Early this year my husband and I opened our marriage into an ethical non-monogamy status, which for those not familiar means that we allow each other to have sex with others. Sometimes we play together as a team, but we've also been attempting to find solo dates (FWB). Just for fun. (Our reason is that it brought a lot of sexual heat back to our marriage.) Specific to our solo dating efforts, comparing our experiences has been fascinating.

True to the claims, he gets almost no likes/connects from women on the dating apps. He's attractive, has good pictures and wrote an intelligent and descriptive profile description. But set those details aside for both of us because this post isn't about "how can he or I get dates". Most of the few likes he's gotten have been from scammers (located in Taiwan, Kenya, etc.) He's had two actual no-sex dates, one sex date and no second dates (Kind of by choice because the women he was getting connected to weren't really attractive to him. He dated them because he was slightly jealous of the attention I've been getting on the same apps.)

My experience as a woman, considered attractive for my age....

Yes, I get a metric crap-ton of likes/connects. Some guys disconnect themselves because they won't chat with me online. (I prefer to chat with them at least a little to see if I want to meet them in person.) Many disappear/ghost before I can meet them. Most others ghost me after our first meeting but before a sex date, despite showing intense interest in each other. I haven't been tracking them in a spreadsheet but now I kind of wish I had been. So guessing, my numbers over the last six or so months have been something like this:

*connections: 65

*online chat: 35

*in person meeting (no sex, maybe kissing): 4

*Sex date: 1

*successful friend with benefits: 1, that lasted only 2 months because he and his wife decided to close their marriage

*Me back to square one

One thing I've noticed with the fallout between chatting and meeting, and between meeting and actual sex dates is that they tend not to continue to nurture the budding relationship. Yes, it's only a sex relationship, but that's still something. If you let weeks go by between talking/chatting with each other, you lose interest. We're all busy between jobs and families and I don't expect them to give me a LOT of time. Just keep in touch, ideally schedule a date with me, even if it's a month or three away. I've been trying to ping them from time to time to hold their interest in me, but I can't force them to reply. So ghosting away they go. I've attempted to schedule the dates with them and most of them are either resistant/evasive or they agree and then cancel last minute... several times. So I stop trying and hope that they'll come to me when they're ready/have time, but they never do. See the part about losing interest from lack of contact.

So when you look at the total number of dates between me and my husband, we're even! Despite me getting a huge amount of initial interest, a very large percentage of that interest comes to nothing. And this is just looking for no strings sex on a friends-with-benefits basis, not even looking for romance!

Edited: had to fix the formatting

Edit: LOL at the loser who sicced Reddit Cares on me. Hope you feel awesome wasting a resource that's intended to help people who are genuinely in trouble.