Free dating sites suck. Get on match or don't do it at all. OLD is only a tool on the belt, not an either-or proposition. It works best when you are out at night, talking to women during the day, and doing some OLD, not as the focus. If you have had success OLD once, you can again, discount slumps, we all have them.
Be persistent and systematic with your OLD. Every friend of mine I've ever tried to teach OLD to fails by wasting their time chatting up 20 y.o. Asian chicks on the other side of the country when they are a 45+ yo man and not having any routine about it.
Have a good profile with great pictures. Pick a realistic age range. Scan 500 or so profiles in your area. Pick the 50 that are attractive and realistic who have logged on in the last 72 hours, not the ones you can tell are getting 500 mails a day and inactive for 2 months, they are probably fake profiles anyway. Email 5-10 of them a day for ten days. If you don't get response you want, start digging into profiles with bad, out of focus pics that could be "hidden hotties." I've become pro at mining those out of an OLD site. Many hot women purposefully put up crappy, old out of focus pics because they don't want to be PUAd or outed as being an OLDer, which many women still see as a sign of failure.
OLD is a snowball like all other dealings with women, once the snowball starts rolling, even if it's rolling based on 5s, it tends to grow and get easier and the quality of pull goes up. '
MGTOW? Pfft. If you are going to take a break from women, do that. Nothing at all wrong with that, I'm on one right now. But as a "life statement" or "philosophy?" You can do much better than MGTOW as a base principle. Good luck.