First Contact

Once our profile and pictures were up, it wasn’t long before people started to contact us.  For the first week or two we politely declined most of them.  We had a few things to take care of before rushing headlong down the road.  One couple, however, peaked our interest.  They were similar in age to us and we figured we should pursue that a bit and see if we meshed.  We chatted with them on IM once, and then they disappeared.  We didn’t stress about it.  We did contact them to say hello again, and they said they had been traveling.  However, they still haven’t contacted us since then and I don’t really expect them too.  Maybe they didn’t like us.  It really doesn’t matter to me.  Nothing was lost, nothing was gained.

Of course, we have had more than a few singles contact us.  Currently we are just looking for couples.  So, we looked at their profiles, then always declined politely, saying we were just looking for couples.  Most of these singles were men, and only one wrote back with just general lifestyle questions.  Anne and I pointed him here to the Swingset.  There was one single female that contacted us again after we declined.  She seemed overly eager to meet us, saying she had a male friend that could come along as well.  Her over-eagerness was a red flag for me and a major turn off.  If someone can’t respect our wishes on this, then who knows what could happen with them in real life.  It is possible that her reply just came off the wrong way to us, or maybe it is just because she is a single female and isn’t used to rejection.  I have no idea, but not really knowing how to respond, we didn’t.  I feel bad about that because Anne and I try very hard to always reply.

Once we had most of our ducks in a row, Anne and I sat down and started looking for people to contact on both the sites we have profiles on: Kasidie and Lifestyle Lounge.  Searching Kasidie is much easier in my opinion, but there are less people in our area on it.  Lifestyle Lounge wasn’t so bad once we selected enough options like within 25 miles, within 8 years of our age, and most importantly, online in the last 30 days.  We left that last one off during our initial search and as a result, very few of the people we contacted replied.

There are two basic things we quickly determined were important to look for in other couples profiles.  First, they had to have a picture of the male half of the couple in there somewhere.  I don’t understand how some of these people have like 30 or more pictures, and the man is in none of them.  Secondly, they had to actually write something meaningful on their profile.  If it just said, “Couple looking for fun” and had no real content, we passed on them.

We have since straightened out our searching method and have been in contact via IM and emails with a few couples.  Anne and I have more in common with some couples than others, but haven’t had a bad experience yet.  All people we have contacted have been really nice (even the very first couple that seemingly fell off the map).  We have our first dates set up and are eagerly and somewhat nervously awaiting meeting these couples.