The medium is the message (girls, conversation, vs, looking)

[OvernightDelivery]

I'm trying a kind of OLD and the response is dead cold silence which seems extreme and is damaging my ego / confidence. Why is it so hard to strike up a small conversation? You can't know each other simply by their profile because everyone is so different and wants to know different kinds of things about each other. And despite seeming like a bad match there is no way to know if you'd make a connection anyways unless you try.

I would just make my profile best describe who I really am and let it sit but girls don't make the first move . Too much mind games.

[NilaJones]

Are you using OKC? If not, you should be.

Use the match questions feature to its full advantage. Answer lots of questions yourself and, more importantly, read the answers to ALL the questions the girls you are interested in have answered before you send the first message. That will give you a lot of info about what they are really like. Then send each girl a short message that references something from their match questions or the text portion of their profile.

[OvernightDelivery]

I'm not looking for a LTR. Is OKC good for that?

[Chemistry_Guy]

I admit I have never done OLD, but I recently attended some workshops on online interactions where we discussed some principles that might explain your frustration. People can be very stingy with their personal time and effort. Some people are very intentional about how they distinguish their "productive" time from their "fun" time. Typing at a keyboard is going to be associated more with "productive" than "fun" for some people, no matter what the purpose of their electronic interaction is. While a short conversation, in person, is seen as personal time by nearly everyone, many people see reading and responding to emails as work, even if it is part of OLD.

For what it's worth, I think this might be part of the reason why I have never tried OLD (and maybe even part of the reason why I often don't respond to questions people ask me on this forum). Typing up a thoughtful and organized response just seems like work, and I do plenty of that every day. For me, a direct conversation doesn't feel like work, even when it is, while responding to OLD emails would feel like work.

If one of my students comes to my office and asks me to summarize the material they missed during an absence, I will gladly discuss the material with them, and even draw diagrams or equations associated with the material, and this doesn't feel like work at all. On the other hand, if they send me an email asking the same question, responding would be very tedious and I would probably just tell them to come and talk to me. I think that some very valuable aspects of human interaction are lost online, and I would rather communicate in person whenever possible.

Maybe the next generation (I am 35) won't feel this way about online vs in person interactions, but I know many people in my generation have sentiments similar to mine.