Susie’s Thoughts

I’ve been surfing some ads but immediately got some problems… what criteria should I use to search with? I don’t have any preferences when it comes to looks, education or location. I know it would be easier with a guy closer to me, but Finnish guys on international dating sites don’t want to date Finnish women. I guess the same thing goes with me, if I wanted a Finnish guy I would probably just put an ad up on a Finnish site. This is a small country, you know… and women live longer than men…
Instead of trying the search I decided to randomly browse the profiles of guys that were online. When I mingle at a bar I usually just brows through the guys until my eyes catch someone… I thought of trying the same here. The problem is that I have to choose based on a guy’s nickname, age and location only. The first guy to catch my attention was a guy that called himself doggydaddy. I recently got a puppy so I thought it could be nice with another dog lover. Hmm, good looking guy, seems nice, he says he’s got a professional job and cleans up well!?!?
The next guy wrote he’s whole profile in CAPS. I’m enough of a geek to consider caps shouting and I shout enough myself, don’t need another shouter in this family.

After reading these ads I have only one thing to say: “Guys, if you want my attention… WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT YOURSELF… that’s the purpose of these sites…”

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Christmas is over and New Years Eve ahead. In a way I’m looking forward to the New Year even though I’m old enough to know that sometimes the next year isn’t any different from the year that has passed. During last years Christmas the poet told me he wouldn’t come back to my country and I was still smitten by him the whole year. I hope I will be taken by someone closer to me during the year 2005.

I have registered to a lot of free dating sites just to check them out and review them. I usually tell guys that size doesn’t matter, but when it comes to dating sites that’s not true. It doesn’t matter if the site is nice and has a lot of nice features if there aren’t any members. One site though gave me 20 responses in less than 12 hours, but none of them really clicked. I guess I should do a search myself and email the guys that I find interesting. A lot of sites offering dating tips say that guys want to be the ones taking the initiative and do the chase… I’m old enough to go for what I want instead of just waiting to be picked. Hmm, I’m still single so maybe my approach isn’t the right one!

I found a site selling an eBook about how to start and keep a conversation going. They offered different books for women and men, but when I looked at the example chapters and the table of contents the advice seemed to be the same for both sexes. The advice was to talk about the weather, favourite movies, books, dream vacations and dream birthday parties. In Finland you could use a whole evening to talk about the weather if you want to, but then again… every time I see someone I don’t know very well they tend to talk about the weather. Especially older people do this so I don’t know if that would be what I would want to talk about on a date or while chatting on Yahoo.

I guess talking about movies, books and vacations is nice, but spending a night listening to someone telling the complete plot in a book I would never read, or describing every bar they visited on their last vacation, everything from the drinks they ordered to describing the color and state of the bathroom floor and ceiling after they had too many drinks and passed out, is a little bit too much even for a former punk rocker like me.

So, if I decide to search some ads and write something to the guys I find interesting, what do you suggest I should write about? I guess the “What are you wearing?” approach doesn’t work on guys since it hasn’t worked on me!

I wish everyone a really good and peaceful Christmas!

I have been surfing the Internet to get some info on how to date online. First I have to tell you that I’m from Finland and we don’t date. We go out and meet people, we hang out and we even have sex, but we don’t talk about dating. There aren’t really any rules or guides we could read and follow to know how to act during a date… we hang out with people and if we like someone we seem to hang out with that person more often than with others, eventually we start having sex and if we find ourselves having sex with only one person more than once we start talking about a relationship.

OR then it happens as with the man I thought was the love of my life… I met him at work, we started to talk and the attraction was so strong that we were an item a week later. It was an instant attraction that lasted for 5 years and turned out to be a complete disaster. Now when I’m instantly attracted to someone I try to walk the other way. I have succeeded quite well with that for the past ten years. That’s why I have been single. I felt an instant attraction to the poet I’ve been talking about and tried to walk away. His poems always got to me though; let’s see what happens this time.
I found a lot of sites offering dating advice and some of them even asked for some money for me to be able to read them. I was wondering who would ever pay to read advice like that! There is so much information for free on the Net so I really can’t understand why someone would pay for the same thing. The poet use to say that nothing worth having comes easy… maybe we have to pay for the information to really appreciate it… the problem is: How to tell if the advice really works if we can’t try it before we buy it? Do we even need that kind of advice to be successful daters? Isn’t it enough to use common sense and be ourselves? Can you be really successful in a relationship if you try to be something you aren’t? On the other hand, I have been single for 10 years, maybe I should buy a guide to be NOT single and become happy.

What do you think, should I buy a book or a guide to become successful in relationships or should I just be the woman I am and hope someone who appreciates me will come along and notice me?

I have now registered to all the sites in my last post. FriendSearch turned out to not be completely free. I have to pay to be able to receive and send messages. Houb.net has chat rooms, forums and I’m able to create my own blog. At JumpDates I had so answer a lot of questions about myself and they had an instant messages system and Java chat. BookofMatches has also a chat and I had to answer a lot of questions.

I have yet to explore all the features at these sites, but so far I think they look good.

My online dating experiment isn’t doing well. If I’m not on the site chatting in the chat room I don’t get any responses. Well, I guess that’s only fair since life is about giving some to get some…

I have been tweaking my template for the last couple of days and have completely forgotten about the dating site and about writing. The same thing has happened before too. When I’m into something I’m completely into it and after a while I get tired and try something new.

I won’t have anything to write about if I don’t get any responses from my ad. I either have to start chatting or try another dating site. I’m not going to pay for dating so I searched for 100% free dating sites and found these:

PlentyofFish

BookofMatches

JumpDates.com

FriendSearch

Houb.net
I don’t know for sure if these sites are absolutely free. I haven’t tested them and a lot of sites consider themselves to be free if you’re able to place a free ad.

Have anyone tested any of these sites and what do you think of them? Or do you know about another 100% free site that you think is good?

As Lone Ranger pointed out in his comment a dating site might not be the best place to try to find someone suitable for me, but there are really a lot of sites out there and every site says they have a lot of members, so there must be something in them that attract visitors. Hmm, what do people really want from those sites? Is it a way to find THE ONE with as little effort as possible? Are we so busy that we don’t have the time to really get to know people anymore…

Edit: After writing this I surfed the Internet and found a site that reviews dating sites. eDateReview says that their reviews are made by real people. They even host a blog, Online Dating Insider, but that blog hasn’t been updated since August.

LIFE Observations (Humorous and otherwise)

I have been working on my new template for this blog for the last couple of days and can’t get it the way I want it. I thought I’d leave it like this for a while and was just about to go to bed when I happened to click on the next blog button in the upper right corner of the window. The poet use to say that everything happens for a reason and I guess I needed to read that blog. Some of the things could have been written by me… especially the part about failed relationships.
It’s not that I have very many failed relationships in my life… two long term relationships (those men happen to be the fathers of my children), and some shorter ones. The poet knows everything of the second long term relationship. I have been writing many, many emails about that guy even though it’s ten years since we broke up. Some people just walk in to our lives and when they leave we are the ones who have to clean up the disaster they leave behind.

I’m not going to read everything from that blog tonight, I’ve been sitting way too long in front of the computer today… I am going to get back to it later. The blog is written by a man and I must admit I still at this age have a hard time understanding men. Maybe I will get some answers reading that blog. What do you think… is it true that men and women can’t understand each other because of differences in the gender or is it all about different personalities and has nothing to do with gender at all?

Are men REALLY from mars and women from venus?

I’m the only one in our family who is single. My grandmother lived till she was 90 and at that point she thought she could say whatever she wanted to whomever she thought it concerned. We are not as close as a family as you could wish. I haven’t seen some of my cousins in years, but on my granny’s 90^th birthday we were all there.

Everyone was eating cake and drinking coffee, trying to catch up on each others lives when granny looked at me and said: “You have been single an awful long time! It isn’t good for a woman to be without a man for that long, you know… you can get a lot of deceases… hopefully you understand to go and get a man once in a while!” Out of respect for my grandmother we all tried not to laugh… she wasn’t joking, you know!

I have tried to follow granny’s advice, but it isn’t always that easy. I think granny would have wanted me to have safe sex. Already in the 70’s we were taught about those things in school, I just sometimes wonder what the boys did during that lesson. I’ve heard a lot of excuses, everything from: “Oh, I’m not the one getting pregnant”… to… “First time doesn’t count”. Lately guys have started to say: “Aren’t you too old to get kids?” Kids? Who were ever talking about kids?

Is a relationship a marketplace? I once asked the poet this in response to one of his poems. Unfortunately I deleted all the emails I ever sent him and I can’t remember the rest of that question, but now when I have my ad on that dating site I feel that question to be more than relevant. With the ad I’m trying to market myself in the best way I can. I’m not very good at marketing myself. Not that I’m humble or anything, I know I’m a catch, but I guess I’m still romantic enough to believe in my feelings rather than my brains when it comes to relationships. I work at a business school and even though I don’t teach marketing I have these marketing people around me every day. I even found this blog written by a former human resources director who thinks that there are similarities between dating and hiring great workers. She has a couple of really good points in her blog and she even made me consider changing my ad. (Savvy Dating Secrets)

A Finnish guy called Wiio once said that all human communication usually fails, except by accident. This is so true and unfortunately there haven’t been a lot of communication accidents in my life lately. Except for one message I got that I’m not sure what to think about. I got a message from a guy saying that he liked my curves. Are they real, he asked? I took a look at my picture and wondered which part of my body he was referring to. All my curves are real, some of them are caused by my genes, and others are the result of hard work (four pregnancies, a love of chocolate and many, many hours of sitting flat on my butt working on the computer). I told him my curves are real and never heard from him again. Apparently he wanted fake curves! (Wiio’s law)

This is my favourite painting, I’m really proud of it.