Transatlantic Online Dating
This concept is best comprehended if you are seeking interracial romance. For the time being, this comprehensive article will do. I often think that I would have been taken seriously as an intellect if my dating profiles had photos of myself working in an office. Not that most British women took me seriously in that capacity anyway. One example is a middle-aged woman on the Plenty of Fish site. This was during the years when my profession identified me as a writer. Advertising myself as a writer got me nowhere because people assumed that my novels must come from an urban or third world perspective as opposed to an intellectual or cosmopolitan one. Anyway, I asked the middle-aged woman what she did during the summer of 2019. Assuming that I was asking as a writer instead of as an aspiring dater, she responded: “Come up with your own ideas.”
On dating sites, I’ve found that an English woman’s idea of being clever involves being snotty and having a long list of favourite cerebral artists. There are people who will find it difficult to believe that I’ve had more luck with American women than English ones, but you have to understand that there is such a thing as a regional mentality. It’s why you will find that most people in certain counties have dialects pertaining to those counties. There is such a thing as a country having a common mentality among most if not all people. It’s why you will find people in the North and South of England sharing the same slang like “Tar” as a substitute for “Thanks.”
The pandemic made things both easier and harder for people. Many women admitted that the lockdown brought them to the world of online dating, but there was the frustration in not being able to meet, greet and treat each other like meat. Online dating should have been made all the more easier with people having to spend more time at home with no impending deadlines on the horizon. Some white women would easily use this excuse: “How do I know you’ve not been tested?”
The irony is that this question was never asked by racist women in regards to the possibility of a suitor having an STI. Besides, many (if not most) white women already shun dark-skinned guys because they don’t know if we have washed our hands after going to the toilet. The contagion only exacerbated these fears and quarantine jokes. Even before the pandemic, many women used dating sites as nothing more than a way to kill time. This is proven by the countless women who have profiles that are either blank or sparse. So many women on there could easily find guys offline and would feel safer in doing so, it’s just that there’s a comedy value that comes from online dating e.g. men who pose topless with cheesy banter.
Dating sites became the scourge of my existence. Any confidence that I had about living in England was shattered. I’m not an underrated underdog in America like I am in England. If 40 is the new 30 then 30 is the new 40. Women have it just as bad at that age - not old enough to be a MILF but not young enough to be cute. With myself turning 30 on in 2017, it was obvious that women in their twenties would mindlessly see me as out of touch whereas I was automatically seen as not being mature enough for most of the middle-aged women. Many of the latter couldn’t understand why I would want them since I should already have young women “singing my praises” or “lining up” for me. As for women who were in their early thirties, some of them prefer men who are older because of financial security and domestic independence. Even women who don’t have an age aversion (or one that works in my favour such as twentysomethings wanting thirtysomethings only), there was still the matter of racial discrimination.
Regardless of whether we’re talking about middle-class or working-class women, most of the women who snubbed me did not know what I sound like. The working-class women assumed that I speak with a foreign accent whereas the middle-class women assumed that I speak in a working-class dialect. I don’t use working-class lingo, yet I don’t sound posh. The only women who I kissed and had sex with were those who knew me offline. They saw my gait, heard my voice and witnessed my physical behaviour. I don’t walk with an antagonistic stride. I don’t shout, swear, spit, loiter or do crude things. The women observed my facial expressions, table manners and body language, which photos can’t do justice to.
I’ve been using social media since 2003 - this was two years before MySpace became popular. In 2003, Face Party was more famous than Plenty of Fish even though it was a networking site instead of a dating one. You had to be at least 16 to join. I met a few girls from these sites, but I only succeeded in making friends than landing dates. I was also a member of Face Pic, Look It’s Me, Mingle Ville, Xuqa, Profile Heaven, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo, Club 18–30 and Vampire Freaks (whose social network ended in 2020). Despite my vast vocabulary, I rarely got respected by English women when I had original ways to describe their beauty with photo comments. I remember one time when a middle-class woman described my words as “magical” after I was denigrated by her clueless working-class friend for not speaking English, although that’s nothing compared to the other working-class women who would cockily joke about me having got those words from a dictionary (as if to say I’m not naturally articulate).
In 2010, I joined POF. In 2015, I joined OkCupid. I re-joined both sites on a number of occasions. By changing my location and the way that I looked, I figured that I would be increasing my chances. It turned out to be a social experiment that showed how racist that Britain is. I got tired of feeling like a foreigner who has no place in his home country. Even the Americans are more inviting. I wondered why I was born in England and what the point was in having good looks if I’m disregarded like an ugly person. Spiritually, I saw it as a sign that I had to be born in England because online dating and social media in general are measuring sticks for publishing success. Look at how film studios use a test screening as a microcosm so they can understand how well that a film will fare at the box office. Test screenings will have anywhere from a hundred to five hundred people. I have messaged thousands of women, so I’m well within my rights in spurning U.K. ventures. I don’t specialize in writing British books, so why bother? Some women asked me what books that I have written, but the below ten-word pitches did not land a single date.
I) Two women produce a computer game to advertise their religion.
II) The Italian fashion industry serves as a front for assassins.
II) A Canadian girl has surrealistic nightmares because of being bullied.
IV) A male student is framed by high school staff members.
V) A woman becomes a counsellor and vigilante for abused women.
It didn’t help that none of my novels were published, but that shouldn’t have stopped the women from requesting to read one via e-mail. You can’t dismiss someone’s identity as a novelist or author just because they haven’t got their work published. It’s like dismissing someone who claims to be a painter who haven’t had any of their paintings sold, although I hope that I don’t only become famous after death like Vincent van Gogh. One of the things that prevented me from being taken seriously as a novelist is that most women assumed that I wrote from a Northern English view. I don’t have a provincial mentality.
Even when I achieved my aim of writing over 300 articles on a vast range of subjects for my blog, no English woman was interested. For most of the middle-class women, the idea of myself writing a novel is like a rapper or a chav (British hick) attempting poetry. I remember one English woman on POF who was a librarian. She responded to me and we engaged in a long series of messages, but I got the impression that she would have held me to my word if I was white. To my surprise, I saw her on the Facebook friend list of a college classmate. When I asked if we could be friends, she typed: “I’ve had it turn nasty when guys feel they have been friend zoned. I tend to keep my Facebook PG-rated and post a lot of silly things. You might get bored.”
Her message may seem self-deprecating, but she’s insinuating that the boredom would be due to myself supposedly being a dunce. Hypocritically, her answer to OkC’s “How often do you use profane language?” is: Often. Like Tan France from Queer Eye, I would rather live in the U.S. than in England because we haven’t experienced racism from Americans. In fact, Americans are perceptive enough to realize that the bone structure of my face is European. The more that I lived in England, the more that I became alienated by it to the extent that I’m really more interested in American culture. I was never really all that British despite the fact that some Americans think I have the usual British dry wit. I don’t speak British slang and I’ve never been the sort of guy to be described as a bloke or a lad. People often make the mistake of treating me like a tourist by saying: “Oh, you’ve just not been to the right places yet. England is great.”
That’s like telling a homosexual person: “The only reason why you’re gay is because you haven’t found the right person yet.”
I had cast a wide net in messaging women of different ages, ethnicities, builds, classes and cultures. If I was white, I would’ve been perceived as a perfect middle ground. Instead, I was seen as not enough of this thing nor that thing i.e. middle of the road. It didn’t help that I had no new photos of friends. Then again, most women are guilty of this. When a woman does upload photos of friends, either their faces are obscured so that the men don’t chase after them instead or the woman decides to exploit their beauty so as to attract men. Either way, the result is the same when dealing with unfaithful men. As for whether I was wanted by anyone, there have been sixteen middle-aged women who expressed an interest in dating me. The problem was that each white woman lived too far away. On my OkC profile, I mentioned that I am half white. However, during a conversation, a middle-aged English woman typed: “Is English your second language? Your use of English is very good. And I am an English teacher.”
Even when I used my profiles to describe my English accent as well-spoken, that could have easily been misinterpreted as either: “Unlike other foreigners, I speak fluently.” or “I enunciate in a foreign accent.”
Speaking of enunciate, it gets annoying when some people speak slowly to me as if I’m a deaf person who read lips. Back to the online experience, here is one message that I got from a young white English woman on OkC: “Hey, you seem great (apart from the being Southern part - which I assume you are. You could just be faking an accent, I’ll live in hope).”
Even listing my accomplishments did me no service. At the age of 33 in 2020, it was a given that I was bound to have learned several martial arts and done a fair amount of things as a writer (including two non-fiction manuscripts, five novels and a few screenplays). Unfortunately, there was a white English woman who ultimately didn’t want to date me despite saying something that was a compliment but turned out to be a putdown: “You sound terrifyingly accomplished.”
Me: “Maybe if I was 10 years younger.”
Chloë (who’s 37): “I think you’re still quite young.”
Me: “I’m hardly an overachiever.”
Not all hope was lost as evidenced by this exchange on OKC…
Kate: What kind of Dom are you?
Me: One who knows the importance of a safeword while pushing the threshold so that the sub has more tolerance without feeling diminished or catatonic.
Her: Best possible answer really. xxx
Having dark skin colour means that people see you as an immigrant. If a white guy chooses the “Wants to find someone to marry” option on his POF profile, it’s deemed sweet, but if a dark-skinned guy was to do that then he would be declared an asylum seeker. There is an option on POF to search for women who don’t want children, but even they didn’t want me. The most heart-breaking instance of this was being rejected by an English white woman who was perfect for me. She is an alternative rocker whose “physical preference” (as she puts it) is a black man. It was such a relief for me because such a woman never exists, especially in England. Her name is Gemmah. “Ah” makes her sound highfalutin but she was definitely of the “Uh” variety. She is a Mancunian who described herself as a demisexual that only sleeps with guys of whom she is in a relationship with. That ties in with my asexuality since I’m not preoccupied with sex like most men are.
I was confident that she would respond warmly to me because, despite being half white, I have always been treated like a black guy. As far as most Britons are concerned, myself being half white is an inconsequential side-note that has no real bearing on my personality. It’s like when a British white person tells another that they have a non-British lineage that only points to a bloodline than a line of thought which pertains to their upbringing. Anyway, Gemmah blocked me despite my civil introduction. Ironically, she’s one of those women who’s okay with displaying her full name on her profile so that guys can add her on Facebook. After she ignored me, I gave a cursory glance at her FB profile. Like many a teenybopper, she hopped on the “Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn” cosplay bandwagon.
Two short-haired millennials on POF had initially expressed an interest in dating me. Both English women had the same outcome. Vicky was a slightly butch policewoman who gave in to her lesbian side before we could meet whereas Nicole fell in love with a fellow white mother before we could meet. OKC proved to be an even more demoralizing experience. It was excruciating to have a reasonably high percentage of compatibility and still be shunned. I managed to score 99% with some women, but they never welcomed me into their fold. An English white woman in her mid-twenties wanted to meet me but a balding white guy became available, so she rejected me. He was ugly. This reminds me of what happened in April of 2007. On the first day that we met, a fellow teenager in Manchester dumped me for a short-haired chav wearing a heavy metal shirt. Back to OKC, it was dispiriting to see so many women answer yes to this survey question: “Would you strongly prefer to date someone of your own skin colour / racial background?”
I was mortified by an English middle-class woman who answered “Yes” despite her profile having a disclaimer about not wanting to receive messages from racists and other types of discriminatory people. The other type of hypocrisy that was annoying me was when an English working-class woman on POF had typed the following words on her profile: “I’m not a racist but I prefer my men like my favourite chocolate…WHITE!”
The similarity between those two white women highlights my difficulty in finding an English girlfriend. Most of the English white women fall into two camps: supercilious middle-class snobs and simple-minded working-class bigots. The line is blurred when you have working-class women who think that they’re posh but don’t realize they are lacking in qualities that go beyond possessing material luxuries, and middle-class women who think that they’re down-to-earth just because they like to wear trousers, play sports and listen to rock music. Sniffy and snotty are two sides of the same coin like when you describe something negative as blowing or sucking. I’ve become increasingly wary of women who proclaim themselves to be nice or open-minded but wouldn’t dream of dating an ethnic minority.
It annoys me when some women say they care more about personality than looks; it that was true then I would’ve been at least considered as a potential friend if not a potential lover (which is why it was disappointing to message women who only want friends but wouldn’t befriend me). It’s not rare to find a middle-class American who isn’t snobby, just like how it’s not difficult to find a working-class American who isn’t bigoted. I think this is because America specializes in middle-brow entertainment while U.K. films and TV, for the most part, tend to be too clannish to be truly universal. A U.S. accent is usually classless in that it’s not obvious if a character is working-class or middle-class. There have been many American women who expressed regret that I didn’t live nearby whereas only one woman in England told me that. She was 31 years old, white and based in Southern England. To my dismay, the only English women who I have been in bed with are those who are Southerners.
After reading my Marxist analysis of The Wizard of Oz, a 25-years-old English woman on OkC asked me if I attended university despite what was displayed on my profile. The white woman’s question was a backhanded way of saying that my article would have been better had I attended uni, although she wouldn’t have believed that I had attended unless I had a graduation photo. There are more U.S. and Canadian women who are interested in me in ways that go beyond the platonic. It was so disorienting to have young American women be excited about me versus the young English women who could never be described as excitable. Part of the problem is that U.K. soap dramas tend to depict black and half-caste men as crooked. U.S. TV shows depict more interracial bonding. Unlike Britain, there have been U.S. TV shows depicting middle-class black families. Also, there are more black people online and offline for Caucasians to be exposed to. Therefore, they are more enlightened.
On a site called FetLife, a middle-aged English woman told me that my sex life would have been better had I been born in the sixties to experience life as a teenager in the eighties and a twentysomething in the nineties. If I was born earlier, I would have appealed to women who are fans of Lenny Kravitz. Social media has made many young women spoiled for choice. Some of them are too picky. I’ve joined dating sites enough times that I can say rejection wasn’t because of myself wearing heavy metal clothing. I don’t wear metal shirts as much as I did in my twenties because clothes are about communicating who you are, and I didn’t get to come across that many local metalheads. The ones who I did come across offline were people who I couldn’t approach without looking like a stalker. You can be walking in the same direction while wearing a leather jacket with a brazenly heavy metal aesthetic but not get much in the way of a call-out.
Websites like Join My Band and AltScene site were a lost cause. Once I had enough articles on my site about heavy metal, wearing metal clothes didn’t matter. Clothes aren’t enough to verify you when you can still be called a poseur, unless you have a tattoo or your own band. The only exception is if you have photos of yourself standing alongside a famous metalhead. Since most women on dating sites don’t like metal music, I eventually kept my tastes private on dating sites. It was a double-edged sword because most women assumed that I have a preference for black music whereas specifying my rock music taste to those who were inclined were not swayed. I gradually settled on a template that was so carefully worded that racist women could only reject me by being ignorant rather than singling out a specific detail as an excuse to say we have nothing in common. Ironically, a few women still said that. This means that my complexion is a barrier that denotes a lack of common ground.
I know enough about British matchmakers from personal experience and from witnessing their attempts with others. The difference between being black and Spanish is that a matchmaker will go out of their way to find a white partner because a Spaniard is “a different kind of white person” in the same way that an Italian is. The problem is that a male matchmaker with a girlfriend won’t set me up with someone because, besides the possibility of pairing me with a woman who’s more attractive than his girlfriend, he is afraid of losing his “spares” if he ends up being single. As for a female matchmaker, she won’t set me up with a special woman because she is afraid (especially if she’s single) that she will spend less time with her friend. A female matchmaker is crafty because she will save her best women for those who are more popular. She is using them as leverage so as to get in different inner circles. That’s often how women climb the social ladder. This selfish method of matchmaking means that she can prevent her friend from dating a man who the matchmaker yearns for. The most calculative matchmakers encourage people to split up, with or without infidelity leading up to the break-up.
As an ethnic minority, one of the things that goes against you on dating sites is the exposure of news stories involving other ethnic minorities - terrorists, thieves, rapists and killers. This reminds me of another double-standard: not smiling in photos. If a white metalhead does it, it’s a sign of being a cool and composed metalhead. If he doesn’t have a facial expression, he’s reserved. He’s not trying to impress. If a dark-skinned metalhead had that same demeanour, he would be accused of looking angry or creepy. A white guy can be a cynic and still be called a lovable grouch, a dark-skinned guy would be called a scumbag. Being a half-black guy who looks Asian works against me. If I was a bit more black-looking, at least I would have the sex appeal of a black guy because you know what they say about a black man’s manhood. I’ve reached a point in my life where romance is a fantasy for me but a reality for everyone else. Most people have romantic nostalgia; I only have unrealized dreams that weren’t unrealistic.
I would like to address how internet culture has become synonymous with celebrity culture. So many women on dating sites talk about wanting to date their very own celebrity lookalike. This reminds me of the notorious Bruceploitation genre - movies where producers sought to find actors who looked like Bruce Lee. It always astounds me when some women would be okay with dating a celebrity without actually knowing who they are. All they know is what they look like and what they sound like. If you were to ask these fans to write an article about their celebrity without doing research, it would be impossible for them because they don’t really know them. If their favourite celebrities asked them to write their memoirs, their fans might be turned off by what they learn.
If their favourite celebrities were only ordinary people who didn’t become celebrities, their fans wouldn’t be all that interested in them. This is especially the case when talking about actors. When a woman talks about wanting to date an actor, their interest is more to do with the characters that they play and the women who they kiss. Furthermore, a woman is especially turned on by a male actor if he has wealth in the form of multiple homes and vehicles. Having a huge non-platonic fan-base is a turn-on for these women, especially when they see the fandom online. If you have less than a hundred friends or followers, it negatively influences how someone perceives you. When you reach your thirties, there is a high expectation for what makes you appealing. It always makes you look good if you show your affluence, not your knowledge, by telling people how many countries that you’ve lived in.
On dating sites, the only millennial English women who wanted me were ones who would change their minds. She would make the first move, but the conversation would end for no discernible reason. They were that fickle. There have been times where women were unreasonably stand-offish. I would sometimes get blocked despite not having spammed them nor having typed anything offensive. Another irony that I’ve picked up on is that you will get a woman who didn’t want you in your twenties when she was in her thirties but she wants you when you’re in your thirties because, your maturity aside, being in her forties gives her MILF status. To conclude, I prefer American women to British women because they live outside their own bubble. The music culture in America is more varied (music videos included) while the film culture is more vast. Don’t let the posh accents fool you; England isn’t classier than the U.S.
