It’s no wonder many men give up

Quite a few years ago a few mates were at my condo and we started discussing how difficult the dating scene was. We decided to test our theory to see if it was actually true and came up with a crazy test.

This wasn’t a scientific double-blind gold standard test. It was pretty basic. It also turned out to be a very quick test.

We ran the test of the Craigslist website. Back in the day, they had a pretty popular dating section. This was before the days of Tinder and similar apps.

Dating sites did exist but wouldn’t have worked for our test. Setting up profiles with photos and having to pay a fee to contact people just wasn’t worth it.

So, what was our crazy test?

We put up two almost identical ads. One was for men seeking women and the other for women seeking men.

The ads were pretty basic. I can’t remember the exact wording, but it was along the lines of looking for a long-term relationship. Both ads made the male and female searchers appear like genuine, normal people.

We submitted both ads and sat back.

We were just getting ready to hit the town and weren’t expecting any replies right away. This was on a Saturday evening in London. I’m not sure if that made a difference to the replies or not.

We planned to go out and then check any replies when we got home later in the night.

What happened next shocked us. We were assuming the ad for women seeking men would have way more replies. We were right, but the number of replies was so high that we decided to delete the ad after about an hour.

So, how many replies did the ads get?

Women seeking men — the replies started coming in within a couple of minutes. Within an hour the ad had over 200 replies. At that point, we deleted the ad. If we’d left it running overnight we might have had thousands of replies.

Men seeking women — we left this ad run for a week. We got 0 replies. No, that’s not a typo. The ad got zero replies.

It’s tough for men.

Men can’t even get a reply to get a conversation going. Possibly this was because we didn’t include an image. I guess that most women may assume the guy is not good-looking or they would have included at least one photo of themselves.

But is it tougher for women?

On the surface, it seems like women are spoiled for choice. In one hour they have 200 men to choose from. Just pick a few of the best ones and go on some dates.

But the replies from the men were pretty awful. It’s no wonder some men can’t get dates.

Here was an ad from a woman saying she was looking for a long-term relationship. How did the men reply?

We didn’t check every single reply because there were too many. However, a large proportion of the replies were dick pics and naked men. Is that any way to reply to a woman that’s looking for a long-term relationship?

Most of the other replies were pretty bad as well. They didn’t seem to make any effort to paint themselves as a normal guy. If I was a woman I wouldn’t have replied to any of them.

And maybe that’s why we didn’t get a reply to the men seeking women ad. Women have probably figured out what the men of Craigslist are like. Maybe there aren’t even any women there. Maybe all the women seeking men ads are fake, just like ours was.

Ladies, I didn’t realize that online dating was so tough for you as well, but in a different way.

Men, if you get a chance to date, please put some serious effort into your reply. Send a decent photo of yourself, not a dick pic. I don’t even know why I have to say this. Are some men so stupid that they don’t even know all of this?