Virtual Dating, Virtually Impossible

Welcome our newest contributor, Becky (nickname TBD)! We met Becky through our running club. She brings wonderful insight and material to the blog!

I hate online dating.

I’m really not a hater. But I have a theory about how the average man conducts his online date hunt. He puts together a profile (with varying amounts of eloquent language and spelling and grammatical errors, some of which I can overlook and some of which I can’t). Then he puts together a message that he can use when he comes across a girl that he likes. So without thinking too hard about it, he scrolls through pictures of girls and when he sees a cute one that he likes, he can just copy/paste the message he composed in an email to her, as if it’s his tried-and-true pickup line that he may have used for years, but he’s too lazy to change his game, so he sticks with it. This is sort of like taking your resume and whoring it out wherever you can in an effort to play the numbers game to find a job—thinking that at least a percentage of the ones you send out will call you for an interview. So the more you send out the better, right?

So guys-- does that actually work for you?

There’s a reason why I have developed this theory.  I have tried just about every dating website out there, and oftentimes I try one for a few months, realize how ridiculous the entire method of meeting people is, give up on it, and several months later go back and try it again, either forgetting how bad the experience was, hoping this time it will be better, or just thinking that nothing else is working so I should at least be doing something proactively.  And I get these kinds of messages all the time.

They always look something like this:  “Hi, my name is Joe.  I really liked your profile and would love to get to know you better.”  Often that’s it, although sometimes he adds a little plug, like “I like to work out, I’m successful at my job, I have my own house and love my dog and family, and I like to go out to eat.”  How original.  (On a side note for entertainment value, I got one the other day that added at the end “I hope you write back because I joined this website just because I saw your profile and wanted to send you a message.” 

Wow, I’m pretty gullible, but even I didn’t believe that one. Maybe I’m a little cynical, but every once in a while I’ve checked out these guys’ profiles after reading their messages, and if they’re not a complete psycho or leper, I’ll agree to meet them.  They usually turn out to be the most boring people ever. I chug my coffee hoping it will speed along the date so I can escape the horribly snooze-worthy conversation, and amazingly he thinks it was the best date ever and he suggests that we go out for dinner, or keep the date going somehow.  No thanks.  Are these the only kind of people who are online? Good grief, what would that say about me?

In an effort to put this theory to the test and hope that I can cut the problem off at the pass, I became very transparent in my online dating approach. I wrote right in my profile, “Do not send me a generic message that just says ‘I like your profile and want to get to know you,’ because you could have written that to anyone.  I am not likely to write you back unless you actually start a conversation! I put all this information about myself in my profile, so why don’t you tell me what we have in common or start a conversation in a natural way?” Shockingly, the volume of messages overall that I receive has not decreased, nor has the proportion of them that are copy/paste. This leads to strengthening the part of my hypothesis that states that guys do not read profiles.  Well, great.

So if a guy has no skills in his approach and doesn’t read a word of what I write anyway, how am I supposed to find one worth talking to? Let’s turn to the guys’ profiles. One would think this profile method would be a tremendous opportunity to be selective, and an efficient way to drill down to exactly what you want. I mean, when you have an entire database of candidates, hundreds or even thousands of guys deep, you might expect to be able to specify insignificant, yet fun details like age, height, and weight, and get a list of guys matching that criteria, among whom you could simply select some that have some common interests and are easy on the eyes.  Right?  Right?  Nope. 

Online dating doesn’t work that way.  That’s because the information in a person’s profile has nothing to do with the actual truth and everything to do with what that person had to say about himself.  Which could be an outright lie, or an exaggeration, or, less dramatically but far more common, simply unimportant.  The information that most people (and this isn’t only guys, just to be fair) put things in their profiles doesn’t really matter, like how much they like their job, or that they like dogs and eating out. Seriously?  How about you just say that you like to kick small puppies, trip old people in the middle of the street, and pig out on lard and packets of Splenda because at least that would be original.

We don’t really know ourselves very well.  Even if we’re very in tune with our own souls, we can’t possibly articulate who we are at the core in a few little paragraphs on a stupid website. So again, I ask you, how am I supposed to know if I would really get along with Greg who plays soccer and has lived in Jersey his whole life, or Matt who works out in a gym and has a job as a financial trader, or Pete who just got out of the military and lives with his parents and likes to go to the beach on the weekend? I could just agree to go out with everyone, but I don’t have the time for that, and I just don’t have the energy to try that hard.

The catch-22 for me is that I don’t like to meet guys in bars. It feels cheap and dirty somehow, and I get the feeling that the only people there are either drunk 22-year-olds or 45-year-old greasy biker guys. At least in that situation I can get a sense for if that guy is easy to talk to, if we have a certain chemistry, and whether or not he is completely creepy or psycho before I agree to spend an hour having coffee with him. Meeting a stranger in person may mean that I know absolutely nothing about him, but I would rather make a judgment call on how I get along with someone based on a short conversation with him than on reading that he likes to eat out. Maybe that’s just me.

I know, I know, the best thing for me to do is to put myself in more situations where I can meet the kind of guy I’m looking for, right? By getting involved in more activities that I like to do, or striking up conversations with guys in bookstores or something (do people really pick up guys in bookstores?). I work hard, and then I go for a run and make dinner and by that point I’m usually tired and just relax for a bit and then go to bed. I know very few people in this entire state, so I wouldn’t have people to go out with on the weekend anyway (oh, except that I forgot I don’t like to do the bar/club scene to pick up guys). So I ask you, what is a nice girl from the Midwest (who is no longer in her 20s) who is painfully shy but has a lot to offer the right guy, supposed to do to navigate the dating world that is so full of weirdoes? Is there a book called “The Art of Bookstore Seduction”? I don’t want your pity, or anyone else’s. But there has to be a happy medium between online dating and the bar.  If I figure out where that is, that’s where I’ll be. All eligible bachelors will have to meet me there.