email, but was looking for someone who ran the experiment that I wanted to run. Now that I see you did it, I can rest easy.

Question: It makes sense that the women on match.com who are paid members would be more likely to respond and follow through on meeting you, but my how much more or less likely are they to put out quickly compared to the ones from say okcupid?

My theory would be that they are less likely to put out quickly because they are paying and expecting more commitment. But you actually have experience. Are there any noticeable differences?

He continues by offering a couple links on another topic from my book:

Okcupid myBestFace features is pretty useless:

http://jesse.la/okcupids-mybestface-would-be-awesome-if-it-worked/

https://www.joshsway.com/articles/view/stop-using-okcupids-mybestface

First of all, Mr. Anonymous, thanks for reading. I'm glad you like the book. How about a positive review on Amazon? Anyway now that that shameless promotion is out of the way, let's take these questions one at a time.

My WhatsYourPrice Adventure (Part 2)

So it's been a while since I've written about the online dating site for sugar daddies (ahem, generous men) and golddiggers (I mean, uh, women), What's Your Price. At the time I was intrigued by the prospects, but never got around to writing about the outcome of my adventure.

What happened? Well, honestly I figured out much more effective methods to meet women online, and no longer had any need for a gimmicky website like What's Your Price. But since so I've received so many requests to follow up my first piece, here it is, by popular demand, Part 2 of My What's Your Price Adventure.

Why Most Online Dating Advice is Crap

There's a lot of online dating advice out there. The problem is, most of it is crap. Why? Well it's the same reason that most information on the internet is crap. People tend to get too caught up with what they want, rather than focusing on the truth. The result is that most advice is anecdotal or more of a personal desire than actual advice on how to act for success. Here's what I'm talking about:

This guy complains that he get's too many matches and emails with women he doesn't like. From his sample size of... wait for it... three he infers that he should answer online dating profile questions oppositely of how he truly feels. The better advice would be to stop waiting for women to contact you!

Why You Should Date Black Women

I've had a lot of success in online dating. Shit, I even wrote a book about it. But recently I've had even more success. How? By dating black women. Now, before you get all worked up, this wasn't a conscious decision I made one day. It's just something I noticed. I sort of though something was going on, but I didn't really pay attention until one of my friends whispered to me that he'd noticed that black women seemed to love him. When I started to keep track, I realized that I was having a lot more success with black women than any other race. But why? It turns out there are two factors at play here:

Why Tinder Sucks

If you haven't heard of Tinder, you haven't been paying attention. It's the hottest thing in online dating. It's worth billions. I'm not going to bore you with all the details of how it works. You can learn that anywhere, but here are the main reasons Tinder is different, and why it's getting so much buzz:

1. It's not "really" online dating. Tinder has an organic feel. It uses your facebook contacts to link you with friends of friends.
2. It's entirely smartphone based, so is very comfortable and intuitive to people who are familiar with social apps. It doesn't feel like normal online dating.
3. It empowers women. Because you can't communicate with anyone until there's a mutual match, women feel empowered to control who gets to write them.

Yes all these things are true, but there's one fundamental flaw with Tinder that makes it almost entirely useless, completely inferior to virtually any other online dating site: It sucks. Here's how Tinder destroys online dating:

Online Dating Links

1. Online dating tips from our old friends at The Onion.
2. Looks like this guy has experience the "photo from above" deception in my book's list of profile photo red flags.
3. A great video on the economics of sex. Bottom line, it's good to be a man.
4. Guess what? Online dating saves you money.
5. Hey did I mention my book? Check it out here.

What’s the average online dating email response rate?

Match.com, like many other sites, has something called “winks” that you can send to other users. It’s basically a quick way to let someone know that you’re interested in them. Now, when you receive a wink, a screen pops up asking if you’d like to email and stating that:

She’s 15X more likely to respond to an email.

(At least that’s what happened for a male match.com member at the time of this writing.)

Think about what this implies.

The Online Dating Email: Personalized vs Generic

The following is an excerpt from my new book, A Hacker's Guide to Online Dating: How to Train Your Computer to Get You Dates. In it I discuss all my tips and tricks learned over years of online dating, how to optimize your online dating strategy, and how to automate the whole process.

So you want to know if your online dating emails need to be personalized? You want to know whether you need to read her profile to craft an eloquent essay about all the things you have in common, or if you can get away with sending a generic, cut-and-paste email to everyone. It’s an important question. Crafting that perfect personalized email takes a lot of time. And if you consider the fact that even with a perfect email, the likelihood of a response is fairly low, you’re going to have to send somewhere between 5 and 20 emails to get one response. All that time writing emails adds up fast.

If you do some research online, you’ll probably see a lot of articles written by women whining about how generic emails are such a turn off, how unromantic they are, and how no one wants to respond to them, yada, yada, yada. Some articles are less emotional, but also conclude that generic emails are less likely to get a response, usually using a mixture of opinion an anecdote. But those people are missing the point. They’re answering the wrong question. The question isn't, Do people prefer personalized emails to generic ones? The question isn't even, Are people more likely to respond to personalized emails than generic ones? No, the relevant question is much more specific: Is the increase in response likelihood gained by a personalized email over a generic email worth the time it takes to write it? The answer to that question is an unequivocal no. Here’s how I know.

Announcing My New Book!

Dear loyal readers,

I’m ridiculously excited and disgustingly proud to announce the release of my new book A Hacker's Guide to Online Dating, How to Train Your Computer to Get You Dates. Available on Amazon here.

If you enjoy the blog, you’ll love this book. It’s everything I've learned throughout my years in the online dating world. All the tips and tricks on how to optimize the dating process to do what online dating is supposed to do – get you actual face to face dates – as efficiently as possible. Basically, overcoming the paradox of choice. I've even included the automation code that I personally developed and use to have my computer do most of the work for me. Online dating on steroids!

I’ll be posting excerpts periodically – there’s so much good material here that I’m not going to limit it to just the book - but to wet your whistle, the table of contents is below. I also want to do something for my loyal readers. For the next 5 days, the kindle ebook is going to be available absolutely free! No strings attached. The whole thing. Free. What are you waiting for? Here’s that link again. The only thing I ask in return is this: if you like it, give me a review on Amazon. It always helps. And let me know how my strategies work out for you. You can always reach me here in the comments section.

Vaya con dios,
Dorian

Date night

Age: 24
Ethnicity: Hispanic, white mix
Met her: online
Height: 5’ 0”
Body: Somewhat disappointing. A little more than pictures indicated in the stomach, arms, and thigh regions.
Boobs: Again, didn’t live up to expectations.
Butt: Looked ok, but also looked like it took quite a bit of effort to get into those jeans.
Date: Drinks, and -- surprise, surprise -- some unplanned food.
Cost: $31 + $25 paid by her

Summary:
The date is best summed up by the following quotes:

   “Growing up, I was kind of a chubby girl.” (Uh oh)

   “I’ve never really taken care of myself, you know, aesthetically.” (Oh god)

   “Let’s do it again.” (I'll think about it)

Argument for seeing her again: She was cool, easy going. Her body wasn’t THAT bad. She was sitting down next to me at the bar the whole time, which tends to have an unflattering effect on the stomach (Ok, I'm rationalizing). Fat girls, or in this case, formerly fat girls tend to be, let’s just say, more adventurous in bed.
Argument against: Rule No. 4.

Red flags I missed: Upon further review, Nos. 2 - 4 may have been present to some extent. Again I was burned by the “average” body type. Probably should just steer clear of it all together.
Lessons: I’m starting to think the fact that I’m getting regular poon elsewhere is killing my motivation. I’m just not feeling the urgency. I’m not desperate enough. A few months ago I probably would have jumped all over a girl like this. But now? Not worth my time.

My WhatsYourPrice adventure (Part 1)

You may recall my analysis of WhatsYourPrice, the online dating site where men agree to pay for a date with a woman. Sounds a lot like prostitution, doesn’t it? Well, we’re about to find out.

Based on the amount of money I’d spent in recent months on dates with women I’d met online who turned out to be duds, I came to the conclusion that paying for quality might not be that bad an idea... as long as it increased the probability that I'd get laid. So I set out on a mission to find out what this site is all about. Here’s what happened:

Two perspectives on marriage

I was on a business trip last week, travelling with two colleagues, a man and a woman, both married, both in their early 50’s. I had a couple marriage related conversations I’d like to tell you about to illustrate four points:

1. The significant financial and emotional risk of being married.
2. The common dogmatic assumption that everyone should want to be married, just because that’s the way it is.
3. The fallacy that not wanting to be married means you are afraid of commitment.
4. The fallacy that being married is required to have kids.

My first conversation was with the man, and illustrates point #1:

Infidelity is a one way street

The good news is that we’re finally talking rationally about infidelity.

More and more couples are choosing open marriages-- that is, marriages in which they spouses agree that being sexual with someone outside the marriage is okay.

The bad news is that no one seems to want to talk about the obvious: male infidelity is different than female infidelity. I hate to let the cat out of the bag, but men and women are different. Not only are their sexual appetites different, but when they do want sex, they want it for different reasons.

I’ve written previously about the fundamental mismatch in sexual appetites between men and women. The natural corollary is that no one should be surprised by male infidelity. Frankly, I don’t think anyone really is surprised when it happens. So why does our society continue to be shocked and appalled when men are unfaithful (if that's what you want to call it)?

Ask Men dating survey results

As I mentioned earlier, Ask Men has partnered with Cosmo to put together a great survey on the dating habits and tastes of men and women. Check them out if you have the chance. For now, I'll summarize the best results relating to the topics of this blog:

On marriage:

• To the question of whether or not they believe in marriage, 85% of women say “Yes, definitely!”, while only 66% of men say they plan to participate. Hmm, I wonder if that is a reflection of who is favored by the rules of engagement.
• How important is a prenup? 32% of men say somewhat or very important, versus only 26% of women.  Do you see a trend here?
• When asked which sex gets screwed in divorce courts, 79% of men and 41% of women say men get screwed. 1% of men and 18% of women think women get screwed. So both sexes agree. Men get screwed. Can we update these laws now? Waddya say we make things a little more fair?

On infidelity, sex, and attraction:

Sex drive and marriage

One problem with marriage, or any lifetime monogamous relationship for that matter, is that men’s and women’s sex drives just don’t match up long term.

The male sexual appetite is stronger, stays high for longer, and is focused primarily on a physical attractiveness, which tends to decay with time in women (in both sexes to be fair, but less dramatically in men).

On the other hand, the female sex drive is weaker, peaks during “child bearing” years, falling off dramatically over the age of forty, and tends to be more about non-physical qualities, many of which, such as power and success, increase in men as they age.

To illustrate this imbalance, I complied some data from several different sources to develop the following chart. It plots the male and female sex hormones with age, relative to their respective peak production:

This week in...

...sex

• Is casual sex worth it? Yes, yes it is. Any other questions?
• If you’re going on a date sometime soon, think about incorporating some of these libido boosters. Hint: wear red, hold her hand, and get her adrenaline pumping.

...alimony

• It’s gonna happen! The end, er, restriction of lifetime alimony in MA. Catch the fever!
• Just when it looked like Arnie was going to stand up against alimony, he pussed out.

From the comments, two perspectives on alimony

First from Niki W in response to The argument for alimony:

Ultimately whether or not a parent who has ended his career in order to look after a child has given up something probably depends entirely on the person. Parenting can often be a tiring, thankless job, and not all parents decide to bear the responsibility equally. Our society is still antiquated enough that more women will stay at home to look after their children than men, and there IS a reason why sole custody is usually granted to the mother when joint custody can't be agreed on. Maybe when society has evolved such that there are an equal number of women in high-powered, successful positions as there are men, alimony can be totally abandoned, but are you really considering that it can be extremely necessary as well?

This is a typical strategy used to argume for alimony: Complaining about a bunch of stuff that she doesn’t like, without making any attempt to connect it to a point. I guess I shouldn’t have expected much grasp of logical concepts from someone who calls herself Niki.

But let’s take these “points” one at a time.

Larry David on marriage

Again, it takes a comedian to speak the truth. This time from Larry David's Rolling Stone interview:

David says he's unlikely to ever get married again. "It would be a silly thing to do," he says. "Why would I do it? Why would I want that contract? I already have kids. The best situation is being a single parent. The best part about is that you get time off, too, because the kids are with their mom, so it's the best of both worlds. There's a lot to be said for it. You get married, you have kids – you should plan this from the beginning. We're going to have these kids, then we'll get divorced when they're four. All right, six."

Sounds like a good plan to me. Just make sure you have a solid prenup. And make sure it covers child support.