I received an email this week from a guy complaining that he had written to four women on Monday and not one of them had replied and could I please tell him what kind of flimflam joint I was running. Like every other site, we do get people who complain from time to time and every time it happens - I hate it. We try really hard to provide a great place to meet new people but we’re not perfect so when we’ve done something wrong, we own up and apologize. I didn’t have to apologize today.

It turns out that this Mr. Wonderful had indeed written to four women, none of whom replied to him. On that bit, he was certainly right. When I looked up his details, his nickname was “lickmybutt” with a few numbers at the end. I won’t put the exact nickname here for obvious reasons. He was on the high side of 40 and lived in a small town in the mid-west. A very small town. So first off, he’s not going to get huge numbers of women to contact within 4 miles of his home, but what woman is going to reply to a nickname like that in the first place?

He might very well like getting his butt licked but is that how you want to start up a conversation? Imagine inviting HIM to your next cocktail party!

“Hello, I’d like to introduce my friend Mike, he just moved in 3 doors down,” you say.

“Hi, most people call me Mike but online I’m known as Lickmybutt,” he says with a big smile.

DEAD SILENCE

So you can imagine the fun I had explaining that it wasn’t my fault that he was stupid. He (and frankly a few other men online) don’t stop to think that the people on dating sites are normal, everyday people that you’d meet anywhere in your town. If he would be uncomfortable saying something to a stranger at the grocery store, he shouldn’t say it online to a person he’s trying to impress enough to get a date in person.

I asked him to change his nickname, upload a photo with his smiling face on it and to write to the same four women and see if he got a different response. He did! Two women have already replied to him and he has since written an apology to me along with thanks for being honest about what he’d done. Of course I did the superior dance around my office. I love it when people finally “get it” about online dating. It’s the same as in person dating except you aren’t in the same room.

A good friend of mine asked me that the other day. I asked her why she thought I would know. It seems that if you have a site with any content for adults only, then you would know everything having to do with human sexuality. Sadly, it ain’t so. Her question did pique my curiosity though so I started looking around on the net for any information I could find.

There are heaps of sites promoting one pheromone product or another and the hype is pretty outstanding. One site told me that all I had to do was wear this “perfume” into a bar and I could get a man within 5 minutes. I wanted to write and tell him that most women could walk into a bar and flirt for a bit and pick up a man in 5 minutes because it’s not that difficult to do. What is difficult is picking up the right man at the right time. I left that site and continued looking around the net for more sites and more information.

I did find a site that talked about a blind clinical study where the research showed that the men participating added a few drops of liquid into their aftershave every day for eight weeks. The ones who had the concentrated pheromone reported having significantly more sex, hugs and kisses than before the study. The ones with the placebo reported no change at all.

Now I don’t know if the pheromones would work for me, I AM a bit over the age of most people who frequent bars for pickups AND I have Mr. Flirty who wouldn’t appreciate me coming home with strays, but I do wonder what it would do for my sex life at home. Anyone currently dating who has tried human pheromones and can report any success or failure?

Now we all know that FeelingFlirty talks about adult things. It’s no secret. I don’t shy away from that. I’m actually quite proud that we can talk about most anything here and it’s OK.

I received an “invitation” from Social Spark to join their advertising program. So I did. They asked me to deposit some money into my account, which I did. I deposited $100 for a trial to see if it was worth pursuing. We created a campaign and when we hit the submit button, they charged my credit card for an additional $93. From my way of thinking if I had $100 in there and I spent $93, there should be $7 left. No so, they want to hold my $100 for some reason only known to them.

Only known to them because we’ve written to them several times and all we get is the acknowledgement that they’ll look into it.

That’s not the worst of it. Now that I have nearly $200 invested with these people, they tell us that we’ll have to advertise another site because mine is too adult.

Wait a minute, I thought. If they KNEW I was adult when they emailed me their fricken spam, why didn’t they say right up front that they’d like me to give them $200 and go away.

So, they mislead you going in, don’t reply to emails in anything like a timely manner and keep your money and give you nothing of value. If you were considering spending any money with them, check them out because my experience was rotten.

In my job I hear from a lot of men who say that they’re on our site because they aren’t getting any sex at home. It’s not just one or two or just a few men, it’s many many men who come to us with this story. We hear it from women too, but not so much.

Why is it that so many women poop out in the sex department? There are some people who’ll tell you that it’s the way women are wired. We want sex til we get a man and then once we have babies we don’t really need them any more.

I think it’s way more basic than that. I think today’s lifestyles are so hectic that sex is always on the back burner. Do you make time for a loving, sexual experience like you did when you were first intimate? Maybe you do but the rest of us don’t.

Imagine a woman with 2 or 3 kids and a home to care for and a job. She gets up early, makes breakfast, gets the kids ready for school, does the dishes, makes her bed, showers and goes to work. She works a full day and she might be on her feet for much of it. She leaves work and stops at the grocery store to pick up supplies for dinner and goes home.

The kids need her attention, the house looks like crap and she’s got to start dinner. By the time dinner is cooked, eaten and cleaned up, there’s the kids’ homework to check and stories to listen to and then stories to read, there’s laundry to do and maybe a bit of vacuuming if there’s any energy left.

She falls into bed and her husband can’t understand why she doesn’t want him any more.

Now take this same woman and when she falls into bed, her husband who loves and appreciates her knows how tired her body is and gives her a wonderful massage. He takes the time to get the knots out of her shoulders and doesn’t instantly decide that the most tired spot on her body is between her legs. Trust me, she’ll see right through that one. If he relaxes her body her exhaustion will lift and she might initiate sex all on her own.

Once he has touched her with loving hands and she’s relaxed for the first time that day, she will want to hold him and kiss him. I’m of the firm belief that if you put a man and a woman together in that situation, sex just happens. It happens because both want the sensations and release that sex gives.

That’s the subject line of an email we send out at SexyAds.com when someone has made a comment on a member’s profile or photograph and it can’t go public until they approve it. We were sending out a notice when the comment was received but it didn’t seem to get noticed. Obviously it was a crap wording because it didn’t convey what was really going on.

I couldn’t figure out why more people weren’t coming back in to see what others were writing. When you create a profile or place an ad on a dating site, you want to know who’s been looking at you. One of the most popular links is the one that tells members how many profile hits they’ve had since they logged in last. So I went to sleep and thought about how I could let people know in a way that was meaningful.

When I woke up, I knew it was peeking. I wrote a short memo letting them know that someone had been peeking at their profile (or photo) and had left a comment and here was the login url to read it and approve it (or delete it, if it didn’t please them). Sure enough, people started coming back to read and approve. People who are serious about meeting online are coming back and leaving comments for others.

The commenting on profiles and photos is fairly recent for us and we’re overwhelmed at how many people check out the photos and leave really nice notes. One I read yesterday made me crack up. He said, “Oh my god.. if I don’t get to meet you my life will never be the same. You are a goddess.” I clicked on the woman’s photo and if she was under 250 pounds I’m 10 feet tall. It just goes to prove what I always say - there is someone for everyone and the “two tits on a stick” figure type is not the most popular body size by far.