Dating services and foreign women

Watching that video was emotionally conflicting.

You've received some good advice and I hope that what I have to add to that advice will also be good and will help. I would start with a recurring line in the 1980's cop show, Hill Street Blues, that the sergeant would always end his morning briefing with: "Hey! You be careful out there!"There are a great many scams operating on the Internet. Yes, some of the offers and adverts are legitimate, but many are not. The wisdom we need to develop is the ability to tell the difference. If it seems too good to be true, then it probably isn't.You express the desire "to catch them in the act of their deception" (Message 13). That would be self-defeating. Even most of the profiles posted on local dating sites contain some amount of deception to various degrees. Even meeting someone face-to-face is not completely free of deception. Nor are you immune from committing deception as you seek to put your best side forward and to not reveal your bad side -- if anything, that could be seen as necessary for the process. Relationships require trust. If you enter into every potential relationship suspecting the other person of deception and wanting to expose that deception, then you will doom each and every potential relationship to failure. Besides, what would exposing a deception accomplish?Personally, what I went through in my divorce augmented by what I personally observed has left me extremely distrustful. I myself look for and see deception in most women I meet. I personally accept that that means that I will not enter into another intimate relationship for the rest of my life (at 61, that should not last long). You are young and have the rest of your life to build, so my cynical perspective is not one that you should adopt for yourself. So don't!To my mind, using a local dating site (which includes a national site such as match.com that allows you to filter by locale), would make more sense. As I had been taught, the recommended procedure is to read the other person's profile to get a feeling for whether you would want to meet that person. Then you initiate contact through the site by various means which should eventually culminate in an exchange of messages (when it goes to email, you are advised to create an email address specifically for this purpose -- a special one for corresponding with prospective partners and your regular one for the service to identify and communicate with you). If that all goes well, then you will arrange for a face-to-face meeting, preferably in a safe public place such as a coffee shop -- this is presented as being more for her protection, but we guys also need to guard against the old badger game. Up to this point, there has been no exchange of phone numbers nor of home addresses; that will come later when and if the relationship progresses that far. A friend of mine (female) who had used match.com with some success told me that it would take about 300 on-line contacts to result in one face-to-face meeting and tens of face-to-face meetings to result in one second meeting.As you read through that basic procedure, consider how it would apply to an international/foreign dating site. The on-line communication would proceed somewhat the same, but how do you handle the first face-to-face meeting? Locally, you would lose about one hour of your time and so could easily enough work your way through the tens of such meetings that would be needed. Internationally, one of you would have to travel thousands of miles to make that meeting and that would very likely be you. Are you prepared to do that kind of travelling?Also there's the question of whether this kind of approach is ideal for you. As I was going through my divorce, I saw a counselor. She wanted me to get on all the dating sites and to end up juggling three women at the same time. For one thing, she didn't want me to fixate on one woman. For another, she had warned me about a number of women's "borderline personalities" that I would need to look out for, so I was to report my experiences with these women back to her so that she could analyze them and point out the problems and presence of those borderline personalities. I found that I could not do what she wanted me to do and her stories of borderline personalities only served to reinforce my suspicions.My main problem with on-line sites was that none of the women appealed to me. I am unable to shop through a catalog for dates. I need to actually meet and interact with someone before I can determine whether I could be interested. Lacking that, all I could do was what we do when we're in a restaurant where we don't like anything that's on the menu; we pick through the menu and eliminate possible choices because it contains something that we don't want or like, until we have eliminated everything except for one, the least objectionable. Similarly, I would read through each prospective partner's profile looking for anything that would eliminate her as a choice. And, of course, I would always find something. The lesser-of-all-evils restaurant analogy of course assumes that I must make a choice, whereas the reality of the dating sites was that I could reject them all, which I could not help but do.Now, with your self-described shallowness (Message 1), that might not be a problem for you. But keep in mind that they also have a choice, one that they will base on your profile. You have expressed a desire to expose the deceptions of others; will you yourself not employ your own deceptions in your own profile? Mind you, I'm not encouraging you to post all your worst warts for all to see. In your profile, you do need to present your best side while you also need to be as honest as you can be. That may prove very difficult for you. Or not; all we have to go by is what you have posted here.What are your other choices? The number-one rule of meeting women is that you go where women are, just as their number-one rule of meeting men is to go where men are. Decades ago, I obtained the messages posted by the venerable UNIX program, fortune, which would display a random "fortune cookie" message whenever you ran it. Here is one: Lonely men go to bars. Lonely women stay at home. They never meet.More than one of your respondents mentioned dance classes. I had started dance classes as something to do together with my wife, though she quit for whatever reason. I continued anticipating her return, since I knew that I had to work on it so much harder. Than after a horrendously traumatic experience, nearly two years before the divorce, the challenge of the dance classes helped to take my mind off of the hell of my daily life; the novelty of a room half-full of women happy to see me also helped. Dance classes had such a therapeutic effect that my counselor's desire for me to give them up did not make any sense and contributed to me inability to follow her advice.Is part of your problem that you have no confidence when talking with women, especially with beautiful women? Dance classes will help you develop that confidence. While actual dance events can be stressful *, dance classes are not. In a group dance class, men and women pair up and then, when the instructor tells them, they rotate to the next partner (usually, it's the women who rotate). Within the structure of the class, you automatically get a partner. This gives you the opportunity to become comfortable in the company of a woman and of interacting with her comfortably. Also keep in mind that a dance is "a three-minute relationship." On the dance floor, don't try to make it anything more. But with your experience in dance class, you will become more at ease with women and more confident. I myself feel very inconfident, but my counselor's initial assessment of my demeanor was one of confidence.{* FOOTNOTE:
Before my time, in the early to late 1960's, all men in college were required to participate for two years in the Reserve Officer's Training Corps (ROTC); subsequent volunteering for two more years of ROTC resulted in a military commission upon graduation. Therefore, it is not surprising that in the student protests of the 1960's, one of the first targets of the protesters was the ROTC armory on campus. By the time I graduated high school (1969) and started college, that requirement was changed to a required two years of physical education (each PE class was typically 1/2 unit, hence 2 units in four semesters, but when I earned all 2 units with a scuba diving course, much to my dismay I learned that it wasn't the units but rather being younger than 21). So to avoid sports (which I cannot stand with a passion), after scuba I enrolled in the dance classes.In class we had a guy who was experienced in dancing. He told us of he would go out to a locale. The girls would all be sitting there waiting while all the guys would be sitting at the bar drinking all the liquid courage they could in order to ask a girl to dance. So in the meantime he was able to get in dances with all the girls there.BTW, dancers are notorious for not drinking. Because they don't need it. And because alcohol will only impair their performance.
}You are a Christian. I would assume that you attend a church. I would furthermore assume that your church has some kind of singles ministry which has some kind of events for singles (this may be a reach, depending on your congregation's size). Have you considered that?A local mega-church has a singles' ministry that ministers to about 15,000 singles. Part of that for the singles in their 40's and older were dance classes, which a church member recruited me for. The senior pastors had a problem with this. There's an old joke about Baptists: "Why do Baptists prohibit having sex while standing up? Because they're afraid that it may lead to dancing." Of course, such an attitude is ridiculous, but many non-dancers think that and have a problem with it.Seriously, learning to partner dance should help you a lot. PM me about this if you want.

I would assume that you are not familiar with dancing.For a very long time, there has been partner dancing. This is dancing with a partner. Partnership implies communication between partners. That means that one partner leads the dance while the other partner follows. To reiterate, one partner leads while the other partner follows what the first partner is leading.Lead and follow. Lead and follow. Do you get the basic idea?On match.com and, I'm sure, many other on-line dating sites, women will post in their profiles that they love dancing. But what really are they saying? Do they know how to follow a lead? Or do they just wiggle on their own? What many women would call "dancing" is not what a partner-dancer would call dancing.If you learn how to dance, you will then need to learn how to decipher what the women are saying to you.PS
Leading is a skill. 25 years before my first real dance lesson, I learned much about leading from my Aikido training. From my very first dance lesson in 2000, the women praised me on my clear and strong lead.Following is no less a skill, an even more elusive skill, one which is so great as to elude me. A salsa teacher lists 25 skills that a leader must have and constantly employ, but only 5 for a follower. A ballroom teacher told me that "men dance in the future, while women dance in the present." The leader must always be thinking about what the next move will be, while keeping in mind the other couples on the floor. The follower must do the impossible: in real-time, know what the leader wants her to do.Edited by dwise1, : PS

Bad counsellor.

No, not really.I had already found a coping mechanism, the dance classes.As I encountered various women, how was I supposed to understand what they were up to?Now, the earlier encounters were while I was still married. I did not understand what was happening, if anything, so I simply wrote it off.Now, what I ended up doing while I was married is that I assumed that there was nothing to it. I had been married for 28 years. I had no idea what flirting was. Even if I were to suspect flirting, I still could not have any idea that it was going on. I was married, no flirting was going on, no questions about it!Now we come to post-divorce.To be honest, I'm not sure that my time with that counselor was strictly post-divorce. For one thing, let's face it, California law is "divorce on demand", so once that bitch filed for divorce, for no fucking reason, it was a fait accompli.I believe that the counselor's motives were right. Observing my ex's friends in their divorces before my own, the experienced divorces counselled them in how to latch onto an unsuspecting man and to drain him of all his worldly possessions that you can and, once you have thus drained him, to dump him and seek out the next carrion. My counselor's intent was to steer me away from such predatory females and from other types. However, I was unable to stay the course.

There has been a ton of wisdom and enlightenment shown here. I will come back to read this thread for some time, at least until I get this problem licked. I did realize something though after reading this which I suspected already. This isn't just a women problem for me; it is a social problem for me. I may have an IQ of 136 in general but I have less than a 60 IQ when it comes to social ability. I am fucking scared to death. That is my problem. I guess it might be called social anxiety but I am not even sure that qualifies.

Well, I am going to take a dance class at college when I decide to take my fine arts course as part of the general education requirements.

There is a dance forum, danceforums.com , which discusses partner dancing and has a lot of dance students on it. They can be very helpful.Basically, a class in ballroom, country, swing, or salsa would be what you would be looking for. Jazz dancing or line dancing would be more solo work, as would ballet (which I assumed you already knew).Having been a listener for decades, I was used to listening to everything that was happening in the music, which meant that I had difficulty isolating and hearing the basic beat. Most dance music (waltz being a notable exception) is in some form of 4/4 time. What you will do is to count the beats according to the rhythm of the dance; eg, swing is 1-2-3&4-5&6 and 1-2-3&4-5-6-7&8, foxtrot is 1-3-5-6 (slow, slow, quick, quick), cha-cha is 2-3-4&1, salsa is 1-2-3-5-6-7 (quick, quick, slow, quick, quick, slow), etc -- many count the rhythm in quicks and slows, in that a quick is one beat while a slow is two beats. You only step (transfer weight from one foot to the other) on a count, so a slow is a single step taken during two beats of the music.In order to learn to hear the beats, start listening to popular music and count out the beats. While 4/4 music will have 4 beats to a measure, dancing uses phrases of 8 beats, which is also two measures. That means that in dance you normally are counting from 1 to 8. A phrase has a definite start, though it takes time to learn to hear it; normally it will be when a vocal line begins or when an instrument starts. Just getting your ear adjusted to listening for the beats and counting them out to yourself will be a good start. And if you know somebody who dances, even if it's free-style (which is not partner dancing), then you could enlist their help in hearing and following the beat.Have fun!

Dancing is a fine art now? I know it isn't when I do it.

Fine Arts
Complete one of the following:ARTH 2010 Art History Survey I (3 cr.)
ARTH 2020 Art History Survey II (3 cr.)
DANC 3500 Dance as Human Experience (3 cr.)
HUMT 2310 Arts and Ideas I (3 cr.)
HUMT 2320 Arts and Ideas II (3 cr.)
MUSC 1030 Introduction to Music (3 cr.)
MUSC 1035 History of Jazz (3 cr.)
THEA 1030 Introduction to the Theatre (3 cr.)DANC 3500: This course involves the study of dance as a societal phenomenon. Students will examine the unique characteristics of dance and its various functions in society. Emphasis will be on dance in Western Civilization. However, materials will be included to the extent that they have influenced the development of dance in the West. Edited by foreveryoung, : No reason given.

I think one of your main problems with social skills is you lack a sense of humor, dude.- Oni

Looks like it could be interesting and it would satisfy your GE requirements as well as enhance your knowledge and appreciation of dancing -- I started college as a foreign language major and then much later switched to computer science; CS is my money degree and my interest, but I got a lot out of the cultural history I had learned as a language major and still cherish it. By all means, take the class, but it's not really what I had in mind.What I had in mind was a class in which you would be working on and directly applying the social skills that partner dancing affords you.Is PE still required? When I went through college, you were required to have four PE, but in reality the requirement was PE every semester until you're 21 -- a couple years before I started in 1969, two years of ROTC was required of all male students, which was apparently one of the reasons that the student protests seemed to always converge on the Armory with the intent to burn it down.I have seen dance classes offered under PE, though other departments might offer them. These would be the classes where you actually learn a dance and practice what you have learned in each meeting of the class. The fine arts class would augment these dance classes as the dance classes would augment the fine arts class.

I will actually be taking a PE class next semester that isn't part of my degree requirements. It is called strength and conditioning and it will be mostly hands on.

It's hard to have a sense of humor when most of the people hate you and everything you stand for.

You keep conflating ideas and yourself.The fact that folk may disagree with your ideas has nothing to do with whether or not they like you.