How to Pare Down the List of Available Women?

[Speedbump]

Dear Community --

My question is how does one go about winnowing the list of contacts? One of my big problems has been keeping a manageable amount of women to correspond with. I am able to easily discard the scammers and the ones with such poor English skills that communication is fruitless. I am talking about in the first 1-10 letters.

But after that how do you decided which ones to keep talking to? Each woman is attractive, age appropriate, intelligent, educated, etc. Everyone shares the same interests (active rest, nature, sport, reading, cooking, traveling, meeting new people, etc, etc). They all are either well balanced or hot tempered but cool down quickly.

Any advice or suggested lines of inquiry would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
Speedbump

[Blues Fairy]

That's an easy one.

Keep the ones interesting to correspond with, and discard the uninteresting (though potentially good matches).  Whether your pen-pal is interesting to correspond with or not, should be clear within those same 1-10 letters.
Chances are, if a person is an interesting pen-pal she'll be equally interesting as a conversationalist, and vice versa.

[Gator]

Agree with Blues Fairy.  Concentrate on those with whom conversation is interesting and flows at your pace.

You should be calling these women after 3 emails.  Telephone conversations are spontaneous, the same as real life.  You may find that those who write ok in English have trouble talking.

Are you writing women from 10 different time zones?  You will take a trip soon (hopefully), and you can not be traveling all over the place to meet women.  Dependent upon your time available for traveling, concentrate on 2-3 regions.

After that, a subconscious filter will have you wanting to talk with only the best.  The others will fade away.

Good luck!

[JohnDearGreen]

My question is how does one go about winnowing the list of contacts?  
...Any advice or suggested lines of inquiry would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
Speedbump

Pictures, interests, and emails are common ways.  
But ladies frequently look different in person from their pics.
And email personality frequently bears little resemblence to face-to-face personality.
Emails are good for eliminating ladies from your list, but not of great value for moving them
to the top of your list.

Here is another approach.  Have you and your potential lady friends sign up for free at this
web site which does a psychological compatibility test.   5 red hearts and supposedly you are a perfect match?
http://www.loverussiangirls.com
I know nothing about that dating site, so use at your own risk.  But the psych test is free.

[BillyB]

But after that how do you decided which ones to keep talking to? Each woman is attractive, age appropriate, intelligent, educated, etc. Everyone shares the same interests (active rest, nature, sport, reading, cooking, traveling, meeting new people, etc, etc).

Good job discarding the insincere women. Since all women you're communicating with have fine qualities and you like them almost equally, you need to find the one that is most into you. The ladies probably have other men they are communicating with so some of those fine ladies will not make much of an effort for you if you visit them. If marriage is your goal, you need to find one that has the same goal and who values marriage greatly. Some women are okay with short term or long term relationships but I suspect you and most men here are looking for a woman for life.

Over the next few weeks and months, things will be more clear for you. You will naturally eliminate some of the ladies and they will eliminate you. Hopefully you don't get back to zero women and have to start all over.

I don't know if you're a VO or VM kind of man but if you don't find any ONE woman that you click with, you may go VM and visit the ladies as friends to learn more about each of them to make a better decision.

As Gator mentioned some women will have trouble speaking to you but you can gauge their enthusiasm when you call based off their tone of voice. Some women, since they don't speak well, may be shy and deny you their phone number at first. Don't accept that as an answer and don't visit anyone that doesn't give you a phone number. Say something like, and translate so they get  the point. "I understand you don't speak good English. Don't worry, you don't need to be embarrassed. It's pleasant for me just to hear your voice. Tell me what day and time to call and I will be happy to call you."

Getting a RW to write you is one thing, getting her phone number is much harder. Some ladies who say they don't speak good English actually speaks good English. Other's have overestimated their abilities.

[Speedbump]

Thanks for all the good advice. I was originally planning on calling after I pared the list down! Blue Fairy, they are all interesting! With most of the women i'm at the 4th or 5th letter stage.

I have thought I should discontinue communicating with some women because their English is not very good and their letters are very short. Is that a fair approach? I am afraid I will miss out on a diamond in the rough!

Also BillyB, how can I tell if a woman is into me. I have limited my search to woman in their mid 30's to mid 40's (I'm in my mid 40's (surprise!)). Most of these woman are very polite and modest. I've weeded out the women who come on too strong because I thought they would be scammers. Maybe I should not be that quick to judge? I was on Ukraine date and there were so many scammers I got tired of dealing with it. Right now I'm talking to women from EM.

And JDG, thanks for the link. It looks like you have to register to use the persoanlity test. If I do that then I will find even more women! But I think I will use it after I pared the list down.

I have a vacation to Odessa in August planned. I will meet a friend of mine and his wife from Prague. My friend is the one who told me I should try to find an EE woman (he married a czech).

Another friend of mine connected me to a wonderful woman from Siberia. She works for Shell Oil and she was coming to New York. We emailed and chatted on Skype and really hit it off. I went to New York to meet her and guess what? No chemistry on either of our parts! We still had a great time seeing the sights. So this time I thought it would be best to communicate with several women and meet them early on to avoid that disappointment of a VO.

Again thanks!

[ML]

Another friend of mine connected me to a wonderful woman from Siberia. She works for Shell Oil and she was coming to New York. We emailed and chatted on Skype and really hit it off. I went to New York to meet her and guess what? No chemistry on either of our parts! We still had a great time seeing the sights. So this time I thought it would be best to communicate with several women and meet them early on to avoid that disappointment of a VO.

You were lucky you were able to see the pitfalls of a VO in a relatively painless way (being in your home country).

[BillyB]

I was originally planning on calling after I pared the list down!

Try to get phone numbers sooner and through phone calls you can narrow down the field easier. Do not eliminate women based on letters so quickly. Some women have told me they don't speak good English and they don't write English good or write me the longest letters but when I get on the phone with them, they can talk for a long time and they underestimate their abilities and speak English pretty good. Some ladies haven't spoken much English since school which may have been years ago. They just need some practice and they'll be fine.

how can I tell if a woman is into me.

On the phone, you can listen to her tone of voice and gauge her excitement when you call. To most men she crosses in life, she may talk to them as a friendly manner and no more. If she thinks you're special, she will give you special treatment. She may say "thank you" a lot. She may ask for forgiveness if she thinks she made a mistake when speaking English. She will seek your approval and ask your advice on certain issues. You can't determine chemistry over the phone but you can find a woman that will be determined to make things happen with you when you visit.

With some women the conversation on the phone may seem clumsy and there will be long periods of silence. With other women, the conversation will go smooth and you will be able to talk a long time. Obviously you want to choose to visit a woman who you feel comfortable talking to.

Talking on the phone with the ladies is much more fun than writing letters. Letters has value in initiating contact and learning about a lady but phone is fun especially if the lady is excited that you called.

[I/O]

One of my big problems has been keeping a manageable amount of women to correspond with.

Write everyone a short letter advising you are coming to visit several women. That'll do the trick.

[ECOCKS]

Sounds like you're thinking about a WMVF for your eventual trip.

Pick a travel date and let them know you're coming over for some face-to-face meetings to help you make some decisions and start "pushing" a little on their thoughts and beliefs by making it clear what you want to know about them. You can gauge their reactions and focus on having a relationsjip with you by which ones disappear and which buckle down and put more effort into building the relationship with you.

Hope that helps.

[Daveman]

All excellent comments so far.

I would add something else to consider. You really need to be clear in your own mind as to what you want/need in a partner.  Get serious and write it down.. must haves, cannot tolerate, etc..

The personality test is a great idea actually.  It can't guarantee perfect compatibility (after all, there's only one test for face to face chemistry), but it can match traits rather effectively.

One thing I did was ask some female friends what kind of a woman (traits) they think I *need* in a partner (we often confuse want and need).  Not only were there some interesting and hilarious conversations, but actually rather informative.  Not that I wanted Mama to pick a woman for me, but sometimes a woman's insight into such is amazingly accurate.  Take what makes sense, and ignore the rest.  The idea is to get focused so you don't settle.

[ECOCKS]

Ask some women who know you, very good way to work on your an evaluation Dave.

Take it anther step and actually work up a SWOT assessment on yourself.

[Kuna]

It's too late to do this but before I started writing I created a list of those things I was lookign for and those things I would avoid...

Age Range,  hobbies/interests, preferred lcoations, jobs/qualifications/careers, Children, etc, etc, etc

As I started writing I found some that were obviously OUT... that was easy.

There were others that I found myself compromising on,  and when revisiting my list I forced myself to be true to my original thougths.

Others will abuse me for this, but I decided to ignore all incoming messages and built effectively an empty profile to ensure no one has anything to write to me about.

After about 40 or so letters,  I had around 5 I was very interested in...  but there was one profile on freepersonal.ru that was bugging me.  I wuld go back and look at her profile every few days...  everything fitted my original list and she looked really cute (and cheeky)...  but she was 1 yr under my minimum age limit.

Damn it...  I ended up writing and almost instantly I was confient she was the pick of the bunch.  I visited,  we clicked (as expected),  we married and now have the two most beautiful children you can imagine.



How should you pare down the list...  get tough man.. .tough on yourself.  Which ones are most likely to be a harmonious partenr for you.

Start asking some tough questions... 

Tell all of them one very definite thing you won't compromise on and wait for their reaction.

Do When you're getting tough on yourself take a critical look at your emails - not theirs... which are the ones you're compromising on.

I don't think you mentioned age range,  if any are pushing the boundaires of reason,  exit NOW!

Check shoe size... if any of them have MASSIVE or tiny feet,  dump that girl...  shopping will be hell for the rest of your life...  errrr, feel free to overlook shoe size if you so wish... but it's a thought huh!   

If you're more critical of yourself rather than them you will find out much more about yourself.

When seeking a relationship like this knowing yourself is more important in some ways than knowing the ladies.

Good luck.

[kievstar]

Since your visiting in August take your top 10 women right now and cut it down to five.  Make phone calls and if some of the 5 do not work out find women to replace to get back to five.  Once you eliminate a woman never bring her back in play.  If you have 5 women to meet that is a good number.  If you have more than 5 that takes a lot harder work on logistics.

[Al_C]

Since you are not the only one communicating with multiple potential mates, your ladies will do some of this work for you as they pare down their own lists.

[Dave13]

Everyone has provided some good points, but its not real until you meet, letter writing and having some talks on the phone may help, but the first meeting will truly let you know if the relationship has a chance to proceed, and its also true for the ladies.

[SFandEE]

I have thought I should discontinue communicating with some women because their English is not very good and their letters are very short. Is that a fair approach? I am afraid I will miss out on a diamond in the rough!

Some men will only meet with women with whom they can communicate freely in English.  I think it is valid if you are trying to be more focused.  There are a lot of very nice women "diamonds", so unless you have plans to marry more than one--tongue in cheek.  This might be a good way to make the best use of your time and the time of the women who are anticipating meeting you.

You also might want to to look at it as a way a woman is showing her willingness and preparedness to leave Ukraine or Russia for the West.  Intelligence too--learning other languages is a demonstration of intelligence.

[Speedbump]

Thank you all for your input. All the advice was dead-on.

I had "mission creep". I had a very good idea of my criteria before I started but I let it slip on a few ladies. That forced me to really re-think my criteria. I gave it some thought and decided I was right the first time. Now I have my list of wants/don't want taped to the computer.

Phone calls and Skype were excellent ideas. That really helped me to see who was interested and who was not really interested.

Ouch, but true! I got pared down by a few women.

The cream did float to the top.

I think I was just overwhelmed by the number of choices. I probably should have waited to post and things would have sorted themselves put eventually. But I am glad I did. All the suggestions were gold.

Thank you all very much.