My girlfriend and I (yes, online dating worked eventually, thank you very much!
Also get some new male friends. Those types of comments have a solid leg mired in misogyny, you deserve better then that. posted by Dynex at AM on [1 favorite]
I understand the temptation – when I was looking for a partner online, I was tempted to lie about my age myself because I don’t feel my age is a very useful data point about me. I do look younger than my age (but then everyone thinks that, don’t they?) but primarily because my course through life has simply not been like that of most of my age cohort. I haven’t had the same life experiences someone of my age would be expected to have, and am not at the same “stage of life” if you will. It was very frustrating to know that I was getting lumped in with other people of my age while I had very little in common with most of them.
However, I concluded that it was simply dishonest to lie about it, and I didn’t want to start a relationship on a foundation of lies. There is also a small subset of women who would sort of “half-lie” in their profiles. They would lie in the age box to get themselves into different sets of search results, then come clean in their profiles. e.g., “By the way, I should let you know that I’m not really 35 but am actually 47. But you believed me based on how I look, didn’t you? And I’m really young at heart!” I realized I was really, really put off by that for some reason. It just came off as so insecure. And so I concluded the only thing to do was just be up front about my age and let the chips fall where they would. It’s not like I was going to keep up the lie for years until my relationship fell apart because I accidentally remembered some kids show that I shouldn’t have seen.
) have spent a fair amount of time comparing our respective experiences. She notes that she also had a very bad response rate when she contacted men first, and takes this to mean that men want to do the chasing. Personally, I think that’s nuts. (suite…)