Friday, March 12, 2010

Dispatches from The Online Dating World


For purposes of full disclosure, I still haven’t officially signed up for the online dating service. I just can’t. I know people have had success, but the more bozos without photos that send me icebreakers saying if I e-mailed them they would definitely respond, the more I think the membership fee would be better spent belly-up at a bar.

But I do think I ascertained another bit of advice for you out there fighting the good fight. I hypothesize that the more eager a suitor is to be in contact the less pure his intentions. I had one guy send me his phone number as an ice breaker -- saying I should hit him up because we could have lots of fun.

Interesting. My profile is exactly two sentences. What about those two sentences tells you that we would have lots of fun together? Could it be my proximity? I didn’t call him -- he was too fake-baked -- so I guess I will never know.

Then there was bachelor number two, who had a breadcrumb trail in his profile as to how I can contact him without joining the service. And because I thought he was cute and he was tall enough and because he lived in the city and wasn’t an unnatural shade of orange, I decided to go for it; after several days of humming and hawing that is.

So how many e-mails did it take before sex was mentioned? Four. Now, in fairness, he asked for the name of my novel and I told him -- Faking It, which obviously opens the door for some inappropriate comments. Responding back that he hopes I won’t have to fake it with him wasn’t what I had in mind though.

Still, I gave him another chance. Mostly because I have been bored out of my mind, that is when I’m not freaking out about grad schools and query letters. So having someone to e-mail was a pleasant distraction. He kept asking me about instant messenger and finally I relented. So, how long were we IMing before sex came up again? About four minutes.

The scary thing is, I think I read this bit of advice before, I just can’t remember where. But, because I didn’t take the advice seriously, I have to guess it came from either Dr. Phil or Steve Harvey. In this one instance, it would seem, they may have been on to something.

But hell, even fortune tellers get it right every once in a while.

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