days four and five

Day Four

I have been sent overnight, a new list of men as normal. I have my very own overnight man-courier-stork! A couple seemed ok, and I even had some of the magical questions to answer. This sending questions to someone you don’t even know grated on me for a while.  This is a service and the site tries to make it easy for you to connect with people, however I felt obliged to apply more than wanting to. I didn't want to seem rude or dismissive and I wanted to be more open minded.

To mix things up (read: entertain myself), I sent a couple of responses that were wholly untrue about myself. Such as, 
Question: "How often do you find yourself laughing?"

Answer: ‘I’m generally a pretty serious person’.

And, question: How romantic are you? 
Answer: ‘I don’t consider myself to be romantic.’

I understand that this says I’m resisting (still) and that I am quite deflective with potential new men, and also that I can be mean! But I also did it to see if I got any responses, after all that's the original reason I set out to do this. To see what it's all about and why it may be unusual or not. Unsurprisingly no one wanted to talk to a go who never laughs or canoodles.

Day Five

I wasn't sure how to use the site after sending an‘icebreaker’ or ‘questions'. If you want to keep in contact what do you do after that? What's considered forward on here? Sending a list of deal breakers, which is the guided protocol from the site that you can use if you want, seemed a bit sterile to me. I tried it a couple of times after this and it was no big deal. It was like removing anchovies in a caesar salad. You are weeding out the people who you haven't yet realised won't work for you in a far more honest way before any feelings may get hurt because at this stage, you're just window shopping.

I noticed that you can check how many times matches view your profile. Which means they can see how many times you view their profile. You may be checking to see if you’ve communicated or just have the worst internet known to man. But you end up looking like a stalker. I wondered a couple of times why my profile was of such interest. Even with the excuses I just mentioned.
From that perspective it’s no different from dating the regular way. You check people on Facebook, look at their photos, re-read messages; only on here, it’s available to be seen and actually after a while I started to get flattered that matches were possibly viewing my profile after we’d already begun communicating.

I did wonder if these methods are a bit forward. For instance, sending a list of ‘must-haves & cant-stands’ to someone who’s basic information you barely know  seems like a bit of a jump, and I don’t know how to get round it- can you not just chat a bit and chew the fat? It’s very business- 'come on, get to know each other, get it on, no time to lose!' Really? I would be quite happy to dawdle over a couple of details, to chat about absolute rubbish and see if the person actually has a sense of humour and isn’t a totally psycho from another planet, rather than going straight in to these details.

Because of that thought I began to greet all the suggested men in my inbox with the same thought ‘go on then…’, and proceed to have a look, (unless I made the first move, which is very unlike me).  Surely one point of joining a dating website is to liberate yourself from pride and shyness? The Internet can act as a buffer to hide behind and not take it so hard if someone doesn’t want to know, because, they're not necessarily rejecting you, they're rejecting a profile. If they reject at all...