Like you, I have been told repeatedly that the way to meet people these days is online. Everybody's doing it. Knowing as I do that social media is stuffed with fakes, frauds and trolls, I wasn't eager to participate.
But more-desperate than I cared to admit, I enrolled with three different sites over the past eight months (not simultaneously). Their names have been withheld to protect the guilty.
My first bit of advice is that if you are male, run away.
Run away in the opposite direction as quickly as your central nervous system will allow. This because if you are a male on a dating site, you are one of three things: a child molester, a serial rapist or a gigolo expert in defrauding lonely divorcees and widows of their assets.
Guilty until proven innocent is a good start.
More to the point, you should consider this: the Puritans believed the best way to determine whether a woman was a witch was to tie her up, weigh her body down with stones and then cast her into a body of water.
If she undid her bindings and rose up out of the water, she must be tied up (again!) and burned at the stake. And if she remained under water? She was not a witch.
Yeah.
And that's with the women presumably seeking a partner.
Then there are the attention whores.
There are attractive women at every age. Some are especially attractive. If their personality profiles seemed a good fit with mine, I would contact them as well.
But just as people in the early days of Facebook would work to accumulate the biggest number of followers as opposed to actual friends, many of these women seek only the greatest number of responses from men.
But know this—that is the end of their interest in you. You are merely a notch on their cyber bed post.
Naturally, these critiques inevitably invoke questions. Questions like “Ever consider they just weren't interested in you?”
Of course.
In any gathering of people, you are going to be liked by some, disliked by others and might fail to even register an impression either way with others. It's a dynamic we encounter everywhere, everyday.
I get it.
I never, ever expected to become “Man of the Month” on any of these sites. But I did possess a realistic expectation that I would encourage some interest. That there would be a woman, somewhere, who would be interested. Or at least curious.
Nope.
Let me say that I am a decent looking guy. I have all my teeth. I have just one nose, correctly positioned in the middle of my face. Ten fingers, ten toes. I am self-supporting. Healthy. I don't possess a record. I own my own home. And genuinely like women.
I am kind. Respectful. Responsible. And like you, I'm not adverse to a good time. I love to dance. Eat. Watch movies, read books and listen to music. Volunteer. I love listening to people's stories. I love getting to know them.
Oh, that's right. I am also a predator, a rapist and a swine. (I keep forgetting.)
So if you're a man looking for a partner, this is the landscape you'll encounter. Good luck. Given my experience, if this is the way people are meeting today, loneliness will become a growth stock. Invest now.
And what of birth control devices?
“Cancel!”
The crowning blow came from a woman who asked me if I'd had any dates. I told her I hadn't even had a conversation. An actual date was very, very hard to imagine.
She went on to detail the dates she'd had with three different men. It was not nice. It teetered into a full-blown rant as she described them as users, bitter divorcees and men who needed someone to maintain or entertain them until the ideal victim presented herself.
I told her I was sorry for these experiences and meant it. But I soon became aware of another truth. With the assumption that this women had provided accurate descriptions of these men, character deficits notwithstanding, they were getting dates.
I was home.
What's wrong with this picture?
I became angry. I wanted to write her back and say “Good for you. Your obviously unassailable character assessments have led to multiple dates with men who left you feeling bereft and used. Well played!
But you know what the real tragedy is? That would have been if you engaged in conversation with me. Or—gasp—we'd actually gone on a date. It's too unspeakable to even acknowledge. Oh, the horror!”
With this new realization in mind, I at last understood what an endless expanse of waste dating web sites are. (Unless of course you are mentally ill or harbor a need for masochism, in which case I would urge you to enroll in as many sites as you can manage.)
And as badly I feel for the woman who texted me about her dates, I wonder if she is someone prone to unconsciously picking men who seemed familiar to her—like exes. Studies show that we frequently will opt for something uncomfortable-yet-familiar as opposed to something completely different and unfamiliar.
It is entirely possible she continues to date her exes. No wonder the dates don't go well.
But that isn't my problem, is it? What I'm left with is the fact I reached out to something like three-dozen women and had one tepid response. (And no, that doesn't include the ranter.) Not great odds.
In the end, these sites are for attention whores and former spouses seeking revenge on the opposite sex. And I, unfortunately, am neither.
Goodbye.
No comments:
Post a Comment