Hi TS, I went through all your posts in this thread so far (didn't bother reading others' replies yet.. saw a few trolls d lazy to process everything). Looks like you're kinda contradicting yourself a bit, but not necessarily a bad thing -- on that, I'll focus on being open minded.

You said you don't want dating app, that's not a problem but... You seem open to chat with guys in this forum - so are you open to dating app or not? In a way, LYN itself is a platform to get to know people online and eventually meet IRL - that is enough to say, it's kind of a dating app. The good thing about LYN is, you can learn more about someone based on their past threads and posts, and I'll just warn you now: this forum has a lot of fake or crazy personas and even in this thread, I recognise some ady. I don't wanna say names so you'll just have to judge for yourself.

If you have certain doubts against dating app, perhaps you can head to the pinned thread to read about general tips on what to look out for. If lazy to read through then can filter by my posts. I was skeptical of dating apps back then, but desperation/desire/loneliness grew with age so I tried
Took me about 2-3 years on and off apps, until I found someone 2+ years ago. While it's not all roses and flowers, we're working it out slowly. There are also a lot others who met their current spouses from an online platform so as long as you play by the books to protect yourself, you should be fine.

Furthermore about your preferences and constraints... First of all, let's not deceive ourselves: men generally like bokbokchui younger women). While it's true you shouldn't be as picky, it doesn't mean you should just accept anyone. Really, if you've lived happily so far as a single, why ruin your happiness by getting together with an asshole or loser just for the sake of pairing up, right? So it's good to know your standards, but sometimes you need to go out and fail to realise some of that.

For example, I used to think "looks doesn't matter, as long as the guy is nice." Then I matched with a guy with really bad quality photo and he didn't look good there. We chatted quite well and met up. Guess what, my first impression when I met him was, "oh damn, he looks worse than in the photos". It was around pandemic so we were masked, so guess what when we say down and took off our masks? HOLY SHIT HIS TEETH. He had good career, got condo, got honda, never dated before, a doting uncle to his niece (so much so, he interrupted the meeting 15mins or so, just talking to the niece). In the end I called it off because I didn't like the flow of conversation, and ultimately, I couldn't accept someone who doesn't have the social awareness to groom himself better (oh yes, he has no friends - I also did not like that). He was a nice person even until the end, he took the rejection rather well, no one has to block anyone and we just moved on.

...So for you, take the time and effort to just go out and try meeting more types of people. Of course you can set your own boundaries, e.g. gambler and smoker is a deal-breaker to me. Divorcee with kid... It was a deal-breaker to me in my late 20s, but let's just say I'm happy I don't have to rethink that yet
Just remember that every hard constraint you add narrows down your chances of meeting someone, and only you will know whether that is for the better or worse. Lastly, it's a long game and you'll get frustrated every now and then. It is a chore to get to know someone from scratch often, so give yourself time and space to reflect and recharge. The aim with every encounter is to know yourself better to be better for the next one.

What was your bad experience there?

Personally I've stopped using ever since I committed to my current relationship, but before that I used two apps: FB dating and CMB (go do homework a bit, read the pinned thread ya).

CMB generally had higher quality profiles but the time limit didn't work for me as I'm slow to warm up, I didn't want to share my private info early on.

FB dating was very easy to set up, so you can hop onto it very easily but on the flip side, you end up with a lot of low quality profiles. If anything, I liked the feature where I can choose to match up with a person with mutual friends. For example, when I saw my then-stranger-now-bf profile on app, there was a mutual friend so I got interested.. I mean, hey the mutual friend was my first crush back in high school so I couldn't help it ok but anyway we hit it off with Japan travel talks so here we are, going there soon this year
Just be warned, as much as I want to give FB dating the credits, I also felt frustrated sometimes as I had to filter a lot of them because there were a lot of fake/scammer profiles. Also, my friend who also tried it after I recommended, she met a person who was my schoolmate (so I was the mutual friend), but they weren't compatible after all... So my story might just be a fluke.

Btw, it's technically against forum rules to spam consecutive posts in a short time, so please use the quote function (tap/click on Quote buttons for all the posts you want to reply to > more options / add reply)
Ehh... well I'm not really hiding anything with that pink tag yknow anyhow I'm also comfortable to be a bro/dude/ghey on the internet.

I guess it can get pretty traumatising if first few tries ady met a weirdo... Reflecting back, were there red flags you shrugged off during the chatting period? Intuition is very helpful to ward off potential bad apples; it's basically your subconscious telling you that someone/something is good/bad by reading subtle cues like body language, things that your conscious self did not pick on. Our brain is really quite brilliant in that, so give more credits to your unknown self.