Online Dating

Dating is awful and no one should do it. On an episode of Seinfeld, Jerry declared that 95% of the population is undateable, and no one has improved on Seinfeld. And in this modern age of technology we have online dating, which enables us to pull a phone out of our pocket and be reminded why without having to actually meet them. I've delved into it and have compiled some stories, so let's take a journey!

From behind a screen, people are secure. When the real-life social element of interacting with people is taken out of the equation, the filter often comes off. One woman I found decided to use her profile as a running blog on the concept of online dating. Meta. In her writings, she admitted that it is way too easy to eliminate potential mates. As an example, she wrote about a scenario in which she ran into a very attractive, well-to-do, slightly older man in an airport and was completely smitten. As in, she stopped walking and gave him a thousand-yard stare. When the same kind of man sent her a message on a dating site, she quickly found a dealbreaker in his profile and didn't even respond: he was divorced, which caused her to discard his message and move on. This same kind of person, with whom in real life she was transfixed into an eyelock, as if time had stopped and a choir of angels sang, was instantly delete-able online. Just being divorced was enough to eliminate him as a candidate. She didn't bother to learn the specifics of the situation. Maybe it was an amicable divorce, where both sides tried to work things out but simply couldn't resolve their issues and went their separate ways. It's possible that the split was the wife's fault, and that the man tried everything in his power to keep them together but it was for nothing. It doesn't matter; over the internet, she quickly moved on to the next message, and the possible man of her dreams was quickly forgotten.

She is straight-up with her assessment of the situation, making no bones about it. She admits it. One of the reasons why this happens is pure volume. It is not unusual for a woman to get flooded with messages. One woman I went on a date with told me that she created her profile by first uploading pictures, and in the ten minutes between posting pics and writing her profile, she received over 30 messages from guys. That's three men a minute trying to sweet talk this woman on her looks alone, with no knowledge of what makes her laugh, what her favorite food is, what her passions are, etc. Often times women simply cannot keep up with the massive influx of messages from dudes. The quality of the messages is an issue, too. One friend told me that every conversation devolved into the same, boring exchange. Over and over, it was mundane conversations about interests that never went anywhere. It's hard to be excited about replying to a hundred messages that are variants of "so what do you like to do?" Come on, guys, try harder. And those are the polite ones. It is hard not to be cynical when men introduce themselves with poetry such as "hi you have nice tits." Female friends have shown me those messages. That is someone's daughter, dude. Have some respect. Yeah. It is brutal to be a woman on these sites.

But ugh, these sites are brutal for us men, too. Guys can go for stretches of time without hearing anything back from the ladies we write. For those of us that try harder than what I mentioned above, sometimes it doesn't matter that we thoroughly read their profile, honed in a specific reason on why we're making contact, or spent 10 minutes trying to remember that quote from that movie we both like in order to craft the perfect message. Often times, our actions are performed in vain. It's hard to figure out what went wrong; we uploaded a nice pic of us, smiling wide to show we have all of our teeth, we mentioned that we have a good job, and our hobbies and interests show that we're fun. Even knowing that women get a lot of messages, at this point it's easy for the ole' self esteem to take a hit. Admittedly mine would sometimes, until a bi-sexual female friend experienced the same thing. Beautiful, intelligent, and funny, she decided that she was going to find a woman from OkCupid to spend the weekend with. She had been flooded with messages with guys, so she shouldn't have a problem finding a lady friend, right? She found a few profiles she liked, sent out a few messages, then checked back in a few days to discover she received absolutely nothing back. Nada. This beautiful, intelligent, funny woman was met with silence. She told me that her self-esteem was so shattered that she wanted to curl up for the weekend and hide, resulting in the ultimate quote: "I don't know how you guys deal with it." 

So, the moral is, dating sucks for everyone, and online dating makes it suck even faster. That being said, I've had some good experiences on there, as well as some people I know, but largely, I believe I've described the norm. So if you've ever wondered what you're missing out on, from either the man or woman's perspective, I hope this has been informative! And if you're willing to wade through what I've described to find someone, at least you know what you're getting into. Good luck!