I have used PRINT personal ads in a local paper for two decades in the 80's and 90's with a great amount of success. No scammers, women HAd to give out a phone number if they wanted you to call , real photos were sent and sometimes perfumed stationary!! And women were GLAD that I called-unlike with online dating who seem pissed I called them if i can pry out their damn cell number. And I usualy got a home phone number ANd a home address in the letter that was in response to my print ad.

I NEVER sat home on weekends and my TV was rarely turned on. Now its my only source of entertainment.

But now, all the date sites want to hook up to your Face page or whatever the damn thing is called or use twitter-whatever that is.

And if yo try to use a site aimed at over 50 people, you get about 8 women living in a city of several million that are members but that does not mean they are paying members so they probably can not respond to you.

You want success in dating-bring back the PRINT ads in local papers. I ran some ads in the major newspaper that serves Dallas at one time so print ads werre mainstream for the shy, socially awkward, etc.

Online dating is just a virtual bar. The best win just like going to the real bars. And most go home alone and pissed and broke.

boycott online dating.

It's already happening. Every damn day, meetup.com sends me e-mails telling me that someone in this city or a neighboring county has started a new group for singles. See, when you join meetup.com and create your user profile, you can set it to notify you every time someone starts a new group near you. There are groups for athletic singles, potluck parties for singles, singles who have the dance fetish, you name it. These are not owned by big, impersonal corporations (although Meetup hosts all the groups)... any shmuck like me can become a member of meetup.com and then pay $48 for 3 months to be an organizer. Sure, it's a lot of work, and I've gone to some meetings where the organizers had no idea how to be good hosts... but in fact, 2 days from now, I'm scheduled to talk to 3 local people who want to take me up on my idea of starting a local group. Believe me, all I need at this point is a geographic location, and I'll start hosting the meetings myself.

Online dating caused a paradigm shift, now meetup.com is causing a 2nd one (gather.com is slower to catch on, but just watch, more singles will discover it too)... so many people abused the online dating system that it's become unworkable. But meetup.com groups work because trolls know they'd get their butts kicked if they showed up IRL at singles meetups. People are discovering that it doesn't pay to act like an idiot at meetups. Online dating is dying on its feet, but image is everything in that industry. How would it look if some guy on the 6 0'clock news did a story about how much the online dating industry has declined? That would be a deathblow to the companies, that's why the news will never air that story.

But I know what you mean about watching a lot of TV... I myself have recently built some very beautiful model cars in my spare time.