My experience with online dating

Bah!

Here in The City of Frustrated Single Women, it’s easy to feel like Team Loser every once in a while…okay, on a regular basis. My friend and I had just gotten off the phone from our respective workplaces, telling each other our latest pathetic "Things were Going So Well, So I Slept With Him and Then He Disappeared" stories when G. called me again. Apparently, her coworker has some hot new boyfriend. The guy’s great, they’ve been together for a month or so, things are looking promising (read: she might soon be freed from the Dating Scene forever, lucky girl). Where did she meet him? I was expecting G. to suggest visiting the bar after work. But no—she met him on Match.com! I groaned. But G. continued, "and then I was talking to my sister? And a girlfriend of hers also met a guy on Match.com. He’s totally nice, normal, great guy. And they’ve been together for months! I think we should do it!" I remained skeptical. Cute girls like us, desperate enough to use a dating service? Just cause it’s Internet based and therefore New and Hip wasn’t going to convince me. I consider myself a savvy ‘90’s chick. I’m careful, I’m smart. I don’t go to bars alone, don’t talk to strangers, don’t let guys hold my drinks for me, etc. I think "don’t use dating services," web or not, would probably be the expected 4th item on that list.

But it was Monday. And I was horny. And there were no men in sight. I sighed and asked G., "Okay, what do we need to do?"

We both registered for the one-week trial membership at http://www.match.com. Not a bad deal. You get all the perks of being a regular member, and if you work fast, you just might find The One within a week! I registered and listed my preferences. If I was going to use this silly service, I was only interested in guys who lived in the City, were athletic, didn’t smoke (well, cigarettes) and wanted children someday. No sense in lowering my standards yet—I was doing enough of that by registering for this service to begin with!

Then came the fun part—designing my profile. At first I was a little worried, because my vital stats—blonde, athletic, master’s degree, want children, don’t smoke, etc.—fit the stupid "California Girl" ideal a little too closely. I figured slimy, superficial guys would be all over that. So I made sure to write up a profile that mentioned my drumming, marathoning, rave-attending, interests—and left out the wholesome "I like to cook and garden" side. I figured more edgy, interesting types would come my way if I skewed my profile away from J.Crew.

I learned a lot. First of all, there are prowlers on that service as there are anywhere else, and my nicely written profile really had nothing to do with who contacted me. See, Match.com is flawed in the sense that all its users can search the profile database according to their criteria (what the potential partner should look like and enjoy doing, where they should live, etc.). So even if my criteria were 22-30 year old tall athletic male who lives 6 miles away max, doesn’t smoke, yada yada, some random guy who didn’t fit a single one of those criteria could search for a 22-30 year old blonde athletic female living anywhere, and email me. (I learned later from a coworker that Matchmaker.com, http://www.matchmaker.com, at least matches you up with only folks who meet your standards and share similarities with you. Much safer.)

It got pretty gross. The first guy to contact me wrote about 6 pages of crap about how he thought I sounded interesting, from the little he could decipher of my personality based on my profile (hello, dude, like I’m gonna bare my soul on some internet dating site, grab a clue about women’s self defense here). He talked about his MBA and Ph.D. (cool, but how old are you?), how he writes poetry to women (hmmm), but when he got into his house in Topeka Canyon and how he’d buy another one in SF if we worked out, I freaked. I didn’t pass Go and hit the URL for his web site to see a picture. I just about peed my pants laughing when the image that resulted was of a 70 year old male holding a baby (grandchild, I presume?) in a swimming pool. Yiiiiikes! I did click through the site and read some of his very bad poetry. Ph.D. or not, his writing sucked. I deleted the message and called G.

The next guy sounded kind of interesting. He was German, which is usually a bad sign, but he had some cool stuff to say, played guitar (gets me every time, virtual or not), was an engineer at a web site, and so forth. However, in the 8 or so messages we exchanged back and forth, a disturbing pattern emerged. I felt like I was playing 20 questions—only without any company. He asked me stuff like, "If you could meet any person living or dead, whom would it be and why?" and then weirder stuff like, "Do you wet the bristles before you brush your teeth or not?" I was sort of entertained, and since the email thing is anonymous, felt liberated in a way when I responded. But really, what the heck are you trying to learn about someone by asking them if they wet the bristles first? And really, do I want to meet someone who volunteers so little about himself yet knows all these intimate details about me? To his credit, he answered all his own questions when I requested it, but still…I was creeped out.

Especially because it became obvious that most of these guys had a modus operendi they had crafted to woo the ladies online. Don’t try to tell me the Old Guy wrote that entire treatise from scratch. In fact, that would be even scarier than if he just had a draft he sent around to anyone who might write back. 20 Questions Guy clearly didn’t make up all his questions—if he really cared about the answers, he would have asked better questions. I started remembering every freaky story I’d heard about girls who met guys online., including the one about the woman who got kidnapped. And then there was my skanky coworker who routinely met guys on Match.com and wasn’t the least bit disturbed about it. I didn’t want to be associated with her in any way! I edited my profile to mock the service and waited to see what I’d get. There were a few harmless, even funny-sounding guys who had good jobs, lived nearby, shared interests with me. They were probably just as skeptical as I was, but maybe a bit desperate (I’ll admit, after seeing a few pictures, I refrained from continuing the email conversations).

I had started out really determined to get something for nothing—one or two dates at least. But I found myself totally disgusted by the whole thing. It’s just really sketchy, I think—the whole premise of the service is to talk to people anonymously online via superficial search criteria. Yuck. Give me a party where I can meet someone because I think he’s hot. So he turns out to be a creep later—at least I know who he is! And geez, I have enough to do emailing my friends and coworkers all day. Why would I want to spend time writing to someone I’ve never seen, who probably isn’t really who he says he is?

So my ultimate opinion of Match.com is that it blows. I’ll never do it again, and I’d never recommend it to anyone. Besides, I could never live with telling people I met Mr. Right on Match.com.

ANON

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