ONLINE DATING, Is there a General Type of People Who Prefer It?

At the beginning I had no stereotypes about online dating and dating sites, but now I think I'm beginning to get a bit disappointed.

I've had a profile on the dating site Plenty of Fish for a long time (about 2-3 years).

When I just created it I wasn't looking for any serious relationship, or any relationship, really, I just sometimes met people from there and went out for a drink or coffee with them, that was it.

Then I hid my profile for a year or more (when it's not deleted but people can't see it).

Now I am a bit older and actually want to find a real soul-mate, someone to have a relationship with.

So I "un-hid" my profile, and now I am deciding on the people who I want to meet and taking these dates a bit more seriously,

and the picture is not very good:

First, I get many messages, and am selective about who I meet.
(For instance I only meat guys with good, normal photos (NOT photos of them drinking or with bare torso in the washroom taking pictures of themselves for instance),

Also guys who take time to make nice, well-written messages, and who, in general, are interesting, polite, educated people.

So it can be said I am pretty good at recognizing so-called "red flags" and only meet the "most normal" "good" guys on POF.

And still, that doesn't help!

So far I met about 5 of these guys.

Well, it turned out, as soon as they realized that I will not be having sex with them in the next week they disappeared!

In addition, a couple of them turned out to be strange and difficult in other ways.

A couple of them just kind of lost touch with me (probably because on a dating site there is an impression that there will always be someone better and people never stop).

Moreover!

When, as I said, I came back to POF with more serious intentions, I browsed the profiles using the same search criteria as before (approx. age, education..) and surprisingly, I saw many of the same faces (both some of those who I met and those who I did not meet, but whose profiles I just remembered) They are still active users, at the top of the search results, either "online today" or "online in the past few days"!

Many of these guys are in their late 20's supposedly, according to their profile, looking for a serious relationship, or even "actively seeking"..

And they are still "actively seeking" it two years later..

This finally made me think that perhaps a certain type of people is mostly attracted to online dating. Maybe people who are overly perfectionistic, or with unrealistically high standards.. or maybe online dating makes them this way, because of the online dating similarity with "shopping", and the impression that there will always be someone better…

Also, have you ever noticed that the person who you meet in real life (fellow student, co-worker) is valued much more than someone you meet online, though objectively, the person you meet online may be better, more handsome, more successful etc. Still their value seems to somehow go down a lot, just because you met that person online…

Do you have personal experience with using online dating?

What do you think of dating sites?

Do you think people who meet online unfortunately take each other less seriously and value each other less?

Also, all that I said here I meant In General. I didn't want to say that Everyone who uses online dating is a certain way, I meant a general trend..