OK, it has to be something

Sammysings wrote: So your profile (and responses here) are a bit hostile. Some of it suggests you would be fun to hang out with and some of it suggests drama that isn't fun at all. It's hard to tell. I get you don't do certs but those are comforting to suggest that you are real and fun. So I could see us responding to your message but also saying, nah, not going down that road.

That so many can call our profile and tempered responses (until a certain point) "hostile" while thinking being called assholes, thugs, stupid, and told our photos are absolute shit is the measure of constructive criticism is nothing less than mind boggling. MIND BOGGLING. We were initially guilty of nothing more than humbly asking for advice and instead got attacked by people justifying using fighting words to clear their conscience. If any of you claim you would react well to someone doing that to you, you're only fooling yourselves.

Awww rabbit and scamp. Don't worry. It only takes a few minutes of forum perusal to get the general idea of what value others have of your opinion. We're pretty confident no one would even waste their time reassuring us over an opinion that seems so often dismissed out of hand everywhere else.

So your profile (and responses here) are a bit hostile. Some of it suggests you would be fun to hang out with and some of it suggests drama that isn't fun at all. It's hard to tell. I get you don't do certs but those are comforting to suggest that you are real and fun. So I could see us responding to your message but also saying, nah, not going down that road.

Ah yes! The mysterious anonymous email people that “ have your back” yet won’t go public!

Like Batman they occasionally show up to defend the downtrodden and just an quickly disappear, their true identities hidden behind a mask of righteousness.

Sweetie, you asked for free advice/help and now you bitch about the quality of said free service?

If I had to guess there is a reason you’re not getting replies on this site and it probably has very little to do with your profile or pictures.

Be sure to let me know how many people email you about what a bitch I am!

~rabbit~

Long time reader, first time poster here.

The people here are running a free service and their brand of service is well established.
They provide a gift for those brave enough to ask.

I believe the educate for receiving free advice is to say thank you and be gracious then decide privately whether you believe there is value for you.

For what it’s worth, the profile does align with the replies. Neither appeal to me and Mrs. Curious would likely block after the responses here.

The gift of honest feedback has been bestowed at your request. Do with it what you like, it’s your journey. I suspect it won’t be given a second time.

Fortunately, we received many more emails than replies here which actually had constructive criticism and amazingly, universally told us to disregard the first two posters. That they didn't want to post here but messaged privately says to us that you two must be the resident bullies. We're confident if we were to look at other posts in this forum we would find more of the same behavior from the both of you with one justification after another for your unwarranted obnoxious replies. If someone is being rude, then by all means, give back what their giving. However we did not start out rude in the least. Your lashing out and the smug pride you take in your conscious choice to respond in the way you guys did only shows you're insecure in yourselves in our opinion. Don't worry though, unlike you guys, we fully understand our opinion isn't worth any more than your own. We're also confident that if we did bother to look at your profiles they wouldn't be the literary masterpieces you act like they must be or are filled with Pulitzer Prize worthy photos.

Our profile was not and is not filled with demands. We made one single one, not to be pushy. That's arguably reasonable. Everything else we used manners and ASKED politely. Something that appears foreign to some of you. Those are not demands. Demands would be statements made such as "delete all your photos", "rewrite your entire profile then come back here so we can see", "tell site admin to let you have a new profile", et al. At this stage in your life you really should have a basic grasp on the difference between a request and a demand.

To those that offered true constructive criticism and those who might in the future, we thank you and will take it into consideration. To the handful of you that so obviously get off on bashing others without provocation to feel better about yourself, lol go pound sand. BTW, we reserve the right to justify all/any misuse of grammar and/or spelling errors as nothing more than limitations of speech to text technology. Fear not though, we wouldn't dare presume to dictate to you that you must be perfect. Even if 20% of all women in this lifestyle are teachers :::rolleyes::: Surely a teacher would understand the importance of citing sources?

<b>njnybiwfemme you said "except i note that your responses to all of the well meant advice that others have taken time out of their day to give you has been...pretty much...to snark back at them."</b>

Interesting choice of words. "Snark back". In other words, give back what we got. If you can read our reasonably tempered responses as snarky meanwhile consider being called "thugs", "stupid", "assholes", that our pictures are "absolute shit" etc as "well meant advice", lol, well then it would appear you have some issues interpreting reality.

<b>AandJinNNJ you wrote "Remember, you asked for feedback. You got what you asked for. Use that feedback or don't. But don't be a jerk." </b>

LOL, mmhmm. We're jerks because we pointed out that someone lecturing us on the proper use of grammar does so while repeatedly ignoring the proper use of grammar? That it was speech to text is the excuse of the lazy. Everyone has the ability to proofread before sending and make sure they aren't guilty of the very thing they're preaching against. In fact, that would be quite wise to do if nothing more than to lend your "well meant advice" some credibility. You can't possibly successfully argue against that.
If someone walked up to you in public and after having respectfully and humbly asked for your advice and you responded by telling them they're absolute shit or said "don't make me think you're stupid" and didn't expect to be punched in the mush then we'd argue you too are out of touch with reality. Those are fighting words. They served zero purpose but to agitate and inflame. They aren't even remotely close to something that could be considered "well meant advice" by any stretch of the definition.

<b>goodgollymsmolly said "This is one of those instances where I really hope you've looked at other threads so that you're not surprised when you get what you feel are attacks from all fronts. I solemnly swear we are not just exercising our inner meanness muscles. What we are doing is channeling every negative thought people are having about your profiles"</b>

LOL so sorry, but you aren't nearly as important as you think you are. The ONLY thing you can do is share your own thoughts. You aren't in any position whatsoever to speak for anyone else but yourself. So while you might feel comfortable with yourself because of your disclaimer, the truth is you're only fooling yourself. Same with Velma claiming what pictures should look like. Perhaps what YOU think they should look like, however your point of view is not the accepted standard from which all others are measured against. Arrogance is always ugly.

Yep, making changes from time to time will boost your views. Change a tagline, change your default photo etc. I tend to change my tagline about every month or two, usually some of my favorite pop culture quotes (Blackadder and Army of Darkness quotes are HIGH on the list).

Kind of had to rush out the door this morning before completing some thoughts.

Try to end your profile in a positive thought. Additional Comments is where you'd do that.

If you meet/like people at LS events/parties, make an effort to get their contact info. This way you'll have a lot of people to play with so it won't matter as much how you do online.

At some point, the majority of people that may be interested in you have already seen your profile, so for that reason alone, you tend to get more interaction when newer to the site. Changing you're profile may get you increased looks/chances.

You've gotten some very good advice from some very good people here. Yet, you come back at them with attitude.

If you posted here hoping for validation instead of honest assistance you came to the wrong place.

Remember, you asked for feedback. You got what you asked for. Use that feedback or don't.

But don't be a jerk.

I didn't find your profile awful, but there is always room for improvement. I get that you're looking for FWBs, but other than sex, I have no idea what you like. You also mention that you feel conversation is important but you don't really give clues as to what other interests you have that we could talk about. That said, we would likely engage with you if we were closer, but that's because our interests are SO varied we rarely if ever have difficulty finding things to talk about, but I can see where it would be intimidating to others. Not everyone has the gift of gab.

I also get why you said a lot of the things in Additional Comments. Some does come across as negative and can either be softened or eliminated. It is the last thing people see when reading your profile.

Other than that, you have been on since 2012 so a lot of people have already seen your profile and/or met you and made their decision. With all of the parties and such I'm kind of surprised you don't have a large pool of friends to keep you busy. For us, we just view online interactions as a bonus if they happen but it does seem to be periods of feast or famine with the online contacts.

Actually if you are getting anywhere near 10% response rate with your profile you are doing very well. Many people consider a 20% response rate (any response - including the "no thanks" ones) for a well written profile to be about as good as you can expect. No response is the way a lot of people respond - it's just a fact of SLS life.

Bullet point lists are very off-putting to many people. Telling other people what to do or how to act is very off-putting. The rambling intro about getting behind because of the holidays is off-putting. There is very little information about what sort of people you're looking for and even less information about what sort of people you are. By the time I got to "You want to hang with us" I was thinking "no, I don't think so" but I continued reading. By the time I got to the end I was convinced that we would not be a good match.

Velma may be moving too fast to have a grammatically correct forum post but she has a very good system for core pictures that work well in your public gallery. A few well done risque pictures in your public gallery are fine but many of yours are rather poor pictures. You do not need several almost identical pictures - pick the best one and delete the rest. I'm not sure why you have so many selfies - take pictures of each other! Selfies are rarely a good look.

It sounds like you are getting halfway decent response rate so your emails are probably well written - use those skills to revise and refine your profile. It will probably increase the number of people that reach out after finding you when they search. And you may get more positive responses when you initiate contact even if your total response rate doesn't improve much.

Good luck!

~Phoebert's Wife

LOL, ok. As long as you're doing nothing more than channeling everyone else's negative thoughts and aren't exercising your inner meanness. It's hard to tell. :)

I was trying to find a comparable but less profane way to say fucking assholes. So, thug.

cooch prickly and dry this evening.

No. My husband put it in my ass.

No worries goodgollymsmolly, we're not concerned with "having been attacked" or even feeling like we were. But come on, thugs? Our profile is your measure of thugs? That's very interesting. We'll have to take that into consideration.

VelmaAndShaggy, sure, speech to text is the probably the culprit for all the grammatical errors. Seems rather odd though for speech to text to have randomly capitalized a conjunction in the middle of the sentence without having been preceded by any sort of punctuation, no? Doesn't sound like speech to text. As long as you're aware what the issue is should someone find your cooch prickly and dry this evening. It gave us a chuckle.

That would be Additional comments, which is currently something of a shitshow. There is nothing you currently have there that counteracts the impression that you're high maintenance, demanding and not very interesting. Plus, again with the damn bullet points.

Look, leave your philosophizing out of it. It isn't a good look on anyone, because the people who do it lack the empathy to make it charming. Instead, you just look cranky and demanding to the rest of us, even if it's not our ox being gored.

And whether you like or approve of the certs thing or not, be aware that not having any will lose you opportunities. It has nothing to do with being easy going and everything to do with risk management and some people won't take a chance on you because of it. By coupling your philosophy on certs with criticism, you've pretty much accomplished the dual goal of irritating and annoying anyone who stuck with your profile to the end.

Was that your aim? Because if not, get rid of the negativity and the prescriptions for the behavior of others. You will meet people who are too shy or awkward to carry on a conversation. So what? Isn't that better than turning off people who can easily converse with everyone but won't bother with you because you sound like, well, thugs?

I didn't bother correcting your errors of grammar or syntax, because running what you have through a decent spelling and grammar check will catch most of it and I think you should completely change your profile anyway. But, yeah, there are a bunch of errors.

Good luck and I hope you do some major rethinking and then come back for another review.

Hi. This is one of those instances where I really hope you've looked at other threads so that you're not surprised when you get what you feel are attacks from all fronts. I solemnly swear we are not just exercising our inner meanness muscles. What we are doing is channeling every negative thought people are having about your profiles and acting as a mirror so that you can see yourselves as others do and make whatever changes are necessary to get a better response rate.

So, with that said, your photos are not doing you any favors. Please put some clothes on and take photos of the two of you as a couple. I can give you the reasons for that if you like, or you can just trust me that tits and asses are not actually a selling point once you've gotten past one eye catching photo of her. And, yeah, I know what my profile photos are. But I am not experiencing a problem with responses or approaches.

Your tagline makes no sense, presumably because you have one too many likes in it.

In Looking For, not only is your post-holiday note way out of date, so that you look sloppy, but the subsequent text indicates you're not concerned about giving timely answers. If I were searching, that alone would have me going on to someone else.

You don't help your cause in the rest of that section. Looking For is about who you are looking for and what you are looking for. It's most likely to be appealing to others if you focus on them instead of yourselves, which is something you currently have not done. To be clearer, you have the components that you need but you have completely centered yourselves in the conversation, leaving no room for others. Also, this is not the place to note what you do not want.

Your Description doesn't tell me anything interesting and appealing about you. I mean you say you do extraordinary things, but that bald, unsupported statement just gets a disinterested shrug. Plus the bullet points are tiresome. Instead, talk about yourselves in complete sentences in ways that make you approachable and sufficiently intriguing that others want to contact you. Everyone is unique, so show some of that.

More tiresome bullet points in Fantasies. Just use sentences to detail your experiences and if you have fantasies, one or two of those. This is not where you outline your tolerance for the soft swappers.

I do voice to text a lot because I’m often making dinner while I do reviews. It makes mistakes sometimes.

It doesn’t change the fact that you need some major changes.

Oh so it wasn't? Alright then, let's just say we get a kick out of people making grammatical errors while intimating others sound stupid for grammatical errors. We thought you were being tongue in cheek, but guess that was our mistake. Irony, eh? ;)

No. Spelling and grammar counts.

Just look at this sentence:

“We'll get there;be patient.”

There should be a space after the semicolon. You are missing periods on at least half of your sentences. That wasn’t good for Rizzo and it’s not good for you.

About 20% of the women in the LS are teachers, including me. If I see a spelling mistake I dry up and my cooch turns into a cactus.

LOL, the "grammar, don't use punctuation and don't make me think you're stupid" was a joke right?

Regarding your text- First of all, you don’t have any certifications even though you’ve been on for seven years. This is a huge red flag for me. You couldn’t find anyone to fuck in seven years?

If you have a relationship with any company, get someone to certify you pronto. Else I strongly suggest you create a new profile and ask the admin’s to move your account to the new one.

Your grammar is horrible. You don’t use punctuation. I don’t consider myself racist or homophobic, but I hate stupid people. Don’t make me think you’re stupid. I’m sure you’re not. Write your profile in Microsoft Word and cut and paste it into SLS.

On to some specifics:

Well the holidays were insane and took up all our time.

It’s June, bro. If you’re using the holidays as an excuse you obviously aren’t serious about playing.

We don't accept certs.

You can go this route. I guarantee you it will discourage more people than it encourages. Right now when I look at you I have no idea if you’ve ever actually played with anyone.

I’m not crazy about the bullet point format of your profile. I think you should re-write it with only five lines per paragraph. Some up what you want And only do it in five sentences. Less is more.

Rewrite and repost.

Wow-I get two in one day.

OK guys. I’m going to say some shit that sounds really bitchy. I’m not saying it to be mean. I’m saying it because I want you to get laid.

I opened a private gallery for you to see the kinds of pictures you should have.

That being said, your pictures are absolute shit. Everything is boobs and butts. There is one picture of the guy and it’s off his butt. I don’t know how old your pictures are but some of them are very grainy.

I strongly suggest you delete every single picture. Replace those pictures with 5 core pictures of the two of you full-bodied and clothed.

You need a picture of you and the wife dressed like you were going out on a date. This picture is crucial and it should be your default picture because it shows what you’ll probably look like if you meet another couple for drinks.

Go out to a nice dinner and have the waitress take your picture together.

Get a full-body picture of the two of you together at the beach or pool. That is a classy way of showing your bodies.

Go to a ball game or a 5K. Have someone take a picture of the two of you together. This shows me that you have a life outside of swinging.

Get a separate picture of a girl dressed nicely and a separate picture of the guy dressed nicely.

Create those five pictures and re-post so we can review.

I’ll review your profile text next.

We're turning here. We didn't think there was anything glaringly wrong about our profile, but there must be something we're missing to explain the overwhelming amount of times people fail to even acknowledge our reaching out. Conservatively we'll put it at only 1-10 do we get a response. We don't get it. We used to contact people who demanded that to get a response you had to have your pics open and would follow their rules. We don't do that anymore after we'd keep exposing ourselves to strangers only to be ignored and then sit wondering who out there knew who we were and weren't saying. So no contacting those people. We only contact when a profile gives us an idea about what they want and we believe we're at least a match to start so as not to waste anyone's time. We also contact people who look at us repeatedly, almost at stalker level, but don't reach out and then they still never respond to our mail. Our messages are well thought out and written.

So what is it? What's in our profile that we don't realize is turning off so many? There's just no way all these folks can be universally so busy that they don't have time to even say no.