Online dating is rough

Interesting:

A Reddit user named OKCThrowaway22221 shared a pretty spectacular tale of his adventures in online dating while pretending to be a woman, and we need to talk about it.

So, this happened:

Last night I was bored and was talking with a friend on skype about her experiences with online dating. I was joking with her that “girls have it easy on dating sites” etc. etc. I had never really done anything in the online dating world but I had set up a real profile a few years back and didn’t use it much aside from getting a few nice messages and decided it wasn’t really for me. But, as I said, I was bored, so I decided that I would set up a fake profile. Set it up as a gender-swapped version of me essentially see what would happen. So I did the username, and I was up. Before I could even fill out my profile at all, I already had a message in my inbox from a guy. It wasn’t a mean message, but I found it odd that I would get a message already. So I sent him a friendly hello back and kind of joked that I hadn’t even finished my profile, how could he be interested, but I felt good because I thought I was right that “girls have it easy”

The speed at which his messages progressed from mildly civil to aggressively sexual won’t come as any surprise to those of you who’ve experienced this for yourselves. But it was a total shock to OKCThrowaway22221.

At first I thought it was fun, I thought it was weird but maybe I would mess with them or something and freak them out and tell them I was a guy or something, but as more and more messages came (either replies or new ones I had about 10 different guys message me within 2 hours) the nature of them continued to get more and more irritating. Guys were full-on spamming my inbox with multiple messages before I could reply to even one asking why I wasn’t responding and what was wrong. Guys would become hostile when I told them I wasn’t interested in NSA sex, or guys that had started normal and nice quickly turned the conversation into something explicitly sexual in nature. Seemingly nice dudes in quite esteemed careers asking to hook up in 24 hours and sending them naked pics of myself despite multiple times telling them that I didn’t want to.

I would be lying if I said it didn’t get to me. I thought it would be some fun thing, something where I would do it and worse case scenario say “lol I was a guy I trolle you lulz”etc. but within a 2 hour span it got me really down and I was feeling really uncomfortable with everything. I figured I would get some weird messages here and there, but what I got was an onslaught of people who were, within minutes of saying hello, saying things that made me as a dude who spends most of his time on 4chan uneasy. I ended up deleting my profile at the end of 2 hours and kind of went about the rest of my night with a very bad taste in my mouth.

Yeah. I came away from a lot of my online dating experiences with a bad taste in my mouth, too. Also, a horrible feeling that there are some terrifying, awful men out there that will in one breath call you the most beautiful creature in the world, and then—when you fail to meet whatever demand or expectation they’ve laid out for you—will say things to you that you’re pretty sure only get said during prison riots.

Look, this isn’t about saying that all online dating is bad and you should never do it ever. Some of you (a lot of you, I suspect), have probably met and fallen in love with some great people online. I’ve had a few good relationships come out of the sites I was involved with. That doesn’t negate the fact that for most of us, we have to wade through a mountain of dog shit to get there.

“I came away thinking that women have it so much harder than guys do when it comes to that kind of stuff,” OKCThrowaway22221 writes, wrapping up his experience. Again, he barely made it two fucking hours. A guy who was probably used to “boys being boys”(or dudes being dudes or whatever), could not handle the kind of messages that women get on a daily and even hourly basis. That’s food for thought about the women who’ve been out there, dating online for months or even years. If that’s what he endured during a short two-hour session—well, just imagine.