I'm the reason why I sometimes think users should be able to review other users on dating sites (before I realize what a terrible idea it really is).

I was terrible at internet dating because, in general, I stood up dates. This wasn't always true and I had a boyfriend or two that I met wholly from internet dating. I guess I went on my fair share of dates, but I also stood up more than one or two people. At one point I "grounded" myself from OKC because I didn't think it was fair behavior on my end and I figured I shouldn't even bother talking to people until I was reasonably sure I'd changed my behavior and would show up if I committed to something.

There were probably a lot of factors that went into that behavior. I spent a fair bit of time trying to tease it out. I tended to get extremely anxious/nervous before a date, and would let that get the better of me. I also suspect I wasn't really connecting with most of the guys I never met up with - if I was really interested, I would have made it, right? For me there's some kind of mental hurdle in the formalized online dating kind of progression between "talking" and "first date" - it feels very proscribed in a way, very different from meeting people in person and kind of organically, without labels, spending some time together. As a writer sometimes words mean too much to me and the phrase "first date" definitely is one I think I took too seriously.

OKC in general was a shitshow that felt like a meat market, and of the people I did meet through it many of them were a little cuckoo and some in some rather off-putting ways, but in general it was an interesting experience.

There's definitely one or two guys that I talked to on there for extended periods of time and in retrospect I'm glad I never met up with. One was a guy 20 years older than me located somewhere in NY who was an assistant professor. I guess that doesn't sound so bad, but now when I think about it it weirds me out that I was 19/20 talking to a guy twice my age who wanted me to drive up to NY just so we could bang - and I actually seriously tried to figure out how to make it happen once or twice. IIRC at one point he didn't live anywhere, was floating between situations. He offered to drive down to see me and live in the woods for a week. We actually had some really valuable conversations in which I started to figure out things about myself, but I'm just real glad we never met.