…I logged onto one of the sites and searched for all women within fifty miles of my randomly selected city of Yuma, AZ. I picked the first profile that stood out to me, a beautiful (but not too beautiful) woman with straight black hair. I copied most of her pictures and went to the other dating site and made a concise fake profile. What I’d written for her was mostly an amalgam of things I’ve read in the profiles of different women on the different sites, and things that pertain to me as a person. My likes and dislikes, my stories and goals. She was “down to earth” and wasn’t looking for “drama” in her life. She wanted something real. She loved animals and TV shows with zombies. I gave her a pretty name and took my time in building her profile as I wanted it to be as real and honest as possible. She had to be believable.……My one rule was to reply to every message sent to me. I would not initiate conversation with anyone, but I would respond to all initial messages sent to me, and then continue to respond as long as the individual continued to ask questions. If his/her messages contained no further questions, only then would I not respond and let the conversation fizzle out.……In twenty-four hours, I received 108 initial messages from 108 different men and received 347 profile views. It took me literally NINE HOURS to respond to the first SIXTY-TWO messages and engage in the subsequent conversations that followed. Nine hours just to catch up. I was awake until 4am that morning and when I quickly checked immediately before bed, I had zero new messages. The next morning, I was overwhelmed to see that I had forty-five new messages. I spent another three or four hours answering messages. I responded to EVERY initial message I received and carried on all conversations while being kind, polite, respectful…but often very blatantly short winded and disinterested. That wasn’t my original intention, but after spending so many hours on end answering messages, I grew increasingly impatient with the whole experiment. It was a lot of work and I was exhausted. ……Roughly thirty to forty men sent me messages containing only the words “Hi.” or “Hey.” Many BEGAN by calling me “hun”, “babe”, “gorgeous”, “sweety”, “yummy”. One guy said “I have a feeling you’re the reason the sun comes up.” About twenty were from out of state and most of those men asked me if I wanted to “hang out” or “meet up”. Most of all the men who messaged me asked if I wanted to meet up sometime. Three of them volunteered their phone numbers, and one guy just kept messaging me repeatedly trying to “close” me as he was simultaneously chastising me for not showing any interest. Seemed like a dude you might have seen on Dateline NBC’s To Catch A Predator. I very blatantly was not showing interest in any of them. A good number of them didn’t seem to be swayed by that at all. The most memorable guy was the one from a nearby city who asked me my favorite character on The Walking Dead. To which I replied “At first, Daryl…but now, Rick.” Of course. He found a way to connect with me that was memorable and piqued my interest. Most of the others weren’t able to do this despite how hard they may have tried. One guy was a police officer who messaged me twice, hours apart, without my having replied and told me “I know you read my last message.” When in fact I hadn’t yet.My female dating site avatar told him she was pro-marijuana and he said “That’s actually fine, most of my friends smoke, I can’t for obvious reasons, but I’m open to that angle and I don’t judge!” He then proceeded to try to get me to date him. He was respectful but also very persistent. He later deleted his profile. He was actually one of the friendliest and most respectful of the many guys who repeatedly contacted me. One guy was someone I’d heard of (a friend of a friend sort of thing) but never met and although it seemed impossible, I felt a bit paranoid that he’d be able to figure out who I was and might get angry. Hopefully he’ll never read this and put it all together. Maybe if he does he’ll understand that I did it all for science!……Responding to these men was a laborious full-time job. It was truly brutal. Twelve hours of constantly replying to never-ending messages. Typing fast and almost endlessly, my left hand cramped a few hours into it, but I soldiered on. You know, for science. I had closed all other tabs and focused only on the task at hand. I was dedicated to conducting the experiment in the most realistic way possible in order to walk a mile in the shoes of any given attractive woman on a dating site. I don’t expect any woman would spend twelve hours a day replying to messages received on a dating site. I did it because I wanted to show that’s what happens when a woman displays the very reaction I used to expect from women on dating sites. If a woman chooses not to be “rude” and replies to every messaged received, even if to politely turn someone down, she’s likely to find herself with a full-time volunteer gig on her hands. While I did respond to every single initial message I received and probably ninety percent of all subsequent messages…do I expect any other person to do this? Ever? Absolutely not! IT’S NOT POSSIBLE. And the chick whose photographs I commandeered wasn’t even all that gorgeous. …