Is OLD as hard for men as it is for women

[Beanfry]

I keep reading about how OLD is a cess pit for women, that there are no good men out there. But are men finding it the same in reverse, or are there really 100 women to every good man?

starting to think about dipping my toe back into the dating world, but the stories of how bad OLD is is putting me off. For context i turned 40 last week, so my dating age range would be 37 - 45

I think this must be absolutely true- all the dates I had when I could be arsed to date, their relief and delight was always palpable when we actually met!

I have. As others have mentioned, the statistics speak for themselves. Looks-wise, average and below-average men are at a severe disadvantage, no matter how much effort they put into themselves or their profile.

@GlassFanBan

The reality is, if a man is a 7 and he’s messaging lots of 8,9 and 10’s, his success rate will be poor. If he messages 5, 6 and 7’s he will generally have much better luck.

if a women is a 7, she can generally speaking, message anyone she wants and will likely get a lot more responses.

i don’t mean this in a derogatory way to you or any of the women on here and on OLD, but from my experience it’s very true.

also, most apps now allow you to send a message without even matching. That first message is crucial, even if you’re a 10, a hi how R U? isn’t going to get you very far.

so, it’s almost certainly who you are trying to match with along with what you are saying in your intila
message which is failing you.

What's a 7,8,9,10?!? Is this how we define people of the opposite sex now? Who decides what makes someone a 10?

My current partner admitted that if it wasn’t for his female friend’s input, he wouldn’t have a clue how to put a pleasant, interesting online profile together. I believe there’s a (small) pool of men out there: perhaps average looking but who’d make good partners, but they lack the ability to present themselves in a good light and they choose bad photos and badly worded info about themselves, because they don’t have female friends to ask for feedback and/or they are (mis)guided by other men.
Im not talking about the crude types, I’m talking about the ‚meh’ profiles.

I'm single, thought of dabbling in OLD because I don't care about looks or height in men so I thought I might be in with a shout. However, my DDs friend was doing OLD, she is 28, blonde and a PhD and the stories she told me about the approaches she got have put me off completely. Despite the fact that she put her PhD in her profile, and that she was looking for men with similar education, she was getting approaches ranging from the illiterate to the 'literate but with dick pics'.

It seemed as though men weren't bothering to read her profile, just seeing a picture of a blonde young woman and thinking that she must be gagging for cock.

I'm sticking with single.

OLD for men is way worse than woman. Most average men will get no response or very little response.

One of our friends is a decent man, better than av looking, good job, well presented etc. only got likes from woman who were all well into their 60's - he's 54 but looks younger. We couldn't stop laughing about it - speak about grab a granny 😅

I think a lot of woman think they're better looking than they actually are. I think a lot of woman are looking for that man in the top 20% of men out there and aren't interested in the average decent man - maybe that's why they are single in the first place...

Dating isn’t equal opportunities… sure, everyone has their preferences, but some people are just far more attractive to most people than others.

A tall, athletic man with hair, a strong jaw who’s well groomed, but not excessively so, will score “higher” than a man who doesn’t have those qualities. We may not like the concept of eating men, but we all do it whether we admit to it or not, even if we don’t assign a crude number to it, we will all think “oh, he’s attractive” and “eugh, he’s not. It’s human nature.

"We may not like the concept of eating men, but we all do it whether we admit to it or not"

This is the best typo I've seen in a while 😂

Unless I'm missing something but I thought that women can like on profiles without the like coming from a man first?

I know an average looking man, early 40s who was on OLD (I'll admit, all the women's experiences that I know of put me off) and I asked did he find it as tough as my friends did.
Yes was the simple answer. He met some who didn't resemble their profile photo at all and all were filtered.
He also said that he found women very slow to chat, engage with, he felt that he had to do all the chasing.
Also he met women who expected him to pay for everything and arrange everything and tbh that would annoy me too.

It goes both ways tbh women can be as bad as the men.

OneLemonGuide you've mentioned tall men in nearly every post but no one else has. This is obviously your thing but i wonder how many other people feel like that or maybe they aren't as shallow as you?

I know when I was OLD men were always shocked that I looked like my pics or better. They always said it was scary because women rarely looked anything like their pics. I don’t get it cos I would not bear for them to be disappointed. But I seem to be rare in this.

Yeah this is common. Of course we all post the most flattering pics of ourselves, but mine were always “honest” in that they were recent, unfiltered, and showed what I really looked like, albeit on a good day.

I met a few women whose pics turned out to be 10 years old, or cleverly posed to make them seem much slimmer, or filtered so much they looked like a totally different person.

Three different tales of dreadful OLD experiences from 3 different male mates

One went in a date with a woman who said she was curvy - from her photos he thought she looked about a size 16. When she arrived her photos were at least a decade old and he said she much bigger - probably 20 stone+ - they went for a drink and she downed pints of Stella like water then fall off her bar stall.

Another went on a date with a woman who said she was 54 - and a woman in her late 70’s turned up with a walking stick. She’d used her daughters photos and then went mental when he told her he was going hiome, screaming ‘age is only a number’ across the car park and telling him he was an ageist bigot.

The final one was outside Liverpool Street and a stranger walked over and said ‘hi Dave I’m Julie’ (names changed obviously) and it was a completely different person. He said to her ‘you’re not the one in the photos’ and she shrugged her shoulders and said ‘well we’re here now might as well make most of it’ - no attempt to apologise or explain!
He said no thanks I’m out of here and got train home again.

When I did OLD I was told by a number of men that women wouldn’t look like their photos in real life. This seems to be the main gripe.

I really enjoyed OLD, but I have a strategy that I believe works.

Put real photos up, no make up shots and full length so when you go in a date they know what you really look like.
Swipe right for interesting men only. Look at their hobbies, education, job. Make sure they align with your interests and values.
Don’t obsess over height, hair etc or looks.
Make sure their communication is good. Do they respond quickly, do they make you laugh, do they ask you out on a date quickly? Are the interested in you, do they ask you questions about your life? Can they spell!

Anyone that goes straight to overly flirty, sex talk, don’t bother with.

All the men I went out with were absolutely lovely. They were fun and interesting. No ghosting.

Everyone uses OLD to meet now - there’s no stigma. Just employ a strategy that works for you and stick to it.

Women have much better profiles. They put more work into them from what I’ve seen. I do often look at my friend’s tinders and OLD profiles and sometimes I see men and I think actually he probably is pretty good looking he just has bad pics. A lot of men’s downfall is their awful photography skills… or the very obvious cropped out ex gf on all their good pics.

I’m sure the struggles are different for men and women, but I don’t think one has it harder than the other. All the single men I know at 20-30 (I’m 26) are single for a reason though and I wouldn’t touch them for all the money in the world. All the single women I know at that age (bar one or two who are inane) are single by choice and have at least one man orbiting them.

@blackpooolrock
maybe I misread your tone, but you seem to have written your last comment as an insult. You are aware presumably that an ever increasing number of women are CHOOSING to be single as for them it’s preferable?

Yes, of course they can. My point is maybe the women who have swiped yes on you, you’re not swiping yes on, so you don’t get the match.

I used tall men as it’s well known that women, typically, have a definite preference for height, whether or not it’s something that you care about, or think should matter.

This truth has nothing to do with my own personal preferences or supposed “shallowness”. Where have I said that I have a preference for tall men?

The apps I've used notify you if someone has liked your profile. You don't need a match.

I know this because on Bumble when I selected "interested in men" I saw likes come through without liking them. When selected "interested in women" no likes come through.

Less likes from women is a plus point for women, because it’s because she actually takes the time to look at a profile and decide whether she likes it or not, then swipes accordingly. Men swipe yes on everything (I’ve seen them on a train not even looking at their phone, just swiping yes) then only look once they have a match, which is lazy and cruel.

I met my partner and best friends on OLD, so it can work.

It's not easy, however.

As has been pointed out, most men rarely receive messages/likes, due to a number of factors, including the fact that many women still don't like to make the first move, and that there can be many more men than women on sites.

My profile was fairly different to the average male one, not least because it included photos of me hanging out at castles and NT sites, and included the killer 'I'm vegan, and looking for someone who would at least give consideration to exploring this idea' statement 😃 This reduced my 'likes' even further, of course, but at least there were no 'Fish' pics, and it was certainly helpful in filtering out poor matches!

I was looking for a potential life partner, not casual stuff, and was prepared to wait for as long as it took. Most meetings and chats came to nothing, but that was expected, and I at least had some nice outings and met some lovely and interesting people.

Tip tip: Use the right site for you. I avoided the more downmarket ones, finding Hinge and Bumble to be good, even with just their free membership.

I wonder if a lot of women’s pics are filtered/old or they are catfish just looking for instagram followers etc, whether men have an unrealistic expectation of the type of woman who would be interested in them. So don’t swipe on their true potential matches with genuine photos as they have lots of likes (or whatever) from influencers.

May be one of the reasons why a lot of women who are serious about dating on here rarely get matches?