Dr. Dawn: On line dating rules and Boundaries

Boundaries.

Rule number one.  The most sacred rule of all: boundaries.  You need boundaries.  Without them you compromise yourself, values and worse you send out the signal of DESPERATION.

Women appear to have much more desperation when looking for love than men.  If there is any cue that can bite you, it's being desperate.  Nothing men like more than a desperate woman and a woman with low self-esteem.  It attracts the worst. There are blog sites that train men how to find a desperate woman out there. 

Desperation can bring out the worst.  It leads us to wear the too tight dress, revealing too much cleavage, coming off to sexual and nixing the chance to find that commitment switch.  Being the girl next-door is probably the most powerful tactic you can take in finding Mr. Right.  One of the biggest mistakes women make is in amping up their sexuability too soon.  Good men want wholesome women who will be fabulously sexual with them and only them. If you don't agree go into therapy or become an escort.   

Let me tell you about what my friend Tara did.  She is probably one of the most beautiful women I know.  She had one goal: to find love. For the next year I watched her fumble and bumble her quest with at least twenty different guys.  For the sake of parsimony I'll narrow them down—I want you to see how attachment style feeds off of desperation.  It you looked up that word in the dictionary her face would have been plastered to it. 

            At the time of her divorce I was a teaching at a small college and I introduced her to Rob, a clam handsome divorced father of two.  I knew him well, he came from a wonderful family and had strong values and was looking for exactly what she was; a loving partner to spend the rest of his life with.  He was secure, came from a close knit family and they hit it off.  She'd call me each day and tell me of their wonderful conversations and how quickly they found shared interests and that connection.  But a months into their connection I sensed something was wrong.  

            Driving some 60 miles each way to his house, she was there every day and had practically moved in. "Don't you think you're moving too fast," I asked her.  She thought nothing of it and waylaid my fears.  But soon after he called me to tell me that he had to cool it all off.  "She's a great woman, but she is too over powering.  I think she needs time to figure out what she wants," he said to me.   The next weeks were spent weeping into my pillows and accidentally texting him.

            Her next plan was on-line dating.  After hundreds of profiles she found Barry, he looked good, had a great job and relayed that he was seeking a long-term relationship.  Barry however was our dismissive type; he was already forty and had never been married. All his vibes told me he lived to fly solo and had little need for a real relationhip—one that required real interaction—because for the next weeks they texted compulsively, chatted on the phone all night and there was still no meeting.  I had no doubt he was a pretexter- my term for those people who form on-line attachments and never move beyond the surreal world of texting and sexting because it satisfies them.  Finally she wrangled a meeting out of him.  When she stopped over before her date I was shocked.  She stood in a revealing dress, too blond, too overdone and raged desperateness. So can you guess what happened?  His picture didn't say that his head was far too puny for his body, that he had a weak chin and small female-like hands.  Nor did it say I hate desperate women.  Before they even ordered the entrée he fled the scene.  We had another week of crying and self-loathing. 

            Even approaching that desperation thing was impossible.  Next was Mr. Preoccupied—Nate. The desperate meets the desperate.  Nate was handsome and giving and soon I named him Mr. Velcro.  That name—preoccupied—it means they are preoccupied with getting dumped. When you are afraid to lose in the game of love, you tend to do one thing; wind your way into that target's  life.  He whined and wined her—practically moving into her house. He had no career to speak of other than worshiping the various women he had loved, or professed to have love.  I listened to his syrupy sweet anthems each night, and watched her walks around my house like a deranged Fellini character, in a bra and thong. I wanted to vomit.  

       Way too fast is how these relationships work because desperation feeds off other desperation.  It took some shocking realities to lift the veil; he was an alcoholic, had a criminal record, was living off his mother's credit card, had no real job aspirations and the house he supposedly lived in?  At forty, he had 8 college aged roommates.  Her puppy dog turned into a monster. 

            Now that we've described it, my next blog will detail the signs.

In the meantime tell yourself you are worthy, he needs to prove himself- not the other way around.  Men need to compete, to woo and to work for our love.  THAT IS SCIENCE my dears.

Anything worth having is worth working for- the principle of effort justification.  Google that !     

ONLINE DATING: Ok cupid, make me a match with those plenty of fish over fifty or Christian Mingle me with eharmony for a Jdate with chemistry. Yahoo!

ONLINE DATING: Ok cupid, make me a match with those plenty of fish over fifty or Christian Mingle me with eharmony for a Jdate with chemistry. Yahoo! 

So confusing!  The scientific truth is that there is little reliable research.  I just read a book review where some woman conducted her own experiment and delivers her say on the matter, without any  scientific reasoning behind her common sense rules. What she did was to dupe 90 women into thinking they were dating a man, profiles she created.  She catfished them all and her lack of ethics in doing this makes me question anything she might say. 

"I also wanted to learn everything I could about my competition. So I created profiles of 10 male archetypes and spent a month as these men, interacting with 96 women, researching their methods and scraping data from their profiles."  From http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/22/living/online-dating-amy-webb/index.html "Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating To Meet My Match," By Amy Webb, to be published January 31 by Dutton.

OMG, are you kidding?  I've got a lot to say about algorithms used by dating sites.  Unfortunately dating-sites are not keen on giving anyone access to what they know.  But there are scientists in Universities, real ones, who number crunch and pick through the BS.  In the next series of articles I'm going to tell you the truth. I only hope those women she catfished come forward and those sites investigate. Anyone could be out therecould be pulling an "Amy."  

I'll give you the second rule: Identify the person. Try to date people in your area.  Google their names.  If you don't see their names anywhere, be suspicious.  If you find a job listing, call, ask for them and listen to their voice- just to make sure of their gender.  Speaking about gender try Gender Genie on Google, you paste some interaction in and they spit out the gender of the writer.  

If you cannot dig up this person on the internet - don't go on.  More about this later but this leads to the best way to identify--meet as soon as possible.   

The first rule?  Have boundaries.  That means getting rid of desperation, that is your worst enemy and perhaps the most difficult to tackle. Keep on dating!  Dr. Dawn Hopper  

  

Online Love

The Love Lost Generation: The Problem with On-line Dating and Choice.
Love-lost genration? Sadly we are more confused than ever. Our cave life made it all much simpler. A hundred possbile dates? Are you kidding?

GF Becca calls. Disgusted with on-line dating- too much time, too much work, too little results. Is she alone? Hardly. The industry calls it “one of the best tools,” but unfortunately our cave brains see it as a massive stimulus overload. You just have too many choices! It might seem great to have hundreds of potential matches but then again our mind plays some tricks with all that information.

First, it gives us a false sense of confidence that we are in more control than we are. Then we make the next mistake, thinking we have control we maximize our pay-off. So when Becca saw Tom, a heart surgeon who took a liking to her pic, she chose him—Not for nothing but Becca is a cocktail waitress and wouldn’t know an artery from an arterial.

What she doesn’t know is that our brains get irritated when we are faced with too much choice. Oh how we hate to be wrong, indecisive and leave tings to chance. So she makes her contact. Now her brain decides to screw her over again—she becomes convinced they are destined. She goes back to his profile and works over all the reasons they are a couple. We call it post-decision dissonance and without all the science gab, it’s a way that we make ourselves feel better after we make a choice. We feelmore confident. Those dating sites know this. They know you might do all the things that Becca did and that’s why they give you certain information and then smack it with a percentage. He was 97% her match. For the next day she read, reread and presumed that they had everything in common.

Now effort- justification kicks in. What’s that? It’s when we amp up our confidence that our efforts are well-justified. After all, she spent two solid days filling our questionnaires and another weekend responding to questions and queries. Our minds don’t like to think our efforts are worthless and Becca was absolutely convinced that there was a pay-off in there for her. Of course her mind filled in all the gaping pot-holes in her path—after all with hundreds of choices and a 97% match, what could go wrong? Plenty.

The date was a disaster. He, like 67% of men use on-line dating as a hook-up tool. After plying her with gin he proceeded to tell her about his other vein—She bolted from the restaurant.
But even if that last scenario didn’t happen all that choice lends us to experience some big disappointment. So what can you do? First you just learned something about how thinking can undermine our efforts. However in the next weeks I’ll set out some great rules that can help in maximizing on-line dating efforts.

For more information: Online Dating: A Critical Analysis From the Perspective of Psychological Science, by Eli J. Finkel, Paul W. Eastwick, Benjamin R. Karney, Harry T. Reis, and Susan Sprecher

Match.com: Plenty of Fish in the Sea

It seems all my friends are trawling these days on dating sites and I have a lot of chum to chew about.  I’ve vowed that if I ever have a single life, I will never go out to sea.  Take Bob, by far the best fisherman out there and my gf’s ex.  She left, he wasn’t ready, and with a broken heart, a heavy dose of sexual rejection,  he did exactly what men do to heal—they fish the sea of women.  He’s not into the catch and release program and he’s floundered the last month with at least a dozen fish,  some still on ice, in his walk-in-cooler.  I know he’s not exaggerating; my cousin, an experienced fisherman has told me many times the lure can be a phone call, a cheap dinner and a bottle of wine.  “Dawn,” he said, “there are so many women out there!”

So when Bob showed me his line and hook, and made his cast, I had no doubt they’d feast on his bait.   He listed his income in the 99% that most of us 1%er’s despise yet covet and then characterized himself as loving, generous and out for a long term relationship with a woman who could travel the world with him and visit exotic places.  They swarmed.

Bob responded, and with a heavy heart telling them he was still in love with his scornful wife and terribly lonely.  Men, he cast the perfect line.  This wounded guppy created the perfect feeding ground for bottom dwellers.  Woman #1 responds.  He tells me she is self-made, a professional gambler,  living with her aged parents, who she lovingly tends to and runs an internet business on EBay. I’m sitting right there when she sends him a picture of her at that moment in her panties. A Black lace piece of dental floss.  I look down at my crotch imagining what my husband might think if I sent him my shot, right at that moment—jockey microfiber granny panties.  I tuck away the idea of doing something fun for David and  went back to Bob’s plight.  Hi mind was wound in the Black lace but my logical prefrontal cortex was screaming.  So I translate: Compulsive gambler, lost so much money she has to live her parents basement and sell her garage sale finds to fill her gas tank.  I add that she might be selling her used underwear.” 

“But she doesn’t drink,” he retorts.

“Oh,”  I say, “she’s a recovering alcoholic too.” 

A week later he tells me I was right. His revelation came after he found himself eating alone in the casino dining room and after she swiped the tip off the table for “just one more game.”  The evening was topped off with wild sex after she beat him at strip poker and out of a couple hundred dollars.  “How did that happen?” I asked.

“Every time I lost a piece of clothing I had to pay her fifty dollars.”

By now he’s got a new one on the line.  “She’s really down to earth,” he tells me. He describes her life:  She doesn’t care about money— which was a revelation after her near-death experience, after the bus hit her, and after the state took her four kids when she woke from the three month coma, couldn’t recall her own name but had to start again by working in a soup kitchen and living in a studio.

“How old is she?” I ask.

He responded but all I processed was “still fertile.”

“Did you use a condom?” I asked. 

“Oh my God,” he said. “I never thought about that.”

Somehow my mind conjured up the predatory image.  Nothing more juicy than a fat wallet and a desperate man. 

“Bob, it’s like the food chain.  You think your landing plenty of fish but they have to feed too.”

As the weeks went by  Bob got tired of his expedition. “It’s like a full time job,” he told me. “Depressing as hell.”  

He turned the iPod towards me so I could read it. 

All the right words were there; Attractive, divorced, financially secure, wanted honest long term relationship, loved to travel to exotic places. . . .”

He scrolled up to the photo.  It was his ex.