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.