How to get over trauma of online dating

[Traumaonline]

I’ve been online dating for a few years
ended up in 4 or so short term dating and longer term relationships
the guys were lovely to start with but all turned very nasty and selfish towards the
huge commitment phobes, lying, cheating etc

now I’m too petrified to online date again and I’m trying to meet people in real life while taking a break

but im starting to wonder if im too traumatised to even want to be in a relationship anymore

I always had a secure attachment style and I have a professional job with a career and great friends

I know I’m a good, decent person but I’m starting to feel bruised and down

any help/tips?

@SamW98 and I bet he thinks he’s one of the ‘nice’ guys who get overlooked by shallow bitches who only like bad guys.

I almost expect that kind of agression from younger men in the current climate of Andrew Tate and his nonsense, but proper grown up men the wrong side of 40 coming in with that attitude and not seeing anything wrong with it boggles me!!

@Surreyclaire then they aren’t who we are talking about?

Even rarer on a thread about dating that doesn’t attract the mansplaining nice guys, is a thread without someone NAMALT-ing.

I met my DH online when I was late 20s. He was the third person I met up with, the other two just weren't for me (and we probably weren't for each other). He is the love of my life. We have been together for 8 years, have 1 DC and I'm pregnant with our second. I really cannot imagine life without him and I find it a bit scary that we might not have crossed paths without OLD. I am mid 30s now and he's just turned 40, so still relatively young.

That said, I can imagine things become more complicated as people get older simply because they have more life under their belt, and are more likely to have had long term relationships, marriages, separations, divorces, kids, traumatic life events etc.

I am a bit disappointed/disgusted to read that there are men who are 40s+ who behave in such an unpleasant way. I do think some people just never settle down, for whatever reason, which is fine, but it is not ok to string other people along if you know full well it is never your intention to meaningfully commit.

I also think it's hilarious that any man who is 40+ thinks a 20something will be interested in him to the exclusion of a man her own age. I mean, really. Talk about being divorced from reality.

Wishing you all the best, OP. I'm sorry the dating pool has proved a disappointment so far and I hope that changes for you in future, if and when you are ready to date again.

@Crushed23 so many of them about!

I went on one date with a guy who bore a close resemblance to a garden gnome with the social skills of a doormat, who spent the whole date talking about himself and his hobbies with not a single question to me about myself, who texted after the date to say he enjoyed himself very much but would not be asking me on a second date.

The reason? He had thought I was out of his league and the fact he was able to go on a date with me and come away feeling good about himself was a sign he could do even better and he didn’t want to limit himself when clearly there was a world of ‘top totty ’ out there for him to indulge in.

A couple of months later I got a text from an unknown number telling me that perhaps he had been too hasty to cast me off, OLD was proving fruitless and young women were rather demanding so with some consideration he was happy to ‘settle with you for now’

I have never typed the words LOL NO so fast.

Did I miss more mansplaining ? 😂

Yep all those thirsty men looking for lurrrrrrve and not being given a chance by us fussy old girls 🤣

Im taking a break from old too.

I think many slightly older women could write a book. I've been sent abusive messages, had a bloke leave a google review that was all about me calling me a slag because I refused a second date , been ghosted, had a guy accuse me of lying when I cancelled a date due to being unwell and had lost my voice, even though I'd asked if we could rearrange , been stood up several times , been messed around, had blokes sent abuse because I haven't replied immediately to their shit messages on apps, (like I'm just sat waiting for their ,message and don't have a life ) had one guy that I was seeing for 6 weeks dump me out of the blue only to have him text back weeks later saying while he was looking for his next girlfriend would I be interested in " meeting his needs " , the list goes on.

I wonder what compelled the man on this thread to wade in without any actual experience in on line dating telling us silly girls how to do it .

And I guarantee all of these men on OLD have got friends and family who think they’re lovely blokes and can’t understand why they’re single.

Creepy men don’t walk round wearing badges showing their sleaziness. Most of them perfectly capable of being polite pleasant and friendly when it suits them

Oh no, I think I missed being corrected about my awful anti-nice guy bias from the husband of the year 🙄.

@SamW98 that’s exactly it - these men don’t come with neon creep signs otherwise we wouldn’t go on dates with them!

I can guarantee that the female relatives of the worst men I have been on dates with would not recognise those men in a dating situation because the entitlement and what seems at times to be absolute hatred of women they aren’t related to changes their whole personality.

Women can get sex extremely easily, they have no need to go OLD for sex.

Also,telling will says he's married but his situation is complex and he's looking to date

I wonder if he'll be one of those who put a bow tied on their profile pic and say married looking for discretion for fun

I also wonder if he is planning to tell the wife .

Screams sleaze to me , not nice guy .

It was a breakdown of classic incel tropes, explained in minute detail for our simple shallow minds.

How long typically was it before they showed their true colours?

notjustforchristmas

Oh damn I missed it, I'd love an explanation of online dating which I've been doing for almost 4 years from a married man thinking of cheating with no experience of on line dating but who an academic fell for because he didn't want her but he's so ordinary and nice

Shucks .

Same OP. Giving up. After 5 years I am so bored of it and it’s making me hate all men. I’ve had liars, stalkers, even a creepy death threat but mainly just an abundance of men who just want sex or sex talk and have no interest in anything more.

I’ve just had this opening message on hinge..
”mmmmm yes, do you want it?” from a 54 year old man. 🤮

Funny how willgt pissed off . He's obviously not tried to date on line !

I’m also taking a break, OLD is very bad for your self esteem and breaks your faith in men. My main lowlights were finding out that a lot of the men I was in contact with were married or in relationships, being ghosted after a relationship of a few months, creepy men constantly talking about sex, scary men and rudeness. It has become apparent to me that most men OLD in their 40s-50s have major personality flaws. The final straw was a date I had last weekend, that was just totally weird. I think he didn’t particularly like me, fair enough. But instead of just saying that he made out that I was like his ex that had a problem with him texting his teen daughter because I just asked who he was texting during the date! I would just love to meet someone to have a normal conversation with but I have a feeling that any decent man doesn’t use OLD.

I want to cry when I think of all the thousands of hours of my precious life I wasted with OLD. Similar experiences as PP have detailed. When I started out I was thrilled at getting over 100 responses to my initial ad, thinking there must be a perfect man for me among that lot. As I was wading though them more and more replies came in every day. It became an extremely time consuming job assessing each one and messaging the most likely and out of hundreds I ended up whittling it down to just 15 who i actually wanted to meet. The dates took up even more time and at the end of it even the cream of the crop did not pass the first date hurdle. What a massive waste of time and energy!

Talking of sleaze bags, the worst first message I received was 'Do u do anal'. I will never forget that to the day I die!

@Tarquina 🤢 bloody hell.

It’s so depressing to have your view of men corroded so brutally but consistently with messages like that. And yet we women are too picky…

Per a PP it’s also shocking how many men on apps are married and openly looking for a woman to fulfil their sexual needs, as if dating apps are service ordering apps and the women on them automatons who exist only in relation to what the man wants.
Not even an affair scenario being offered, that might involve some wooing or effort. Just ‘my domestic appliance is broken, need replacement. Must self fund and deliver’.

Sorry OP, this is all a bit bleak but it’s really not you, it’s the culture of men on dating apps when it comes to looking for something serious.

@Over40Overdating @capabilityfrowns @SamW98 Do you think most of these men really don't understand that most women won't appreciate sleazy opening messages and would much prefer a man to actually read their profile and properly try to engage with them as a person? Or do you think most of them know this but just don't care, or even try to be sleazy deliberately?

Sometimes I wonder whether some men would benefit from reading more Mumsnet threads - not wading in to mansplain, but just listening and learning. (I'm a man and I feel like I've learned a lot here.)

@MoonbeamsGlittering In my opinion they don’t care at all. The kind of men who send these messages see women on apps as a sex service they are entitled to and are angry they don’t have the free access they want so like monkeys flinging shit to show annoyance they send these messages instead.

Those messages are a power play - they know it’s not going to lead to them getting a reply but the fear and disgust it generates is enough of a thrill for them in lieu of sex.

Like flashers - it’s to show women what they think of us. To make sure we know that no matter where we are, a man can always invade our space to show his contempt for us.

Those are the worst ones but there’s a whole spectrum of behaviour from men, many of whom are no doubt good, decent, thoughtful men in every day life, that has shocked me to my core over the course of my dating life.

Online dating has actually done more to turn me off men in the last 5 years than the previous 40 years. I find myself now approaching all men from a positon of deep distrust because of what I’ve seen and heard from men who I would otherwise have assumed to be good, decent kind humans.

@Over40Overdating It's really sad that things have reached that point. I wonder whether the dating sites could do more to stop this kind of disgusting behaviour. Or maybe there's a gap in the market for a site where there is zero tolerance for these things. I wonder whether the paid sites have fewer gross comments because men wouldn't want to get banned and lose their money? I don't know (I did a load of online dating 20 years ago but it sounds like it has changed a lot.) But it's really sad that women have to put up with so much of this nonsense if they want to try to find someone respectful via OLD.

I assumed the paid sites were better but according to one pp they are worse!

I do think there are lovely men on OLD - I've met some! But I think it's wise to take breaks and keep tabs on your mental health.