I recently entered into a time-honored tradition in the brief history of the Internet: Online dating. This is a subject that is positively rife with material to spoof on. From Adult Friend Finder to EHarmony to Match to Plenty of Fish, this is a bottomless well for a jaded yet hopeful, sardonic yet sincere, hardened softy such as myself. Being a heterosexual male at the tail end of his youth, I find myself, more often than I’d care to admit, cursing this frustrating world of eternal hope.
Coming up with the material for the first post in this series took about 12 minutes. The online dating world is saturated with information, philosophies, aphorisms, admonishments and wisdom. And that’s just the women that I have, like, 76% in common with.
I only have a subscription to one online dating site, and yet I get emails seemingly every other day with my daily suggestions for long-term bliss. And it is long-term. These women’s musings about Life, this enigmatic concept on which at least half of the women on this site have a profound philosophy, range from the mundane (“Life is like a box of chocolates” [Okay, maybe this specific musing wasn’t quite so trite, but it might as well have been]) to the pragmatic (“live every day to its fullest!”) and everything in between. And, in case you were wondering, Life is also:
“… short ….”
“… not about waiting for the storms to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain … “
“… doesn’t always have to be an up hill climb [sic] …”
“… an adventure …”
[And something to …]
“… enjoy [life, that is]! Are you game? …”
Oy vay. Not at the moment, I’m not. I’m exhausted just from reading the headers. Then there was this one …
“… Life is not worth living if one can’t laugh …”
Nevermind the seemingly macabre undertones of this statement that seem to admonish the perspective suitor that if he is a generally somber person, for whatever reason, he should probably just eat a bullet. Anyway, more on that subject later. Oddly though, regardless of age, number of children, if they “never married” are “currently separated” or “divorced” (I won’t include “widowed”, that would just be callous) a helluva lot of them seemingly are ….
“… starting a new chapter in their life …”
And given their personal stories, many of them have chapters like a Vonnegut novel; with a single sentence. One woman boasted of having a very fulfilling career (I assume it was her career, she didn’t seem to have much else going on and her Occupation listing was “Other”) at hoola-hooping flaming rings in a rather lengthy list of geographic locales. And hey, I’m not saying anything derogatory about having a career as a flaming ring hoola-hooper, but I would think you would never be at a loss for interesting guys if you travel to Toledo and Hawaii and Denver and Phoenix and Hoboken and Mexico and Timbukfreakintu as this woman claimed to have done. But maybe that was her thing. She wanted Bob the insurance salesman to come home to after jet-setting with Jorge in Tijuana and Joshua in Telluride. Whatever. Godspeed.
And yet, with all this seeming depth regarding the intricacies of life come to by every type of woman from executives to servers to nannies to massage therapists, there seems to be a very common thread of reticence in volunteering any other information because a staggering amount of them cap off a 4-5 line profile with the statement that they are “not very good at talking about” themselves and if you want to know more “just ask!” Presumably these are the women who get the most “Your hot” and “Hi” messages sent to them.
But perhaps the most frustrating thing about the site I speak of is the fact that many women specify that they haven’t ponied up the cash to actually have a membership and thus can’t send or receive emails. Thus, if I do send someone an email, I believe all that happens is the site contacts them and tells them they have 74 unread emails and she needs to show them the duckets if she wants to see those emails so pay up. Which makes no sense to me because not only am I sending emails not knowing that it’s to a woman who can’t ever read it and but also I get the added bonus of thinking all the emails I sent out last night were for naught and I really am as undesirable as I thought I was when I was eating cookies and drinking milk out of the jug at 3 AM in front of an open fridge.
It’s tricky terrain I’m venturing out into with my gloves-off profile in which I quote many of my female friends about what a catch I am. Unlike many of the other guys who I’ve heard through the grapevine are nothing more than musclebound jerkoffs, I have a brilliant, if slightly damaged, mind and a soft heart to bring to the table along with my pretty beefcake physique.
Here’s hoping this works. And if it doesn’t, no worries. There’s always ChristianMingle.com
My Zen Brain 