Neither reflects well on him, or his self-esteem, or the way that he feels about your relationship. This may not be the most polite way to go about things, but it’s their prerogative.īut that said, even if this guy is an idiot with computers who isn’t getting together in person with women he’s meeting online, if he’s continuing to log in, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that he’s doing this to feel that he’s either keeping his options open, or that he’s looking for the ego boost that comes from strangers finding him attractive. Anyone who has done online dating seriously will confirm that there always seems to be people lurking on the edges, folks who are up for a chat but not for a meeting. So I don’t think it’s impossible that the man you are dating is not actually using the site with intent to meet someone, so much as to flirt or assess his worth on the dating market. In other words, many of the guys who claimed that they never used it to meet women were probably telling the truth: there were few women for them to meet. This has been most acutely demonstrated over the last week by the data dump from the Ashley Madison platform, which revealed that the site had millions of straight male subscribers, but very few women signed up. It is true that lots of people set up online dating profiles without ever taking action or using them to meet someone. He’s also a bit of a dipstick when it comes to computers (we’re both in our 50s and haven’t grown up with them, though I’m a lot more computer literate than he is) and given how I’ve seen him struggle with searches/purchases on eBay, I can appreciate that he might not be able to get his head round hiding a profile on a website so I haven’t cut and run. We really do get on very well, which is why I’m hanging fire at the moment. He was still really, really insistent that he wasn’t looking for anyone else, and would look again at cancelling the sites. At that stage I was ready to end the relationship and leave him to it. I raised this with him, and he still swore blind that he hadn’t met up with anyone since meeting me and was responding that he wasn’t available for a relationship. A quick Google search on his user name revealed another three, all with very recent logins. Cut a long story short, he’d logged in that day, not just to that site but to a related one.
I thought no more of it, apart from a feeling that something was “off” – then I visited the website about a month later.
He denied it, said that he’d been telling any interested parties that he was involved with someone (me) – and that he’d look into taking down the profile. I asked him about this, and told him that while I had no wish to pry into his personal life, the question for me was whether he was looking to keep his options open for now, it being early days. So far, so good – until we were both looking at something on his laptop, and a dating website came up as one of his most visited sites. We started seeing each other initially as friends – we have a lot of shared interests – and then one day he jumped on me and the relationship became increasingly physical.
I’d been cheerfully single for about 3.5 years, and wasn’t looking for anyone when I met a wonderful man.