Not sure how much this has changed but my gut feeling is that the continued mainstreaming of online dating is making it almost impossible to get a woman to
FOCUS on any one man long enough for anything remotely resembling "intimacy" to take place.
I mean, men adopting abundance mentality is one thing, but for women it's true abundance, and that sort of kid-in-a-candy-store atmosphere, as envious as it seems, carries a downside.
It's the Paradox of Choice.
There is a moment in time where you have to, as the saying goes,
SHIT OR GET OFF THE POT. I think women may be reaching a stage where the fire-hose of choice is so overwhelming that they just get locked into permanent window-shopping mode.
The best success is in engaging women who are brand new users of the dating sites. They aren't yet aware that they're going to get flooded with suitors like fan-mail for a rock star. So their initial instinct is to actually read your message and treat you like a fellow human-being.
The problem now is that even if you're the first one to engage her, if you don't lock her in almost instantaneously, she's going to get that tsunami of suitors. When that happens, she'll start stalling and sifting. It's a form of monkey-branching but it's happening now at the earliest stages of the interaction.
This thing about being kept on hold at the texting stage is new for me. I've never experienced it before and I don't know how to handle it. I used to equate getting a number as a guarantee that we'd at least meet once and size the other up. I'd see that as a good thing as any guy only wants the dignity to stand there and make a full case for himself in the flesh rather than being judged based solely on his online game. Now I can't treat it that way. It's just another place where things can stall out.