You are welcome llan.
It’s great that you have a couple of girls who are your friends.
Keep working on expanding that number.
There is a good chance that in the process of doing this, you may either become friends with a girl that comes to like you romantically or she may be willing to introduce you to a friend of hers who would be interested in you.
Yes, bad actors in online dating hasn’t made it easy for guys who have good intentions.
However, the quality of the messages that you send when online dating are very important.
They can set you apart from other guys, especially the bad actors.
The next time that you send a message to a girl, avoid sending the kind of generic message that you have done in the past in saying, “Hi, how’s it going?”
This is not conducive to opening conversation.
This is the kind of message that many guys copy and paste to numerous girls on an online dating site thereby making these girls very unhappy to read them.
It is this unhappiness that causes them to build the defensive barriers that you have experienced.
Make your messages more substantive.
Ask them an open-ended question about something that they wrote about with passion or in great detail on their online dating profile.
This will give you a much better shot at getting a reply from her that is a lot more friendly and a lot less defensive.