The Perils of Online Dating

So I’ve stepped fully into the now and embraced online dating. Well, maybe not embraced, but I’ve at least given it a quick hug and an awkward pat on the back.

This might be surprising to many of you (ok, none of you) but I spend a lot of time online. I’m online all day at work, and sometimes at home, and so I go around to a lot of websites. I’ve idly perused match.com many times, and finally, Beth convinced me to put up a profile and see what happened. So with her help (“Uh, Beth? I can’t think of one non-boring thing to say in this profile”) I wrote up a profile and downloaded some pictures. It scared me at first, because within hours of my profile being posted, it had been viewed like 700 times. And there was a lot of winking. For those of you who are uneducated on match, winking is how you let someone know you’re interested in them. It’s a stupid term, because if someone winked at me in real life I’d be like “Um, yeah. I don’t think so.” But on there I’m alright with it, mostly because on there I have a delete button. People can also email you, and it’s all very anonymous – they don’t even know your name until you tell them. So I got some emails as well. If by "some" you mean "about 75."I answered like four. Because there are a lot of weirdos out there and also a lot of short guys. I'm tired of dating guys my height -- if you're under six feet tall, move along. See how shallow I am while still acting appalled at the shallowness of others? Anyway, I even got one from a guy I went to high school with who did not recognize me. Beth and I decided that in that case, a better screening process was in order. Not that he’s dangerous, he’s just weird, and the full extent of that doesn’t quite come across in his profile.

So a decent looking guy emailed me, and I read his profile and he seemed ok, so we decided we’d talk via instant messenger. I have a separate email account for just such an occasion. Anyway. We made small talk for a while until he asked me what I knew he’d been dying to ask me since we started talking: “So, uh, what does ‘curvy’ mean?” (because match gives you options of body descriptors on your profile). I put “curvy” on mine, and he wanted to know what I meant by that, because he doesn’t like girls with big hips or stomachs. And then he wanted me to give him my hip measurements. Uh, ok dude – I’ll get right on that. So glad I used the other email.

The best story thus far is this 42 year old guy who has sent me four emails over like the 3 weeks I’ve been on match -- and I’ve responded to NONE. He’s a big cheeseball. His profile says “I know you're out there and sweetie, I'll find you. I'll feed you strawberries as we share a bottle of champagne in front of a raging fire to celebrate us.” Not kidding. I copied and pasted that straight off his profile. So his emails are like “you’re stunning and our paths crossed for a reason – we’re destined to meet” (*gack*) and then when I don’t respond he’s like “does persistence pay off?” (I’m going to go with “no”) and stupid stuff about how I should take a chance on him and I wouldn’t regret it. Dude, I regret that you ever saw my profile, I’d most certainly regret emailing you. I could block him from contacting me, but since I’ve got an evil streak, I don’t, because even though his emails make me throw up in my mouth a little, I get great amusement from them as well. Amusement I like to pass on to you, the reader. Heh.