Please remind me that it's a numbers game, one that you can win!
You definitely can win at this OLD game. It’s often frustrating and there is some element of chance in whether anything good comes up. But the game isn’t rigged against you. You just have to get through unknowable amounts of dross.
@Eesha It’s hard when you’ve experienced an alcoholic partner. I can totally understand your wariness there. But, the thing with categories is, you can’t easily tell his he’s interpreted them (until you’ve met him).
And, as others have said, he may well be a very different kind of drunk person than your ex. And, actually, the issue is likely to have been your ex’s personality (with or without the drink) rather than anything else. MrSG is silly, even soppy, when drunk mostly (at worst, he gets a bit needy). I’d never fear him coming home drunk, and he is happy to be teased about whatever silliness occurred (for example, his worrying that buying some cheap stuff for my bathroom was a sign that I was planning to put down roots without him the other night 😂). On the other hand, my (extremely uptight) ex barely drank (a weird control thing: he’d drink sometimes with others but never with me, and would moralise hideously if I drank with friends) but I walked around on eggshells and altered my behaviour to manage his moods for years. He’d have been an abusive arsehole whether he drank or not.
That said, figuring out if your lifestyles are compatible is part of the whole dating process. It may be that you just don’t want someone who goes to the pub most days because it doesn’t work with how you’d like your life to be. And that’s perfectly fine. But you can’t tell that unless you meet him.
On profile pics, I had makeup on in most of mine. Not a lot of makeup because I only really tend to wear some bb cream, mascara and lipstick the colour of my lips anyway. So they reflected what I look like generally. I don’t think I’m enormously photogenic really, so I had to hunt through loads of photos (and take loads of selfies) to try to find ones of me looking acceptable.
MrSG’s photos were also clearly a raid of his google photos over the past few years. Some of them were pretty old (although he still looks like that) and one of them made him look properly ginger (rather than slightly ginger). So I assumed he was trying to weed out anyone who’d object to gingery hair with that one. It’s weird though, as he is pretty photogenic. Much more than me. But he’s a bit under confident I think (something that was clearly not helped by having been cheated on by his ExW).
I do think snapchat filters should be banned on OLD though. What is the point of putting up photos of you with giant eyes and teddy bear ears?