The Ruling on Online Dating (Pt. 2 - A Male’s Perspective)
By Jock | June 27, 2008
Category: Sex and the Illy
Online Dating (Cont’d from Part 1)
Arranged to meet a girl who looks like this?
Well, start looking around the bar for someone who looks like this:
The Set Up
So you asked about online dating, Pat. Bianca gives you the thumbs up. She says go for it. Well, from my point of view, here’s the question you need to ask yourself. When it comes to finding your soul mate, are you willing to put your faith in…this guy:
That’s 77-year-old Dr. Neil Clark Warren, founder of eHarmony.com, which claims to be the #1 online dating site in the world. He can’t get a boner anymore but he’s pretty sure he can find you the love of your life. All you have to do is log online, fill out a 29-part “personality profile”, and voila, he’ll save you hours of inane chatter, years of heartache, and deliver you directly to your soul mate (scientifically proven!).
Do you trust him?
If I sound a little skeptical it’s because I am. The guy looks like Orville Reddenbacher’s corpse. I keep imagining the gypsies from Marquez stories, selling snake oil and miracle cures which are really diluted turpentine. But you know what? I’m willing to give it a chance. I’ve logged onto eHarmony, I’ve got my #2 pencil sharpened, and I’m ready to fill out my “personality test”. So let’s see what it’s all about.
The Test
3% complete –For metaphorical purposes, let’s imagine that I’ve just walked into a giant version of Kildares. Right now, there are 1,000,000 females milling around in here, some old, some young, some fat, some skinny, some divorced. The only thing they have in common is that they all have computers. How old am I? 26. How many times have I been married? 0. How many children do I have living in my household? 0. How important is level of education? Somewhat important. I haven’t done anything earth-shattering yet, but I feel like I already cleared out half the room.
12% complete –Okay, now we’re at the meat market:
7. What ethnicities would you be willing to accept as matches?
(Check all that apply.)
Korean
Japanese Chinese Indian Arab Native American OtherI’ve got my fingers crossed for a half-Korean, half-black midget.
19% complete –This just floored me: under check religious denomination, they have 15-different choices for Protestant! 15!
Protestant
Assemblies of GodBaptist
Charismatic Churches of Christ Congregational Episcopal/Anglican Evangelical Free Lutheran Mennonite Methodist Nazarene Non-Denominational Pentecostal
Good Lord! I consider myself a fairly educated person, but I have never heard of something called a Charismatic Protestant. They must be the ones on TV…
And So On
My plan was to document the sign-up process as I went along, and draw some conclusions based on that. But guess what? It took like 4 hours. I feel like I just took the SAT, followed by the test NASA gives to astronauts before they go into space. Suffice to say I’ll be waddling for the next few days. The examination was thorough.
I understand that thousands of people probably meet on eHarmony (or similar sites) and go on to live happy lives together. And that’s great. If this happens to me, I’ll come back and tell you all about it.
But you know what, Pat? Bianca’s wrong, and 978-year-old Neil Clark Warren can go fuck himself (only after taking a 29-part test to see if he’s compatible with himself).
The internet is great for specialization. If you love horse racing, but can’t stand all the other sports, you can find 10,000 blogs dedicated to just horse racing. Spend enough time online and you’ll find exactly what you’re looking for.
And so it is with online dating. I understand eHarmony’s mission. By throwing up a thousand checkpoints on the way to our hearts, they can ensure that the ones who finally get through will be right, or at least theoretically right, i.e. “compatible.”
But doesn’t that take all the fun out of it? The chance? The unknown? The other day I was riding the el home. I spotted an Irish American girl on the opposite side of the car who was pretty cute. Of course, I didn’t say anything. When I made my connection at 69th St., I found that she was getting on the same local train. So I had to say something now. But just as I was going to she realized she was on the wrong train and got off.
I sat there for a minute. I watched her walk away out the window. Oh well, I thought. It wasn’t meant to be. But then I had a better thought. Fuck it. I got off the train, boarded the wrong one two tracks over, and introduced myself to her. We’ve gone out a few times now. Is she the love of my life? Who the hell knows, and who the hell cares. She’s another great person I never would’ve met had I just put my head down and gone on with my normal routine. We’ll see what happens.
And so this is my advice to you, Pat: open your eyes, dude. You don’t need a 3,000 question exam to tell you who you are, and you don’t have to meet women in the 3-hour window you spent at The Brew Pub with your buddies on Friday nights. Should you go walking around talking to every stranger you pass? Hell no. But do it sometimes. Challenge yourself. It’s fun to catch people when they’re not expecting it, and it’s fun to be caught vulnerable yourself, as you go about living. You’re not a carefully crafted 500 word explanation of yourself. You won’t fall in love just because you both love the same salad dressing.
Again, I don’t begrudge people who meet on the internet—that, too, is going out of your way to connect with new people. If you choose to go this way, I wish you the best of luck. But for me it’s like sitting in a room, staring at a fish tank all day, when the big wild ocean is right outside your window.
Bianca Porter, 26, grew up in South Philly and is a graduate of Villanova University. When not writing about sex, she works as a nurse at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital.
Jock Trotter, 26, holds a Masters of Creative Writing from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and teaches at Temple University.
Dear Abby is Dead. Every Friday, Jock and Bianca debate the “rules” for dating in the 21st century.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Jock, you know I am never wrong… Sounds like e-harmony is more for people who really want to knit pick so many different details and somehow through the internet check off boxes create/seek/find their perfect match. Seems somewhat unrealistic and incredibly time consuming but for people who are that hardcore and detail oriented about what they want (in other words they are looking specifically for a half vietnamese half mexican 4 foot 7 inch 139 lb uncharismatic protestant tranny who only uses thousand island dressing) well that is their prerogative and hopefully they will find what they’re looking for. I’m not dissing or promoting the internet dating option, but I think if you’re strapped for time or don’t want to follow someone to baltimore in an attempted train romance, it’s just an (or another) option.
June 29th, 2008 at 10:27 am
I am dissing internet dating. People fill their days up too much with crap. They are so concerned with making money and gaining power that they forget to actually live their lives. They kill themselves to make that extra dollar for no reason and have no time for anything else.
Online dating has turned dating into a quick stop at the food store. You write down what you want/need, get in and get out, then continue on trying to earn a the all-mighty dollar.
That sick stomach you get in your stomach and racy heart when you see someone you are possibly interested in is what life is all about. Feeling emotions. Have your heart broken, then suck it up and move on, it happens to everyone. People need to stop taking shortcuts through life and just LIVE IT. The meaning of life is to enjoy it, not to make money.
(Sorry about the rant. And sorry it started getting a little preachy.)
June 30th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I used e-harmony a while back but gave up on it because it hooked me up with my mom.
It is a fraud, I have my own real life version of e-harmony, it is called a bottle of Jagermeister. Down a half of bottle of that shit and you will be talking to anyone and everyone, in which case you are bound to stumble across someone who is willing to take you home. Sometimes you might even strike gold and end up with the freak of the week, or at least a chick that likes to get peed on.
Let’s all be honest here, at 3am on a Friday or Saturday; a mouth is a mouth and a hole is a hole, as long as there is a little warmth in it who gives a fuck.
June 30th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Another good thing about my version of e-harmony is it throws out all the standards and you can forget about all the ‘knit-picky’ check boxes…..you will just leave yourself with 1 and that would be the one that says ‘pussy’ or ‘dick’, depending on which you prefer or are in the mood for at the time.