Is online dating useless to average looking guys?

Wealth and looks have little to do with it, basic supply and demand is working against you. Society has modeled our dating behavior on a predator-prey relationship between men and women where men are the pursuers and women are the pursued. This means that there is an inherent imbalance in the number of women that are actively looking for companionship because they are routinely receiving unsolicited offers from many different sources. Into the noise of an inbox receiving dozens or hundreds of messages per week you add your one honest interaction, and there is now a small percentage chance that they will even open your email. If they do open your message and it's interesting enough that they remember anything about it out of the 100 faceless messages they receive a week, there is a roughly 30% chance that they will never go on a date regardless.

I understand it's pretty soul-crushing to keep attempting to put your best self forward and be original, creative, funny, and entertaining. That's why the vast majority of male users simply do the copy-paste wave of messages in the hopes someone may notice by random chance, which decreases the chance that women will engage in an online dating scenario even further, which makes actual heartfelt interaction even less effective and so on in a death spiral. It's entirely possible that what we have mistaken as honest dating platforms are more societal covers for folks who simply want to find sex but need the veneer of heartfelt interaction to make their urges palatable to friends and family, in which case you would probably be better served spending time and energy simply looking in the world around you for people who happened to be single and interested.

/r/7CupsofTea Thread