Dating - where am i going wrong and do i just resign myself to being alone.

[notsuchaspringchicken]

Having just spent my 5th christmas on my own, being on my own forever seems more and more likely.

Im 34. Im divorced and have one child. I work, if part time. I have interests and hobbies and am not unattractive, if on the curvey side.

I go out, though its more meals and activities than clubbing, which i hate. I have not had one sniff of interest from any man in the 5 years ive been single.

Ive done online dating for years and never got anywhere with that either.
Having had a break from it i signed up to several sites yesterday, and ive had no messages, not even from the free sites where its known for being a bit of a meat market, where a while back i was beating them off with a stick. Any views i have had have been from men over 40 who look like there are actually closer to 50. Its depressing.

I dont understand where im going wrong and how come i seem to be so unattractive to men. A new girl started at work, shes not pretty, but is thin. And is just 20. Within 2 days she had been asked out by 4 men. I dont get if its my age, or the fact im a size 16, or am a lone parent? or just not what men want????

Hairy trucker? Have to say I'm struggling with euphemisms and acronyms more than anything on here, but I'm guessing that's not good!

Ike - I've just pm'd you a semi naked pic with my car in the background and a gormless, kinda constipated, look on my face. Hope you like.

Well.....I could overlook that pic Bunny if you have either a) dreadlocks b) a mohawk c) a dog on a string?????

Full house ike- Mohawk which morphs into a dreadlocked mullet and a devil dog on a string (although where I live is pretty rural so its some farmer's twine).

I'd advise the rest of you to invest in hat stocks when the markets open again on Wednesday...

hey hey hey, i was busy earning a wage!!! i shouldnt miss out for that.

Bunny, ill pm you. Im not fussy about hair.... lol

Trying to be helpful here, so sorry if it comes across as critical.

I have a lovely single friend - she is intelligent, beautiful, hard working, determined, decisive, loyal, considerate. She is finding it really difficult to meet men, and to meet anyone decent, which she would like to do.

SO... I have tried fixing her up with friends of mine and my DHs, and in a social situation, all the things which are great about her sort of intensify until you can't be surprised that the men are scared off. Rather than intelligent, she comes over as shooting other people down, rather than determined, she comes over as overbearing, and so on.

It's the same with a single male friend in his 30s (and yes, I have tried to set them up together). He's lovely, but his good qualities never really seem to come out when meeting potential partners. He just comes over as nerdy and obsessive, rather than being full of life and enthusiasm and huge fun to be around. To be honest, it makes me pretty angry that no-one has seen how great this guy is, because he would love to get married and be a father, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

I wonder whether things might be the same with you and the people you're dating, just because you're on dates and its a bit of an artificial situation. Might good characteristics be turning into something a bit off putting?

This might be wildly off, of course, but I thought that since you've obvously got a huge amount going for you, it might be worth sharing these people's experiences.

This book might annoy you wildly but it's great fun, I think, and worth a read!

Now I've read the latest posts, I've changed my mind.

The people you're meeting at the school gates sound grim as hell. I think you need to move area, move house, move job and meet other people - men and women - who do interesting things like you do.

they arent grim though, are they. They are just ' normal' there is lots of them, they will be at any school, in any place. Ive lived in lots of different places, so i do know this for a fact.
Like minniec says, people dont even go to the cinema if there is something on they want to see, if their husband wont like it, or wont go. If i want to do something i just buy two tickets and find someone to come with me at a later date, take DD, or at worst, go on my own. And yes, people do look at me like ive got 2 heads or something. I dont get it, but minnie has had the same experience, so, its not just me.

In the meantime ive distracted myself and have decided next year, 2013, im going to walk over the o2. how cool is that?? and a bit fun and different. Im terrified of heights, but its a great thing to have done :)

Ooh, that sounds great!

But the overwhelming majority of people I know are much more like you than the people at the school gates you're describing, so I think it must be partly down to location?

Ive decided for most of 2013 I am gonna sit in bed eating orange pip sweets n' mumsnet and give up men...unless Bunny really does have the mohawk/dreadlock haircut combo....

I have every other weekend free, which i try to see friends, all married, only want to socalise in their houses due to their babysitting issues ( fair enough) and have some time for me, doing housework, errands, or just chilling out.

See, this is where I think you have it backwards. Back when I was single, I also only had every other weekend free. So what I did was have everything planned for those weekends. So from the moment the kids left to go to their mums on the Friday night, I'd try to have dates lined up until Sunday afternoon. It's actually quite easy. One on Friday night....one Sat lunchtime/afternoon (in case you get lucky and stay over on Fri or just have a lie in). Then another Sat evening and one Sunday midmorning/lunch. Late afternoon I'd do the ironing and clean the house before they came home. That's four dates in one weekend which was about my limit. Anymore and the whole thing became a confusing mess.

Seeing married friends, errands, food shops. Do them on the weekends you have the kids. After all, if they have babysitting issues then it shouldn't be a big deal if you take your kids along too.

Weeknight dates I could only do sparingly as so not to eat into time with the kids. I didn't at the time have many friends locally who could babysit. At one point I paid some local teenage girls to babysit until I met my now fiancee. It was far from ideal but then being a single parent you soon learn that 'not ideal' is par for the course. You do what you can, not what you should.

Bloody hell niceguy I am knackered just thinking about your social whirling!!!

oh, i could fill my weekends with dates if i wanted too. ive had 3 in one weekend before. I just dont want to, and do want to see people and do stuff other than meet random ( shit) men from the internet.

but thats if im not being fussy and just being open minded and meeting lots of new people.

if im being choosey, id quite easily fit one date in....

OP, just a small point. Don't worry about having an exact match with interests etc. DH and I are absolute opposites on paper. He is mad about sport, I hate sport, I love reading and the theatre, he hates both of those. I would never have picked him out on a dating site in a million years. We have very few shared interests, apart from eating out!

But what we do have is a deep fundamental agreement with values, politics and life in general. Things like partnership, working together as a team to bring up our DSs, fairness and equality, sharing the load between us and lots more.

None of our friends would ever have paired us up, but we have now been happily married for 25 years and are still very much in love. Our life together has been very hard due to poor health and disability, but we are still here.

There's a happy medium somewhere, and while I'd be much closer to chicken than nice guy's plan (fuck that!) it is easy to make yourself too available to friends with families, at the expense of your own social life.

I really enjoy the company of my friends anyhow ...have some great single mum mates...better than fake smiling through coffee with a bloke I have no interest in! As it happens I am probs gonna volunteer at the local independent cinema as an usherette...something to do more than anything! But having said that, if I feel at some point I MUST have a BF above all else.. Nice Guy's approach would probs work..

im not even after a match of the same interests, its fine, i dont care, thats superficial stuff. its a match of values and beliefes which is far more important.

I think the advice to spend 'free' weekends entirely on dates is complete shit tbh.

My free weekends are bloody special. I don't want to fill them up/waste them on a bunch of randoms from the internet. Plus the advice to the OP upthread was to be more selective than less - and you cant get 4 dates in that short space of time without being utterly unselective.

If you did set up something like this (and finding 4 people all free at the weekend at convenient times to fit in around each other is fairly unlikely), then (internet men being a pretty flaky bunch) chances are at least 2 would disappear predate anyway. So you're immediately down to 2. And they always tend to disappear/flake at the 11th hour, so usually too late to arrange anything with friends. Then you have 2, one of which will probably be awful and leave you wondering why you are wasting time you could be spending doing something, anything, better than this. The other one will probably be nice, but you'll never hear from them again.

I think a weekend like that would be pretty awful. I'd much rather spend it at home on my own, if that was the only alternative. But I suppose men would say that's why I'm single

ha, velvet. so true.

I think thats why i stopped planning lots of dates in a weekend, mostly they would cancel at the last min, i had cancelled plans with my friends in favour of the date, and then would be left with nothing to do.
or, worse still, i would go to the trouble of getting a babysitter, only to have the date cancel an hour before, leaving me red faced in front of the babysitter.
and thats how i came to only have day time coffee dates, as they were the least effort, least cost, and no worries if they got cancelled. But they arent all that conductive to romance really.

I think maybe the best compromise is to have a weekend where you've got something planned with friends/family/an activity or whatever, AND a date as well. That way if date gets cancelled, it's only one wasted afternoon/evening, and you've still got other things to do, and the whole weekend isn't a write off.

The cost is the other thing, I completely agree re coffee dates being easiest and cheapest, but evening ones tend to be more enjoyable. But then you've got the cost of getting there and back, drinks, food etc. This dating business isn't cheap, I'd be broke doing 4 dates a fortnight!

oh, i know. Evening dates tend to cost me in the region of £40 - £60
taxis, something to eat, rounds of drinks. its not cheap, im a lone parent, i have no money, i cant afford to spend that meeting dullards and it not going anywhere.
Least with a coffee date its only a few pounds, but again, not great for romance at all.

I think you are just going to have to accept that it's going to take time. IN some men's eyes you won't be what they want because you have a child- that will ruke out some men. Other men will welcome you AND your child- but you will still attract fewer men because you have a child.

I do agree with others that you need to hone your search- I recognise the dud men you talk about but I'd never have met any or dated them when I was single because I moved in different social circles.

If you keep doing the same thing you are going to get the same results. I think it was Einstein who said that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome is the definition of madness :)

The other point that someone mentioned ages back is on the thread here your punctuation and spelling leaves a lot to be desired.(You don't use a capital I and you omit apostrophes most of the time.) If this is how you reply to posts on OD etc then you may come over as uneducated- and put off educated and potentially interested men. if it's just laziness here fair enough- but you should aim to get this right when replying to men.

I think you should stop focusing on " getting a man"- just enjoy life, change your job if that will help you meet more people- take drastic action is you need to- then just relax about it a bit more.

Velvet & springchicken. I wasn't trying to say you had to do it exactly like I did and cram loads of dates into each free weekend. Just that it's better to organise dates into your child free time rather than the other way around. In fact it wasn't like a religion I had to pack my free weekends with dates. I just maximised my time. For example out with friends around town or organising lone parent meets. What I didn't do was sit around the house ironing, cleaning and food shopping.

Like I said, I do think it's better if you concentrated on getting your social life expanded rather than on dating sites. You've given it a good crack of the whip and clearly dating sites aren't working for you.

When I met my fiancee she wasn't interested in me at all. I thought she was attractive but thought for various reasons it would never work so pretty much dismissed anything but friendship and cheap babysitting. So for us it was the fact I wasn't looking at her as a potential GF and vice versa that helped us get to know each other and realise later that actually there is something there. If we'd have been on a dating site I doubt she'd have even replied to my initial message, let alone make it to the first date. On paper our relationship shouldn't work at all. But it does.

My point is sometimes it's all too easy to dismiss someone as unsuitable but then later that grows into suitable. Of course there is also more chance that unsuitable will stay unsuitable....but you only have to win once.

yes, but i was having an open mind and dating lots of ' unsuitable' and i would have seen lots of them twice, to see if there was anything there, except, they have to want to do the same....... and they didnt.

Im fully aware people can grow on people and you have to get to know someone past a few hours on a first date. I KNOW this, doesnt mean that the people i go out on a date with know this.

Typically a date and one i thought went ok, would go - meet for a coffee in the day time, have a natter, no awkward pauses, lots of chat,some laughing probably have a second drink, so, maybe 2-3 hours long. A hug/ kiss on the cheek goodbye, me saying i had a nice time, ususally some comment about being in contact from them, or them saying it was fun, lets do it again. And then nothing, not hearing from them ever again.

Ok - this happens with a few dates, but most of them? i dont understnad what more the man could want to happen in those 2-3 hours, in a coffee shop, that would make it a better date? or how well they think they are going to know me?

bopeep - did you read any of my latter posts? im not totally focused on ' getting a man' its a very small part of my life . Ive also, just 2 months ago, changed my job, so, im not going to do it again, id end up with a very ropey cv if i did that.
And no, i dont use a capital i, so what? its just typing

And no, i dont use a capital i, so what? its just typing

Errrr- no it's not actually. It's a window to who you are, in terms of posting on a dating site and emailing men.

You've said all along that many men aren't " up to scratch" in your eyes. Can't you make the connection that if your writing reveals a lack of education or inability to use correct English ( and that includes capitals in the right places) then some men may be rejecting you online?

I wouldn't reply to a man whose Englsih was poor- I'd assume he was uneducated and not what I was looking for. Call that shallow but 1st impressions count.

I'm not the first poster to say this to you but you don't want to listen.

yet another poster told me off for rejecting men based on text speak.....