This web page contains and include my opinions, hunches, best recollections and educated extrapolations.   ThaiCupid.com, an online dating site: A review. ThaiFriendly.com, an online dating site: A review. ThaiCupid is produced by Cupid Media, Australia Does ThaiCupid and Cupid Media and ThaiFriendly Suck? Yes. Thai Cupid Sucks & Cupid Media Sucks and ThaiFriendly Sucks. Yes. They do. They truly do. Is Cupid Media or ThaiCupid or ThaiFriendly a good way or place to meet a girlfriend or boyfriend, wife, husband, penpal, hookup, friend? No. They are, all three, just another horror story. Why? For God's sake, why?   This is an editorial customer review of the online dating website "ThaiCupid.com" and "ThaiFriendly.com". This details and includes multiple experiences I suffered with these sites/companies.   Regarding the ThaiCupid case first: As of June 22, 2021, I have demanded that they terminate my account and refund my money. ThaiCupid has refused. A VISA card dispute (chargeback) for the amount of $140 usd and change will be filed immediately. If the dispute doesn't work for some reason, I will hire an attornery in their area and file a formal lawsuit. THAT is how angry and exasperated this ridiculous website has made me. So, what exactly did they do? Read on:   First, let's be sure who we're talking about. ThaiCupid is one of many, many websites within the same company, as follows: [Excerpts taken from Wikipedia and edited] Cupid Media is an online dating company that operates 33 active niche dating websites based on religion, ethnicity, lifestyle and special interests. Is this discriminatory? Of course it is. It's blatantly, putridly discriminatory and in most evolved nations of the world this kind of nonsense would be instantly shut down. Why not in Australia? Well, is Australia an evolved country? History Cupid Media was founded in April 2000 by Andrew and Emily Bolton in Sydney, New South Wales under the name Interactive Connections Pty Ltd. It was renamed Cupid Media in August 2006. On January 13, 2013, Cupid Media confirmed that its password database had been breached and a section of its user base had been affected. Affected members were contacted by the company requesting them to change their password as well as additional security measures being put in place. Business and products Cupid Media operates a network of 33 dating sites that target lifestyles, ethnicities, countries and special interests including: AfroIntroductions AsianDating AussieCupid – no longer active BBWCupid BlackCupid BrazilCupid CambodianCupid CaribbeanCupid ChinaLoveCupid ChristianCupid ColombianCupid DominicanCupid FilipinoCupid GayCupid HongKongCupid IndianCupid IndonesianCupid InternationalCupid InterracialCupid IranianSinglesConnection - no longer active JapanCupid KenyanCupid KoreanCupid LatinAmericanCupid MalaysianCupid MexicanCupid MilitaryCupid Muslima PinkCupid RussianCupid SingaporeLoveLinks SingleParentLove - no longer active SouthAfricanCupid ThaiCupid.com UkraineDate VietnamCupid   Now you know who they are. Let's delve into what they are. Are they honest, trustworthy, competent, professional? In my educated opinion, no. None of the above. Do YOU want to gamble your money with these folks? Let's find out.   Cupid-Media Reviews; is this a company YOU want to give your cash to? #1 Cupid-Media Reviews; is this a company YOU want to give your cash to? #2 Cupid-Media Reviews; is this a company YOU want to give your cash to? #3 Cupid-Media Reviews; is this a company YOU want to give your cash to? #4 Cupid-Media Reviews; is this a company YOU want to give your cash to? #5 Cupid-Media Reviews; is this a company YOU want to give your cash to? #6 Cupid-Media Reviews; is this a company YOU want to give your cash to? #7 Cupid-Media Reviews; is this a company YOU want to give your cash to? #8 Cupid-Media Reviews; is this a company YOU want to give your cash to? #9 Cupid-Media Reviews; is this a company YOU want to give your cash to? #10   Are you STILL thinking about flushing your money down the scammer-toilet? The above represents a tiny handful of the problems Cupid-Media seems to have generated around the world. It is, collectively, those ten links above, a grain of sand on the beach. You can continue your research here, if this website isn't enough to educate you and save you from losing your loot. My first interaction with ThaiCupid was back in about 2016. I'd been in Thailand a good many years and I had learned what the bar scene was all about. I wanted something real. I signed up and paid for a premium account, and soon discovered that most of what I was running away from in the bars, had simply cloned itself onto ThaiCupid. The girls were sleazy, mostly, with a very large percentage of gold diggers and prostitutes who weren't afraid at all to flat-out ask for what they wanted (money). It seemed ThaiCupid made a halfhearted attempt to cull them, but often enough when I asked a girl what she wanted in life, and she replied MONEY or A CUSTOMER, and I cut and pasted that into a complaint to ThaiCupid, the ladies were still there weeks later. To be fair, I do believe that ThaiCupid did, over the years, begin to work slightly harder to cull those professionals and scammers, but I still ran into them many times per day. The girls became more clever about advertising as prostitutes, often typing into their profiles, "I want a VERY GENEROUS man," etc.. You could then just ask them straight up, "How much?", and they'd quote a price for both short time or long time. Again, when this was brought to the attention of ThaiCupid, sometimes they acted on it, and sometimes not. I'm not going to strongly fault ThaiCupid for allowing prostitutes and gold diggers to haunt their sites -- after all, without them, these sites would have probably a third of the number of ladies they like to parade on the opening pages, and maybe that wouldn't be a sustainable business model. The trouble is you won't KNOW the site is an ant hill of scammers until you spend some time in there, rolling around with them through messages, and by then your money is gone. I do believe THAT is a very large part of their business model. P.T. Barnum, a circus barker, used to say, "There's a Sucker Born Every Minute." Guess what? You're Cupid-Media's sucker. I'm not filing a VISA card chargeback or a lawsuit because of ThaiCupid's blind eye to the sleazy side of things; indeed, that isn't mentioned in the chargeback documents. I'm focusing on one thing, and one thing only: ThaiCupid's bizarre, inexplicable penchant for CHANGING MY PROFILE -- a thing they steadfastly refuse to stop doing over the course of many YEARS, no matter how many times I demand that they cease and desist doing it! It's downright bizarre. In order to submit an initial profile or to make ANY changes to it (altering a "THE" to a "the", for instance), ThaiCupid reserves the right to approve those changes, and that's perfectly as it should be. The problem is that when they go through your changes, they often made changes of their own. I endured many instances where I might say in my profile, for instance, "I prefer a quiet lifestyle. I don't drink nor party." And a little while later, after they'd approved my submission, I might go back in to check it, or to make some small spelling correction or whatever, and I'd find that they had changed the above to something like this: "Quiet may be the bird but lifestyle is rich and to party is sublime." WTFF? Where in God's name did THAT come from? It could be interpreted in many different ways but not in any correct way that I can see. It made me look like I was retarded. These weird little blips continued for forever. I ran out a one year subscription, then swore off the site forever, but always seemed to end up getting bored and committing to another year's subscription, always against my better judgment, and this same problem manifest itself again and again. Sometimes actual settings would be changed, like my age preferences or my weight preferences. These were easy enough to change back, but sometimes I didn't notice those changes for days or weeks or months but was always wondering why I kept getting swamped with girls who were far outside my weight or age ranges. Then I'd go in and check the settings to see that somehow, say, the weight setting had been changed such that I ONLY wanted to hear from extremely overweight people, or extremely young, or impossibly tall, whatever, or ONLY Muslims or ONLY Catholics, when I had always stated NO PREFERENCE. I puzzled over this endlessly, trying to figure out if a human was purposely doing this as some kind of game on their graveyard shift in the Cupid cubicle someplace, where they were joking with the other snowflakes in adjacent cubicles about how to really mess up someone's profile, or if somehow some algorithm in the website engine had run off the rails and was making these changes without any humans' knowledge. Finally, in my second or third annual subscription, I decided it was time to complain about the problem so that at least management could look into it and see if it was happening only to me, or only to men, or what. So I did complain, in writing, two or three times, and I received back only the usual boilerplate nonsense saying they'd look into it. Never once did I receive any kind of intelligent reply, like, "WOW! We found the problem and it has been corrected!" Never once. In about 2019 I swore off the damned service again. I was meeting hundreds of ladies, but not a single one that was even remotely a suitable match. They all seemed to come from the dark side of Pluto or something. Still, that's not ThaiCupid's fault. It's humanity's fault. In 2021 I think I actually forgot about all the nonsense and BS of previous years, and signed up for yet another Platinum year -- $140 and change, USD. I created a profile and went to work, messaging and liking, messaging and liking. After less than a month I received a notice from ThaiCupid congratulating me on having over 200 "likes" from Thai ladies. Of course almost all of them were borderline insane, but again, that's not ThaiCupid's fault. Not really. I mean, maybe they could be a little more careful about where they did their female recruiting. Or maybe not. I've never been in that business. I don't know. In June of 2021 I realized that my settings were spontaneously changing again. I'd correct them. Then a week later others would be changed. Human or machine? I decided I wasn't going to go through a year of getting completely erroneous matches so I wrote to ThaiCupid and asked what the heck. One example was, in my profile, I said I had lived around the world in many countries. ThaiCupid changed it to read, quote: I AM IN JOLLY OLD NEW YORK TOWN NOW. Well, no, I wasn't in New York; I was in Thailand where I'd been for nearly ten years, and I had never been to New York, nor within 1000 miles of it, and had no desire to ever do so. So any and all Thai ladies who were seeking a serious partner living in Thailand, simply passed me by. How many? It doesn't matter how many. It only matters that maybe THE ONE passed me by, and there's no way to ever, ever know. That particular altered profile had maybe ten different alterations in it, all equally as bizarre. I began to believe that a machine-error wouldn't cause this. There's no way any kind of automated machine algorithm would come up with some of the crazy, crazy things that were being swapped into my profile. I began to believe that a human or humans were doing it. I doubted that the same human who was pulling this stunt in 2016 was still there doing the same thing in 2021, so I came to conclude it was an errant office culture that was responsible for it. They were college interns, maybe, working late at night, smoking way too much pot, and laughing hysterically at the idiotic changes they were making to profiles when they were submitted for editing approvals. That seems like the most reasonable explanation. In any case, in that first instance in June of 2021, I came at ThaiCupid somewhat ticked because I was tired of it. I wanted my money's worth out of the website and if prospective life-mates were passing me by because some pimply faced jerks at ThaiCupid were playing adolescent games with profiles, then ThaiCupid wasn't a "service" I could use. It was a waste of time and money. I told ThaiCupid bluntly to fix the problem after all these years, or terminate my account and refund my money. I'd had enough. I received a boilerplate email saying they were looking into it. And I received nothing more. And the problem continued. Below are some examples, verbatim, from the nonsense over the paste week, in mid-late June, 2021: Original text: "I am a retired photographer from America. But I was also a ship's captain, a wild horse trainer, a Federal law enforcement agent, a commercial deep-sea hardhat diver, a big-rig driver, a businessman, a commercial shark fisherman, a logger, a pilot, a teacher, and many other things. But if you don't have time to really talk to me, please don't contact me. I don't want to waste my time. 99% don't have time to talk. So why do they come here?" The ThaiCupid website changed it to this: ".the I am Post A Retired Photographer From the America. But the I Was A Ship Captain, A Horse Trainer, A Policeman, A Deep-sea's Diver, A Truck Driver, A Businessman , A Commercial Fisherman, A the logger, A pilot a, A. teacher, and many other things.....9 9.9% don't have time to talk. So why do they come here? They waste the time." In the next section down in the area for "what do you want or don't want" in a mate, I wrote this: "Normal. Not insulting. Not rude. Not mean. Not complaining. Not lazy. Not partying. Not talking to many men. Not arrogant. Not conceited. Not loud. Not inconsiderate. Not disrespectful. And I will be the same for you." And the ThaiCupid website changed it to this: ". not insulting , not rude, does not mean not complain . do not lazy, not a party . I talked to a guy , not arrogant . not arrogant . not one . They did not care . do not disrespect. I will be the same for you" It's nonsense. I sound like Corky Thatcher. There can't be a single woman on ThaiCupid who thought I was even marginally sane and in control of my faculties. I'm betting they thought I wrote it when I was drunk -- and that bites, because I don't drink a drop and don't have much use for those who do. I complained one last time to tell ThaiCupid I was done, this was no longer negotiable; I wasn't going to go through this nonsense every single time I checked my profile and found that it made no sense at all or, worse, made me sound like an idiot or a madman, and maybe had for a long time without me knowing it. I don't honestly know if ANY of my own writing was EVER posted for ladies to see. Maybe every single instance of it was converted to crap just like this, every single time. I logged in to write on my profile that I was leaving the website and that if anyone who had sent me a "like" that I hadn't had time to respond to, wanted to actually talk to me, now was their last chance. They could say hello and then immediately move the conversation off to email or whatever. I received no responses. ThaiCupid did respond to me as a result of this last ultimatum. They said, first, I should make up any new changes to my profile and manually email it to them, so they could manually check it and maybe update it into my profile......what? Days later? I make changes and corrections and amendments to my profile sometimes from 2-10 times per day, or sometimes not for a month, depending on how many weird likes and messages I'm receiving. And they want me to go through that process for every single change? That's not the service that was advertised and it's not the service that I agreed to and it's not the service I paid for. Bullshit. They also said there would be NO REFUND. We'll see about that. If they really want to drag it out for two years with every single court development being recorded right here, then let's go for it. Frankly, I'm looking forward to it. Did I get my money's worth out of ThaiCupid? I got, as usual, only headaches and frustration and now anger. Yes, the website is a mini-horror of other glitches and hangups and inconveniences. I think they reworked it sometime around 2000, but it didn't really improve. They fixed some bugs, but introduced just as many new ones. When you PAY for a website that purports to advertise YOUR WORDS in front of ladies (or men) looking for a mate, and then they don't do that, you're not getting what you paid for. Period. When you don't get what you paid for, you don't have to pay for it. Period. I tried to log back in awhile ago to copy some pages where settings had been changed without my knowledge, but I was met with the image shown below:     Temporarily? No. Suspend it permanently. I promise, I'll never be back. It doesn't bloody work correctly anyway. But it occurs to me that they not so much wanted to suspend my subscription because they had been told by their bank that I had filed a chargeback -- which didn't happen because I hadn't filed any chargeback -- but they wanted to restrict my access to my own profile so I couldn't take any screen shots of their bullshit. This is in my view a bad website run by a bad corporate parent. The complaints are legion, dissatisfied customers by the shipload, and the customer service is pretty close to non-existent. Even when it exists, it's stupid and counter-productive. Do NOT ever take one website's word for ANYTHING. Do the research for yourself. Dig and delve and read and study before (BEFORE) you give these bozos your money, because as you can see, when (not if) they truly piss you off, you'll play Hell getting your money back.     All new developments will be reported below, and I promise, there will be some.. . . ThaiCupid lists their contacts as follows: I do happen to know that competent lawyers can be found in Australia and yes, I can afford them.     THAICUPID.COM postal address ThaiCupid.com Cupid Media Pty Ltd PO Box 9304 Gold Coast MC QLD 9726 Australia Our office address Level 5 2502 / 5 Lawson Street Southport QLD 4215 Australia Australia: (07) 3062 4546 United Kingdom: 0808 164 8498 United States / Canada: 1-855-356-0102 International: +61 7 3062 4546 Fax: +61 7 3103 4000 .   Below, Faxed June 22, 2021:     ThaiCupid.com Cupid Media Pty Ltd PO Box 9304 Gold Coast MC QLD 9726 Australia Level 5 2502 / 5 Lawson Street Southport QLD 4215 Australia Fax: +61 7 3103 4000 This will serve to make you aware of a growing problem within your ThaiCupid website administration. I have posted a public explanation of the problem at this URL. That page is a work in progress and will grow: http://www.truth-or-consequences.com/badder_business_bureau/thaicupiddotcom/index.shtml The page is self explanatory. It hasn’t yet hit Google. It will. And I’ll do due diligence on the SEO for the page. Your people have very bluntly pissed me off, and it’s a significant mistake. Reference: USA VISA card ending 4997 Bangkok, Thailand, June 22, 2021     . UPDATE June 23, 2021: The account remains "Temporarily Suspended" and no overtures towards a refund are forthcoming voluntarily. So, this company has denied me the use of the account I've paid for, yet won't refund either. I hope the reader is beginning to understand a bit about the whole fiasco of Cupid websites from this outfit in Australia. I have learned in my years of interacting with these types of fly-by-night sites, since my wife of 40 years passed away, that they are all operating on the fringes -- that is to say they all are hovering just an inch above the sleazy porn and gambling and MIRACLE CANCER CURE NOW ONLY $29.95! sites, and other various types of scams. They try to present a facade of being eminently legitimate and honorable -- but we are seeing they are clearly not. They are "snatch and grab" businesses. They'll snatch all the funds they can get and they don't give a rat's ass if they provide a reasonable or even useful service or, in this case, any service at all. They'll just grab that cash and hang on tight until someone physically rips it back out of their account and they have no recourse remaining. Most merchant banks, in fact nearly all merchant banks in the world, which are the banks and financial institutions that handle online payments for paid-type websites, refuse to even accept accounts from porn and gambling sites, because they've learned through long and painful experience that these businesses are simply scumbags and those banks got tired of processing disputes from outraged customers and issuing refunds. ThaiCupid could avoid the black mark on their merchant account in this instance, but they are steadfastly refusing to do so. Maybe it's time their merchant account providers started looking harder at customer satisfaction of their websites. In any case my chargeback through VISA will hit the books in under a week and the funds WILL be physically jerked back out of Cupid's account, and then Cupid can contest it, and they will, and we'll see what effect that has on VISA's determination to make the refund stand, or not. It doesn't matter either way. I WILL take Cupid to court if I lose the chargeback. This behavior is way too damned outrageous to stand for. And so, would YOU like to open an account for any of the above websites? Good luck. Do I KNOW of any reputable, legitimate, honorable dating websites I can direct you to? While one or two might exist in the world, I don't know of any personally. Most cater openly to prostitutes because that's where the money is. Tinder is a prime example. Want paid sex? Go to Tinder. You'll have a girl in your bed in under two hours and be prepared to open your wallet at the end because that's the game. Want a nice girl you can marry and build a life with? Find social activities where you both might share an interest. Meet them IN PERSON. I swear, even watching someone from across a crowded room for an hour or two will tell you more about their character than weeks or months or writing back and forth through a dating site, and you'll avoid all the ten year old photos and the photoshopped photos and pictures of their sisters or daughters -- it's a jungle on the websites, ALL of them. And it's a jungle at a social activity too. But at least in person it's far more difficult for their facade to be useful to them. It SEEMS like you OUGHT to be able to just sit comfortably at your terminal and talk to hundreds of ladies you would never meet otherwise in day to day life. But it never, ever works out that way. Never. All of these things are a huge, giant barrier to these sites ever working. But when the websites won't even print what you tell them to print then it becomes not just extremely difficult for the site to work, it becomes absolutely impossible. And STILL these jackasses feel you should pay. Eff 'em. Let's play this one out to the bitter end and see what happens. Enough is enough. Coming from an American Federal Law Enforcement background (narcotics) I know how to find data -- but only in America. I have an interest in the name, home address and phone number, family background, friends, associates, past employment, salary, and much more, regarding the CEO of "Cupid Media". In the US all of that and more would take ten minutes to obtain. Australia will likely be more difficult, but certainly not impossible. I want to know exactly who the person is who is responsible for the products and services available through Cupid Media and their websites. I want to know everything. Criminal history? Credit history? Past court cases? Law enforcement actions against them? Civil suits? I want to know much, much more about their giant data breach and any consequences they endured, court cases they settled, criminal actions against them if any. And I want to know about the CEO personally. I want it all. In the US you don't need subpoena authority to obtain those things. In Australia you might. But you gain subpoena authority the moment you file a lawsuit. I want to know if Cupid Media is a public company. Does it have shareholders? What are the names and addresses of the shareholders? What are the names and addresses of the principals and corporate officers? Don't they all have a right to know what ThaiCupid.com does and how it conducts business? Of course they do. They not only have a "right" to know, it is their duty to know.   UPDATE June 23, 19:00 Bangkok time:   From ThaiCupid to me on June 22, 2021, at 18:31 Bangkok time: Dear member, Thank you for contacting us. We have been advised by our bank that you have charged back the payment for 12 months Platinum membership of (THB 4,400.00) billed on (09/05/2021). Consequently, your account has been suspended. This means at present you are unable to send or receive messages or access the website.  In order to review your reactivation request, please: - Advise us the reason why you have charged back the above payment(s) - Confirm that you will not dispute any payment you have authorized in future - Acknowledge that any outstanding membership time incurred due to this chargeback may be covered by your next payment - Provide a color copy of your photo ID such as a drivers licence or international passport Once we receive the above information, we will review your reactivation request. For future reference, if you wish to manage your auto re-billing, please log on to your account and select "Settings" and then "Billing". Please contact us if you require any further assistance and quote your Incident Number: [[1471xxx0]]. team@ThaiCupid.com   This is doubly curious because I never, ever made a reactivation request. I want this account TERMINATED FOREVER. Why would I use a dating service that won't even use my own words in my profile? That would be absurd. In saying that I submitted a reactivation request, ThaiCupid has lied. Again. Additionally, they ask me for ID, etc. etc., when they already obtained that from me when I initiated the account in May, 2021 (passport and driver's license). Here's my reply to ThaiCupid.Com:   : Reply to ThaiCupid (team@ThaiCupid.com) Once again I am advising you of the URL of your very own website detailing this fiasco, which details my problems with you very clearly. You've been advised of this URL before, and your corporate Cupid-Media office has been advised of it by fax also. Yet you claim to not know why, oh why, I might even consider filing a chargeback. In point of FACT you suspended an account that was fully paid for a year, claiming your bank had advised you of a chargeback that had not even been filed yet. Liars, scammers and thieves, you are, and documentably so.   Here it is:   http://www.truth-or-consequences.com/badder_business_bureau/thaicupiddotcom/index.shtml   No chargeback had been filed when you suspended the account. I wanted to give you a day or two to see what you would do. Now we all know what you would do -- you would suspend a fully paid account and then lie about it in writing no less! No chargeback had been filed even today when you sent this email and you lied and said you had received notice of a chargeback from your bank. No such thing occurred because no chargeback had been filed, nor has any chargeback been filed even as of this moment. I will file it within the next 30 minutes, but my bank won't even process it for about a week, and your bank won't receive notification of it for about another week. You have lied. You are liars. You are truly the scum of the earth. I do honestly believe there is something wrong with you people, mentally. Understand that every single detail of this case, including all emails from you, and all emails from me to you, including this one, will be appended to the above website. Again, just for the record, no chargeback had been filed when you suspended the account, and no chargeback had been filed when you wrote the attached email to say you had been notified of it by your bank. You lied. You are liars. And that is a documentable fact. I would urge, and I will urge, absolutely anyone even remotely considering doing business with you to not only reconsider before they lose their money and receive no usable service, but to run far and fast from you. Since you are now proven liars, I suspect you are thieves as well -- the two character malfunctions tend to run in pairs. You can easily look at the time of filing on the chargeback when you finally really ARE notified of it, and you can see that the date will be June 23, 2021, at about 19:15 Bangkok time. In contrast, I received your first email stating that you had been advised by your bank of the chargeback on June 22, 2021. Liars. And I detest liars. And I detest scammers and thieves. I had a vague feeling you folks were like that at the moment I signed up. Funny how premonitions so often come true. You are the scum of the earth.    End Email     So now we know exactly what we're dealing with in ThaiCupid. Liars and scammers. Possibly even thieves. Time will tell on that last assumption. I'll complete the chargeback forms right now and post them below. Again, it takes about a week for my US bank to do anything at all with the claim, and it will be at least another week before ThaiCupid's bank will receive any notification at all of the disputed charge. Let's reiterate this one last time: ThaiCupid 1. Didn't provide a useful service and didn't respond when they were asked to. 2. Suspended a fully paid account BEFORE any chargeback had been filed, stating that they had received notification FROM THEIR BANK of the chargeback. 3. ThaiCupid blatantly lied, since no chargeback had been filed (but will be now). 4. ThaiCupid LIED when they said I had requested to reactivate the account. They have no such request in their possession because no such request was made because I have and had no such desire. . Liars through and through. And this is only day two or three of this dispute! Try to imagine what rank and utter bullshit they'll come up with next! Advice? Run far and fast from this ship of fools.   UPDATE: Chargeback documents here The formal chargeback documents were faxed to VISA as a total of 18 pages, including an entire PDF of this website up to this point. You can see the chargeback was actually filed a full day AFTER ThaiCupid said their bank informed them that it had received a chargeback. Absolutely outrageous lies. Also remember, if you're of an investigative mind to really pin down these dates and times, my VISA card bank in the US (Pacific time) is on not only a far different time, but actually a different day from Bangkok, and it looks like the fax number for disputes is on yet a different time on the east coast of the US. Australia, as well, is in a different time zone, but I believe it's on the same day as Bangkok, so you'll have to adjust the times to sync.     Updates? You bet there will be. I'm hoping these lying sons of bitches -- and yes, profanities are what I have come to in this case -- will keep on lying and keep on scamming and if I give them enough rope, maybe we can even get a criminal referral out of this. This is beyond outrageous. I hope and pray the general citizenry gets a chance to see what this outfit of misfits is up to BEFORE they release their hard-earned cash to them. Absolutely outrageous behavior. But honestly, peoples' experiences with all online businesses of this low-life ilk run about the same. Lay down with dogs, get up with fleas.   UPDATE June 23, 2021: I've deleted my link to ThaiCupid and also my username and password. I don't need the anger of checking in there to see that they've done some new outrageous and dishonest damned thing to my my profile. Done is done.   Are dating sites generally honest? No. Ever dealt with a pawn shop in your city on the bad side of town? That's what you're dealing with in dating sites. Dating sites will always be plagued by scammers both male and female. It's the job of the site to keep them out. Sometimes they can't, no matter how hard they try. That's just life. Suck it up. But sometimes they try barely half-heartedly, because they want the interaction on their sites. The more pictures of people they can show, the more likely they are to attract paying users (e.g. suckers). They don't CARE if their sites are overflowing toilets of scammers. I mean, they really don't care. In the worst case, they like it, and they actively encourage it. In the very worst case, when a site can't even attract enough scammers to keep them going, THEY WILL CREATE THEM. That is to say they'll schlep a bunch of photos from various dubious sources and arrange to have a bot complete their profiles, and thereby inflate their numbers of "eligibles" by thousands of percent. It just so happens I caught one of these operators red-handed in Ketchikan, Alaska. They were operating out of Anchorage but advertising fake ladies very heavily in the Ketchikan newspaper. I was able to prove that many, if not the vast majority, of their female profiles were absolutely fake. I passed the data along and the Alaska attorney general shut them down instantly. Alaska has a strong, no-nonsense government and law enforcement mechanism. Does Australia? No. Does Cupid-Media do this on their sites? I absolutely believe they do and here's why. When you receive dozens of "likes" before you've even posted an image or filled in a profile, that's a strong indication the site has bots at work posing as real females. When you respond to 150 or so likes in a month, with a written message, and not a single message is ever even READ, that's a strong indication the site is seeding the profiles with fakes. Someone likes you and they never want to see what you wrote to them? Sure, it can happen occasionally. But not hundreds of times. It's all about keeping you coming back. I can't prove Cupid-Media does this. Maybe someone can prove it. But I'm absolutely convinced of it. Still, I went into my relationship with ThaiCupid knowing this. When you send your $29.95 for that 100% guaranteed cancer cure, you KNOW it's a scam. In the case of dating sites, you just have to live with it and spend the extra time weeding through the fakes. Real human beings don't post fake profiles and then never read their messages. What would they have to gain? ONLY the site operators have any reason to post fake profiles in which the people don't exist. Yes, plenty of real people post fake profiles, but they ALWAYS come back to read their messages to see who they might be able to scam. An old bear trapper doesn't spend weeks setting traps on a trap-line in Alaska, only to never come back and check them, unless they're DEAD. They want to know what they've caught. Same with online dating scammers. They want to knew what fools fell into their trap, and can they strip them of anything. When you have 150 beautiful ladies sending you a like, to which you reply with a nice message, and that message is never, ever read, not even a year later, then only one thing is too-often responsible for it -- the site operators. Did this happen to me countless hundreds of times on Cupid-Media websites over the years? Yes. And that's what I attribute it to. When you deal with these outfits, you're down there doing business on the wrong side of the tracks. And getting scammed.   UPDATE June 26, 2021: VISA (through my bank in the US) has advised me that they have removed the payment to ThaiCupid from my credit card account. There will be no appeal for ThaiCupid.   UPDATE June 27, 2021 And yet another imbecilic email from ThaiCupid.com: Dear member, Thank you for contacting us. Please be advised that your profile is temporarily suspended waiting for the refund to be processed.Once the refund process is completed your profile will be reactivated. Please contact us if you require any further assistance and quote your Incident Number:[[1471xxx9]]. team@ThaiCupid.com.   And my heartfelt reply:   TO: ThaiCupid, June 27, 2021: Go away and leave me alone. Do NOT reactivate this account in any way. You will soon receive a legal demand to remove my photos and profile from your database. If you do not comply i will file with the appropriate Gold Coast law enforcement agency to force you to comply. I want nothing to do with you loons. Sent from my iPhone.   I will now block any and all incoming emails from ThaiCupid, Cupid Media, or anything or anyone associated with them in any way whatsoever, even peripherally. What a bunch of Goddamned wanna-be crooks. Truly the scum of the earth.   Conclusion: Just for the heck of it I did a string search in my records. I keep detailed records of absolutely everything going back since the day I bought my first computer in 1983. A search revealed this tidbit: filipinocupid.com Account name: XXXXXX XXXXXXX DOB: XXXXXXXXX Email: XXXXXXXXX@gmail.com Password: djuit8XXX DO NOT USE -- NOTHING BUT SPAM! Got refund due to Spam in May of 2020. And that brought back a flood of memories. I paid for a "premium" subscription which promised to stop all Spam from this outfit. Unfortunately, it stopped NO SPAM from this outfit. I wrote to them again and again and again and again, showing them their own words on their own website which promised that you'd receive no Spam if you "upgraded", and sending screen-shots of their Spam. Towards the end I started telling them very pointedly that if they didn't stop the Spam, and it was copious, intrusive, never-ending and egregious, that I would ask for a refund. When the Spam still didn't stop, I demanded a refund. When that didn't work I threatened a chargeback. That apparently got their attention and they terminated the account and of course stopped the Spam. I wish I had remembered that incident BEFORE I signed up with ThaiCupid.com in 2021. Unbelievable outfit. Truly the worst of the worst. Will they ever get better? No. They've had 19 years to try. Are they all chronic alcoholics? On drugs? Mentally retarded? All of the above? I think all of the above, plus genetically incompetent and utterly dishonest. That's a bad combination. Be careful where you spend your money. But the subscription price was only a small part of this irritation. It was the never-ending incompetence and lying and screwing up of my profiles causing me to look stupid and waste time. And then to refuse to refund? Nope. No fucking way.   And, of course there's MORE:   Customer Support (ThaiCupid) Dear XXXXXXX, We are more than happy to assist you further should we know the profile and the issue you are concern about. If you do not wish to receive any assistance, we will simply close the ticket.  We would also appreciate any offensive or abuse language use is refrained.   Kind Regards, The ThaiCupid Team     And my too-polite reply:   The above email serves no purpose whatsoever. You've been told again and again and again and again to leave me alone. I've said this politely and also in no uncertain terms and rudely, bluntly, pointedly, and vulgarly. My chargeback has already gone through. If you contest it I will file a formal civil lawsuit right there in Australia. Our business is concluded. Do not contact me again at any time for any reason under any pretense. I will continue to update any future problems with you on the website (including this one). I remain convinced you are the dumbest people on this earth and you shouldn’t be allowed to run an eight year old’s lemonade stand on the street corner. Fuck off. [End Email]     At what point does this become criminal harassment? Around the world, imagine this: You've had a bellyfull of incompetence and bullshit and dishonesty and scammy-ness from someone, and you begin telling them nicely to just. leave. you. alone. But of course they don't. So you tell them more times. But they can't grasp that either. So you threaten legal action. But they just can't resist the temptation to pester you further. It's in their DNA to do so. So you get angry and you start talking about criminal complaints. But they keep on coming at you. So you get vulgar. And they contact you yet again to tell you not to be vulgar. So what do you finally do? I know what Gandhi would do. Gandhi would knock their fucking teeth out. I think even Mother Teresa had her limits. I'm pretty sure Jesus Christ did too -- after all, he also only had two cheeks to turn the other way. I had blocked all incoming emails from these Goddamned sons of bitches (and that's what they are), and yet to send this last one they gave up on my regular email address that they had used all along, and which was the registered email address for the ThaiCupid account, Yet somehow they got through. Is there any doubt there will be more insanity to come? There is no doubt whatsoever.     Updates to follow? Maybe this is the end of it. Now let's take a moment to look at the online dating scene as a whole. Does it work? No. It almost never works. The thing is, it might work. But the odds of meeting a great match are far and vastly higher when just out messing around doing activities you enjoy. Obviously, mountaintop meditation, no matter how much you might enjoy it, is probably not a great place to meet "the one", although you might! But it's about numbers. Volume. Let's say one in 50 of the opposite sex have a tendency to "like" you in person. On that mountain top, you might meet, say, three per year. It'll take a lot of years to meet that one in 50, probably, and even if s/he likes you right off the bat, will s/he keep on liking you forever? Doubtful. Possible, but doubtful. So you have to learn to play to increase the odds. Do you like to dance? There you go. That's your "sweet spot" for meeting people. Go. Dance your brains out. But don't forget to talk. Dancing is about physical attraction, and that crap wears off. There must be a meeting of the minds. The trouble with the online approach is that everyone very greatly, to a ludicrous degree, exaggerates their looks, by using old photos, photo-shopped photos, photos of their sister, friend, daughter -- what you see is virtually never what you get. And even if they post a photo from two months ago, maybe they used the very, very best photo ever, ever taken of them, and that's not who you're going to meet in person and be instantly unattracted to. They lie about their weight. Man, oh man, do they lie about their weight. You'll nearly ALWAYS get quoted the weight they WANT to be, and nearly never the weight they are. If you're not attracted to heavier bodies, you'll be disappointed almost every single time you waste the time to spend the money to go out and meet. When they say they are HWP and you meet them and in 3 seconds see they are morbidly obese, what do you do? Just rudely walk out? Yes. They rudely lied (it's called a scam). Now you rudely walk out. What if they only exaggerated by 20 pounds? I used to suffer through those dinners or drinks sessions, just ACHING to go to the bathroom and never come back. Now, I drop enough cash to pay the bill, if anything was even ordered yet, and say politely, "I'm sorry, I can see that we are not a match at all. I think you're very nice and I wish you the best, but I will be going now." The terror is that they will start to cry or get up and follow you out or, worse yet, start yelling obscenities at you. One friend of mine did that and he got up and started walking away and the woman jumped up and started screaming at him in the crowded restaurant to say she didn't like it when he offered her money to fuck her daughter -- and he ended up calling the police out front of the restaurant in that case when he couldn't readily hail a cab and she wouldn't quit. Yes, doing a Skype session or some such helps reduce these a lot, but they can be pretty damned clever, always presenting their best side, their thinnest side, wearing un-revealing clothing, and never letting you get a full body view. Sometimes you end up really attracted to their character, which is a good thing. But when you meet in person you KNOW you ain't NEVAH getting in bed with that. Can you then end up being friends? No. In my experience, it will never happen. Not beyond one or two more meetings or activities. You rejected them. They'll never, ever forget nor forgive. And it doesn't seem to work the other way around, either. I had a lady friend of many years. I never once thought of her romantically. She wrote veterinary books. One day she asked me flat out to dump my wife of thirty years and go with her. I ignored it. I didn't know how to respond. A month later she asked again. I said no. She never spoke to me again. Then they lie about their attributes. They have degrees that they don't really have. The have done amazing things that they really haven't. Their ex was an abusive, raging asshole -- but in reality, it was the other way around and this person got thrown out on their ass and now they're on the prowl again for a new victim. Maybe it'll be LUCKY YOU! Remember, in 50% of all relationships, the person you're talking to online will be the one who muffed it up and got dumped. Out of the rest, the other 50% who didn't get dumped outright but should have, you're dealing with the whiners and babies and spoiled rotten brats and those with stunningly disgusting personal habits and body odor and a gambling problem, or they're a closet alcoholic or they plan to quit crack cocaine "real soon", or they're argumentative, bossy, maybe they cheat a lot -- the list goes on almost forever. They're fatally flawed. Broken. Unwantable. That's why they're online. Are there good and valuable keepers online too? Yes. There are widows and widowers who did everything right for ten or thirty years and now they want to do it all again, with YOU, and this time they won't even repeat the few relationship mistakes they did make because now they're older and wiser and more experienced. There are those whose mates really WERE the bad seed in the duo and they just want to find a good seed for a duo. Yes, there are good ones, but in my experience they give up on online dating pretty quickly because of the pukes. They just get worn down until they stop logging in. Many, or most of them, just stay alone, often for life. I submit that, out of 100 people on a dating site, you probably won't find a single one who doesn't have one or more of these fatal flaws which you'll not find out about until you've wasted a great deal of time and money. Let's say you interact with 1000 people online. For me, in the US, about 900 will be unattractive (it's the weight). In SE Asia, only about 400 will be unattractive (it's the lack of weight). Of those 400, 300 will be mental loons and that will be clear in the first 3-5 messages exchanged. That's probably the average in the US as well. They're out there circlin' Neptune and there is NO common ground of ideas whatsoever. Maybe they could hold amazing conversations with a grasshopper somewhere down Alice's Rabbit Hole, but not with a human. So you have 100 left who are at least somewhat attractive (you can build on a lack of physical attraction HUGELY if their minds and hearts are in the right place but there must be at least some physical attraction to build on). Of that 100, only 50 will have hearts and minds in the right place. That is, they care at least a LITTLE, generally, about humanity. They're not a screeching religious nut who can't express a nine word sentence without injecting the word "God" or "Jesus" eleven times. They understand that when they accidentally do something bad to someone, they must apologize and compensate them if needed. I'm talking about just run of the mill overarching morality issues that we USED to take for granted. Now, normal, basic morality is really quite rare. Would they stop and help an injured dog on the highway -- at least call animal control for God's sake? Would they do the laundry for their brother when he's sick? What is truly inside their hearts? It's important to know because it dictates the course of your lives. Of that 50, many will be, I'm sorry, just rock plain stupid. Good hearted, perhaps, but ain't got the brains God gave a crowbar. In SE Asia, one of the first things I ask a girl is what they think about the International Space Station (ISS)? Around 60-70% will look at me like I'm a terminally gullible imbecile and remark, smugly, "That's just in America cartoons -- it's not real." Then they'll turn to their SE Asian friends and roll their eyes as if to say, "How did I get stuck with THIS moron for the night?" And their friends all laugh and then slip me their LINE ID when no one's looking. Another thing I ask is, what do you think about World War 2? I'm just trying to gauge their basic awareness of the world around them. I would say that about 40% never heard of it. Another 40% will say they remember something about that in school but don't really know what it is. And 20% will know a few basic facts, like what countries were involved. Maybe. But never, ever the issues. How many great conversations are you going to have about recent advances in cancer research or philosophy or thee cost of living or romance or spirituality or crime in your neighborhood or nice places to live or vacation or good restaurants in town or personal relationships with THAT? None. Zero. Nada. Not one. How long can you go not having an even remotely stimulating conversation about ANYTHING? Not long. Your soul will begin to scream for mercy and the dust of your dessicated brain will blow out through your ears and away in the wind. So out of that last 50, which started out as 1000, how many girls are worth taking to dinner? Maybe two or three. And at dinner you'll find out enough more of their malfunctions that you end up paying, dropping cab fare on the table, and walking away. Meeting people face to face, friends of friends let's say, is the polar opposite to that. Yes, it's all a hell of a lot of work. But is it worth it? It CAN be, but for it to be finally "worth it" is so obscenely rare that it might NOT be worth it to try. For me, it's not. Not anymore. Before I ever played with online dating apps my baseline respect for women was automatically 100%. This high level of esteem was probably induced by my wife. I met each and every one with complete and nearly absolute respect and a good deal of trust. It was then up to them to tear down, destroy and erase that respect. Or not. It was their choice completely. Now, after many years of online dating, my respect for women is probably about as low as anyone's respect for anyone can be. I go into every interaction with every new female with my trust level at about 1% by default. It is then up to them to build up, enhance and increase that respect. Or not. It is their choice completely. And so what most often happens? They annihilate it in very short order -- often in seconds, but almost always within hours. They take that 1% of default positivity I grant them and almost instantly drive it down so far below the baseline as to make it virtually invisible in the depths as a minus value. Even when I gently caution them not to do that, they do it, as if they are robots controlled by some maniacal moron bent on making their lives as unsuccessful as they can possibly be. Every single time I think I've seen anything and everything a woman can dish out, I am not only surprised, I am shocked, stunned and rendered speechless. And so I reset my baseline and I expect even less. And then in short order I am rendered shocked and speechless yet again, even viewing it from the perspective of my new lower baseline. When I begin to finally, reluctantly concede that nearly every single one of them is a singular Satan, they behave in ways and do things so unspeakably dastardly, dishonest, dishonorable, unconscionable, evil things that show me time and again that even Satan would be no match for these witches. I've realized that nearly all of them, nearly all of them, don't draw a single breath without an ulterior motive. Altruism is admittedly rare if it exists at all, but females have shown me that they are almost entirely the polar opposite of even the shadow of altruism. That's what online dating has done for me. I treat them respectfully and well, but I know where it will end. Still, they get the benefit of the doubt. Usually by about the fourth sentence out of their mouths I can tell you how long this date is going to last. The average is 30-40 minutes and that's only because I foolishly keep giving them chances to not be a materialistic, spoiled, adolescent, whining, petulant, air-headed brat. My biggest problem is that I can't have sex without an emotional connection. I'm rather lady-like in that way and I hate that about myself. I need something beyond a body and a face in order to feel any arousal at all. And with it becoming more and more difficult to find any female capable of any true connection, I sleep alone a very great deal. In SE Asia I'm considered decent looking enough. I have all my hair. It's not white. I'm polite. I'm well built, tall, not fat, and somewhat muscular. I was often accused of being a Tom Selleck look-alike. And I'm considered quite rich by SE Asian standards, even though I'm not at all rich by any other standards. The girls are more than willing. And it pains me to be close to many of the most gorgeous and alluring women on God's earth, but not feel a damned thing. I'd be all over Phyllis Diller because she could really hold a fucking conversation. Before I was married I had about 35 girlfriends of one type and duration or another in various countries. After my wife died, here in SE Asia I've endured about 145 girlfriends of varying durations. In SE Asia, in all countries, I've "dated" about 1500-2000 (usually dinner and goodbye). I do not partake of prostitutes -- something about being in an intimate place where another man has been maybe an hour before -- no, no thank you, and again, I thank you not. My cerebral wiring doesn't allow it. Online, I've interacted with perhaps 20,000. Those interactions have become shorter and shorter because I can tell them what they're going to say next before they've even think of saying it. My vision is becoming X-ray. The past decade has been a long, long class in the Advanced School of Concentrated Learning about Females (ASCLF). I am closer every year to seeing them as they truly are. I remember an old Star Trek episode in which one or several gorgeous females got onto the ship and wooed and seduced all the silly, gullible guys -- and they were truly entrancing. --Until Kirk somehow figured out how to deactivate their facade and they were exposed in reality, of course, to be the most gruesome alien ghouls one could ever imagine and their sole intent was to suck out everyone's blood or some such. I am very close to seeing completely and effortlessly through the real veil here in reality too, and the more reality I see, the better I feel. Finally, things about girls are beginning to make sense. And The Truth Shall Set You Free. I'm swarmed by friendly girls here in SE Asia. They're stunningly beautiful, seemingly loving, trying to appear to be caring, wanting you to think they're helpful, and after you learn how to sort them (it takes years), there are plenty who are NOT out for money. Plenty I say! That total equals perhaps six in all of SE Asia and I've only known one. They want you to think they just want a nice guy and enough to eat, and that's often true. But you have to have an exchange of ideas for it to work well. But they have no philosophies about war and peace or space travel or life after death or the possibility of aliens or how to cook a great meal or why you shouldn't drive with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake and they positively refuse to be introduced to anything new at all so you'll never really relate to them on any common wavelength, but here's the thing it all boils down to and which disqualifies them from being deserving of my heart: They have no true humanity. They're in it for themselves. How many heroic females run into burning buildings to save someone's grandpa. Not many. They aren't built that way. So I simply allow them to come into my life, little bits at a time. I've never had an even "good" conversation with a single one of them, not even my wife (I realize that now nearly a decade after her passing), not even the college grads with great degrees, not even doctors, not even female airline pilots, but I finally realize that that's so unspeakably rare in the world, great conversations, that it's probably never going to happen and the amount of work it takes to try to make it happen is vastly asymmetrical to the odds of success. Would you go out into the Sahara and sift sand for all the remaining days of your life, hoping, dreaming, wishing, praying to find one diamond? No. Because although it would be cool to find one, YOU WON'T, so you don't bother to waste the time. There are other things to do in life. Dating sites aren't a complete waste of time. I passingly enjoy the two or three day online "little relationships" now, post the ThaiCupid debacle. It all helps me learn about people and that's never boring. Often disappointing. But never boring. But before a dating site can even be interesting, it must work mechanically. That means that the profile you WRITE must be the profile that's DISPLAYED. That's an alien concept to the turds at ThaiCupid.com. Just go into dating sites KNOWING you aren't going to succeed, because you're not. You're not going to find a diamond sifting all the sands of the Sahara, but you'll occasionally find a sand-blasted Coke can, or a dessicated old kid's toy, a piece of a sandal. the shriveled plastic rings that held some soda cans together, or maybe even a penny coin once in a lifetime. Or not. You'll mostly find mummified camel dung. But look at the shapes and sizes and see if you can find faces in the turds, just like cloud watching! There are endless hours of fun in that! THAT is what you're engaging in on dating sites: You're looking for faces in the turds. Faces in the turds. Remember it; it will serve you well. Repeat it until it becomes your fucking mantra. Faces in the turds. Learn to accept that as the only entertainment you're going to find, because it is. I've lived in various gambling and casino centers around the world. The seasoned human goes to them only occasionally, with twenty dollars ONLY in their pockets, and they piss it away slowly, at a leisurely pace, sipping non-alcoholic drinks and watching weirdos, because it's kind of mildly fun. Only a fool goes there to win money. Yes, a few do win big. But do they REALLY? Research the happiness levels of big lotto winners to see if they truly "won" anything at all. That's how you do dating websites. And what if you beat ALL the impossible odds and find a really, truly great relationship match and you spend years together and you become closer and closer and happier and happier and you know you're truly one of God's lucky chosen children and you do everything right for decades and you never so much as glance at another girl and you work hard and give her a home and dote on your mate and raise her bratty children and spoil her as well as you can and you come home from work and there there s/he is, in your bed, huffing and puffing and grunting and slippery with sweat, screaming and yelling HARDER HARDER I'M CUMMING NOW MY SWEET BABY OOOOOHHHH!!! GOD RIGHT NOW NOW NOW-- and then she's mumbling incoherent words because she's lost the ability of speech and she's twisting like a Gumby and her eyes roll back and she doesn't breathe for 20 seconds and her round jiggly tits turn Christmas-ornament-red and her legs are flailing and trembling and then she's calling out the wrong name -- with your best friend, the mentally handicapped friend who took in years before, and then she sees you standing there in the bedroom doorway and she groans and throws her head back and fucks him all the harder, and you do like my dearest brother-in-law did and go outside and blow your fucking brains out with the gun she bought you last year for Christmas. Thanks Rene in Pollock Pines, California, you fucking worthless piece of shit of an ex-sister. Ah. THAT was fun, wasn't it? Chasing forever and finally catching the perfect mate was, well, just perfect. Right? Sure it was. It was SO worth the sacrifices. The point is, even if you do find your dream love, then begins another nightmare. The never-ending nightmare of "what ifs". And who needs nightmares. You'll never, EVER know if the person you knew was the person you THOUGHT you knew. You'll never know 100%. Not even on your, or their, deathbed. You'll never, ever know if it was all worth it in the end. Did you really have true love? Or did you have a facade. It's like spending an entire lifetime building a replica of the Greatest Pyramid out of invisible stones. In the end, what do you see? What can you touch? What can you depend and rely on really? What have you truly, truly accomplished? Maybe nothing at all. She spent her days with you dreaming of HIM. And you never knew it. There was an old Star Trek episode where Spock was fighting for the love of some Vulcan slut and another Vulcan noob wanted her just as badly. The battle forged and raged to and fro for hours or days, and at the end, Spock suddenly realized something. This tart wasn't worth it. He gave up and let the other fool have the girl, just conceded the battle and gladly gave her away, and his parting comment was, paraphrased here badly, "You might find that WANTING a thing is so much better than HAVING a thing". Indeed, we come into this world alone and we go out alone and I am of a mind at this late stage in my life that that's all we can aspire to in the interim: aloneness. I was married exactly forty years, almost to the day. She died. All my work, all my loyalty, all my understanding and forgiveness (truly a LOT of that) and all my compassion, sacrifice -- all of it was for what? We knew each other for awhile in the greater scheme of things. We shared time together. We shared a path, long and crooked for what seemed like eons and eons. I changed my life drastically for her. I wouldn't do it again. Could it have lasted forever? No. Absolutely nothing can or will. Get that through your head as painful as it is. Yes, there have been insanely isolated cases of both parties falling deeply in love and staying that way for 70 years and nobody did anything bad (maybe) and nothing bad happened -- but what if our lifespans were 700 years? Would there then be one single case in which both parties were stupid-happy for that entire 7 centuries and never cheated, never got tired of you or you of them, never simply grew slowly apart? No. There wouldn't be a single case in the history of the earth. And if nothing is forever, what's the point? All things end. Most end badly. In fact almost all end badly. If you never forget that, you won't be disappointed. Better to allow them to end naturally, at the right time. Just as every piece of fruit has just exactly the right time to drop from the tree, so should every relationship end when it's supposed to. Pick a plum too early and it will be difficult, because it still wants to hang on. Force it to stay on the tree too long and it rots. When it all stops working, in a day or a month or five years, just step back and let it go. And go find another. Or not. Hopefully you haven't invested your heart in the departing soul and the end is as easy as watching the ripe plumb fall in a gentle breeze, because it's just time for it to happen. To love and cherish till death do us part? For Christ's sake grow up. To love and to cherish for as long as it works. Period. The end. In my 40 year relationship the natural and proper time to have ended it would have been in about the third week. But I had saved her from a vicious kidnapping and she clung to me -- unspeakably beautiful and young and devoted and loving. The relationship wasn't right. It was somehow off-center, somehow just barely forced. But I stayed the course, waiting for any number of things to make it all just click into place some day. Of course it never did and it never does and it never will. When it's not 100%, get out. Per the song, just get out the back, Jack, and set yourself free. How many are 100%? None. Extrapolation is Key to Wisdom: Be wise enough to know that everything you fear WILL happen, eventually. It's better to just reduce the opportunities for bad things to get at you, as much as practicable. The Root of All Disappointment Lies in Unrealistic Expectation. That's my own creation. Don't steal it. I like to sue. I mean it. Seriously, I do mean it. If you can ever truly learn to live every moment by that, you'll be the happiest person on earth. Maybe in the Universe. Be realistic about what can happen on a dating site and have fun within the confines of reality. That's the best you'll ever do.   . Classic     UPDATE 2021: I did receive my money back from my VISA card via the chargeback. ThaiCupid and Cupid-Media did not contest the chargeback. They had less than no case and no grounds and they knew it. So why did they even TRY to keep my money? Anyway, that particular matter is settled.   Immediately after I terminated my account with ThaiCupid I moved to Thai Friendly. The website interface is absurd. Manny things don't work and haven't worked for a decade. Bringing the glitches to their attention brings NO fixes, not even many years later. Clearly, they simply do not care. They are making "enough" money for them off their sleazy website, and they have no aspirations to make anything better. Oh, did I say "sleazy". Yes, I said SLEAZY. I had played with Thai Friendly. a couple of times many years ago. I had forgotten how sleazy it was. But I remembered very quickly in 2021. I paid for the "Full Monty" account, about $70us per six months. I created a very nice, low-key profile. Half a dozen pictures. You never enter much text on any SE Asian dating site because no one reads it. Many (many) can't read at all, and even if they can, they can't read ENGLISH, and even if they can, they will misunderstand about 94% of what's being said. In reality, however, most of them don't really care about ANYTHING you might be or might have done. They only want to know that you have money to feed them and that you won't hit them. If they can establish that, and you aren't TOO ugly, they're ready to move in. I mean this literally. I could tell you stories. Those are the ones you DON'T want, but they make up the majority. So, not much of a profile is needed. You can post a few pictures, and say, "I am nice", and that will start the process and probably even finish it. I received about 75 responses the first day, then about 60 the next, and it wound down to a steady stream of about 5-10 per day after that and didn't diminish. The vast majority were stunningly attractive. And it soon made me remember something: Thai Friendly is the prostitute site. Years ago, there were plenty of prostitutes (aka Freelancers) on Thai Friendly. I suppose they ran about 20% of the total. Now, the freelancers are MORE THAN 99%. I don't particularly like freelancers. I suppose I could be some sort of "friend" with one if her character was just dazzling and she had a physics degree. But that ain't likely. Honestly, even then, I'd be creeped out about it and any friendship would ultimately fail. It would devolve to the point of waving across a busy department store if you happened to see each other and then ducking away. That would be it. Plenty of truly stupid guys LOVE the hookers here. Because hookers in SE Asia aren't usually the same as hookers in the US or other western countries. They can actually make you think you have a girlfriend. For an hour. Or for the night. And many (many) will try to move in with you the next morning. So they aren't the same as in the west. The trouble with hookers, for me, is that since they are as plentiful as monkeys here, I have watched them a very great deal. I have learned that once they have made the DECISION to go hook in a bar, they are probably not "redeemable" as good and faithful lifelong mates. That's even before they've had their first customer. The odds of finding a real wife among those who have MERELY DECIDED to go to work like that are, maybe, possibly, hopefully, as high as 50%. Once they've gone with their first customer and gotten paid, the odds of finding a good keeper from THAT bunch drop to about 15%. Once they've had three to five customers, the odds of finding a loyal and loving wife drop to 1%. After they've worked like that for maybe two weeks, the odds are 0%. I've read this back ten times; it is precisely what I mean to say and exactly accurate. Since I have no interest whatsoever in sex for the sake of sex (the soul killer), those girls are lost to me and I am lost to them. Once that dam has broken inside of them, that's it. You can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Not in this lifetime. I had a doctor friend here years ago. He came from a big, unfathomably wealthy family in Australia and had lived in Thailand for quite a few years. He'd been stung and burned and fucked-over and stolen from and cheated on by Thai girls a million times, just like the rest of us. He swore off women completely for a couple of years, but then got lonely and decided to very cautiously try again to find a loving mate with whom to share his life. And he found one pretty quickly. But he was so traumatized by these girls (all SE Asian girls), that he was just absurdly careful. He lived with her for three and a half years, and during that time he had her professionally vetted a couple of times by big private detective firms in Bangkok. Both came back and pronounced her "clean", meaning no history of prostitution. Still, he waited out the 3.5 years to ask her to marry him, and she said yes. They made the usual plans and arrangements and that took six months. The wedding was to be at his family's gigantic compound in Australia, where they would live like Kings and Queens part of each year. He obtained the marriage VISA at considerable expense -- the Aussie immigrations also vetted her. And they set a date. The compound (a huge area, maybe 100 acres, with all the family's 12 or 15 opulent homes arranged around a center open courtyard of maybe 8 acres), was decorated and arranged and entertainers were called in and it was to be one big fucking deal. They flew to Australia, arriving very late at night, and they had to use a taxi to travel to the compound, maybe 80 miles from the airport. They arrived at the compound and everyone was of course asleep, so he arranged to pay the cab fare but the cabbie wouldn't take a credit card and he was just a few dollars short on cash, so he asked the cabbie and beloved to wait while he went and woke up some family and got the loot and came back. And he did just that. And he said he tapped on the dark window of the driver's side of the car, but received no response. He thought they had fallen asleep -- it had taken him maybe ten minutes to go get the money. So he pressed his face to the window and saw no one. Then he pressed his face to the back window to see them going at it hot and heavy, his fiancée' and the cabbie. He found that he couldn't cancel her VISA instantly so he put her in a hotel in the city and began paying and paying and paying and paying and going through lawyers to get her THE FUCK out of the country, and after several MONTHS he was successful. Turned out she HAD been a bar girl but had hidden it well. The dam was broken inside of her and she was irredeemable forever. He eventually came back to Thailand and, like Hugh Hefner, who said he started Playboy completely and explicitly due to an experience just like this, he became a sex monster for the rest of his life. He saw women, then, as soulless creatures who deserved only one thing on earth -- to be paid for pleasuring him in any way he could dream up, often staging whole orgies with a bonus to the first girl to make him cum. He became.....an asshole, like around 96% of the western males in SE Asia. He was constantly trying to buy girls for me but I just couldn't go there. I wasn't yet, like him, broken. Maybe I am now. Maybe not. Time will tell. But I still really don't want prostitutes. That's just as nasty as it gets. In any case, I was being swamped with hookers from Thai Friendly, and each time I would tell them politely, no, sorry, or I would just ignore them, which seemed rude, but you get used to it. But I did get a few solid hits from seemingly "real" women too. But then a curious thing started happening. Many times I would go into my profile to tweak some sentence in Thai (I posted my profile both in Thai and English), and I would find that my entire profile text was GONE. Just empty spaces. Nothing had been changed, like ThaiCupid had done -- it was all just GONE. Ah, shades of ThaiCupid. After many instances of this I placed an English line in my profile which said "ATTENTION THAI-FRIENDLY STAFF: PLEASE STOP DELETING MY TEXT." And for a long time, that worked! I had no idea why they had been deleting it in the first place, because it was about five lines that were as polite and respectful as you can get: "Hi, my name is Bob, I live in such and such area, and I am looking for a serious girlfriend to become my wife. We can travel anywhere you want. I like kids and dogs." That was about it. So why was it being deleted without so much as telling me I had written something "bad" or "against the rules"? Why indeed? I finally wrote to Thai Friendly support twice and asked them to STOP DOING THAT. I never received any reply. On a handful of occasions I got pestered and hounded very badly by prostitutes for refusing them. One in particular asked me if I wanted to go "short time". I said no thank you and deleted her from my list. Then she popped up again saying WHY NOT?! I said because I don't go with prostitutes. Her next retort was, verbatim, "WHO ARE YOU? FUCKING GOD?!" That one earned her a report to ThaiFreindly and I blocked her. Two weeks later, she was still on Thai Friendly. using the same profile. Prostitutes this outrageous were rare, but I got hit with maybe eight of them this obnoxious in the short time I was on there. I ONLY reported those who were outrageously rude, and I NEVER received a reply from ThaiFreindly, and NONE of them were ever removed. There were plenty as blatant and crude as, "HI HONEY I WILL FUCK YOU FOR ONE HOUR FOR 1000 BAHT OKAY HONEY I COME YOUR ROOM NOW OK WHERE YOU STAY?" But reporting those would have been like trying to swat locusts in a Midwestern US cornfield in 1931. So. I learned. Prostitution is the business model for Thai Friendly. That's how I see it. And the numbers back me up. The hooker factor on Thai Friendly didn't kill my interest in their website. I live among freelancers all day, every day. It's a way of life here. Hookers in SE Asia are as plentiful as lings (monkeys). Go HERE to see how THAT turns out. (It's the New York Times so the link probably doesn't work correctly). I was put off from Thai Friendly ONLY because they kept deleting the text from my profile. This whole web page has been about a dating site (ThaiCupid) that relentlessly did an almost identical thing, so isn't this just an astronomically impossible coincidence? Yes, it is. It's an impossible "coincidence". There are two possibilities here: 1. There was one line in my profile that said this, verbatim: "Please, no freelancers". Maybe that really pissed off Thai Friendly., because freelancers are their bread and butter. 2. Thai Friendly. uses the same vetting team used by ThaiCupid, to proof and check profile text when changes are submitted. And THOSE little fuckers remembered getting in trouble with ThaiCupid. I have no third idea about why they would do this. I see no other possibility. I told Thai Friendly. support to knock it off or refund. They didn't knock it off -- my profile text kept right in vanishing, almost every day. So I told them to refund or face a chargeback. And they refunded within an hour. I warn you once again that ALL "dating sites" are scumbags. They are like the sleazy "smoke-shops" in your hometown when you were eleven that sold cigarettes to 10 years olds from the wrong side of the tracks. Dating websites are run and owned by scammers and shit-holes and idiots and fuck-ups. They are the scum at the bottom of every water barrel. They are the waste down that dark hole in every outhouse. They are to be avoided at all costs, in all countries, by all people. They are cocksuckers. I hope this website saves a FEW of you from getting entangled with these fucking snakes.       Yes, yes ThaiFriendly -- I made the website anyway. Sue me. But had they not refunded it would have been SO much worse.