It's not just for trolls

I seem to keep getting matched with guys I have very little in common with. Some of them have got in contact. Some of them have a couple of similar interests to myself. Two in particular look like old boyfriends. One of which even has the same name and occupation and looks like his old counterpart. A huge ‘NO’ for these guys!

I’m sorry, I have nothing against them as individuals or the exes for that matter, but that route is unhealthy. Going out with someone who looks like a past boyfriend (or girlfriend) is bad for you and for him. You will be reminded of your past and come to expect similar behaviours, jokes, experiences from this person who is completely new to you, apart from their face! (I was not listening to Usher when I wrote this.) This poor guy will be completely baffled at your crazy behaviour which has been affected by how much they remind you of your first boyfriend (or girlfriend) / the one who got away/ the one who got the dog/the one who used to steal your underwear (for instance). It’s not fair on either of you to go there. So do yourselves a favour. Don’t live in the past.

A few days later…

I have noticed, that I am beginning to view matches in a different way. I am trying to shed old habits of judging books by their covers, [relieve your eyebrows of that scandalised rise, we all do it] without too much effort, and I think it’s a good idea to examine people based more on their qualities and values. It’s quite easy to write people off based on a photo on the internet when you’ve never met them and they’re just an image to you.

I have also noticed on the site, that some match profiles and even messages from matches, have words that are underlined. If you click on them it takes you to a survey site. Seemingly even private messages and romance are open to advertising. What did I expect? It’s a dating service and we live in a world of consumerism, maximised profit and marketing.

If you were on a date with a flesh and blood person, would it be normal for your date to ask you to take a survey, offer you an I-phone and flash cards of porn films in front of you? And there I was wondering why I ever suspected Internet dating of being utilitarian.

That’s not to say that I haven’t learnt anything from this experience. I’ve learnt that surprises can come in all shapes and forms. They can be a physical bunch of flowers delivered under your nose, or a metaphysical notion of something you never knew about yourself.

Like surprises, love can come from anywhere and I think that’s where this online dating wants to show us- underneath the clear opportunity to make us pay shiny gold internet coins first.  The taboo is fading. Rumple-Stiltskin isn’t waiting for us underneath a bridge with his laptop plugged in to the hunch on his back, while he tries to convince some poor unsuspecting person that he’s the answer to their lonely dreams. Actually paying those shiny gold coins tends to weed out those not-so-honest trolls.

So if it suits you to do it perhaps you have prosaic career-driven week. Perhaps Friday-night-binge-drinking isn’t opening up any new paths on the love trail. Whatever the reason, if your current lifestyle makes it hard for you to meet Prince or Princess Charming, then maybe you can open up to the possibility that this service could help you get those Sunday night, cold winter cuddles we all like.

Getting to know someone new is exciting. Just make sure you meet in a public place at first. 

Talking while driving

It would seem I am playing the online field. I had two replies from two men via the mystic romance portal. There is talk of meeting for coffee, which will possibly help to answer the question- is e-dating worth it and did/is the experiment ‘paying off’?

If I meet anyone for coffee I need to give out my phone number. I’m not adverse to giving out my phone number online, or meeting for coffee I arranged to once before; just picky about the intended audience. It moves the exchanges from the dating website on to private contact, like I said in the first post, you never know who you're giving your digits to. But aside from being stood up the first time, it's taken the effort out of meeting someone, and is certainly a more worthwhile experience than going to a bar, getting drunk and felt up by some alcohol sodden lothario. So who's to say that this is necessarily more or less safe or worthwhile?

Everyone has reasons for being on guard.  At the moment it’s harmless fun, beyond that, beyond messages, texts and banter, it starts to become something else and the potential for people’s feelings becomes real. What happens when e-dating becomes dating?

......

Coffee arranged for Thursday morning/afternoon. The guy seems very keen- responds very quickly and when I said I may be hungover (I wanted to be honest as it was a distinct possibility rather than flaking out) he replied, almost instantly, with “I will take a hangover coffee on Thursday, it's most definitely better then nothing”.

I'm not used to up front honesty. As much as I like to be chased and that seems to be the natural order of things it does seem that sometimes it gets out of hand. 'Better than nothing' isn't up front honesty, and after all we read and hear about men being turned off by ‘women who chase without realising’, how is it that men get to escape being told this?

......

An impromptu call. An 'entity' who's built a bit of rapport, though the call was no less unexpected too.  The gears of communication have truly shifted and this has left the province online. I thought that texting made it more real but it made it more informal. When you go from applying yourself to an hour’s worth of writing every other day, in response to a (very nice) essay you received from someone, to having a chat over the phone, no effort, no editing, no time consuming typing and spelling errors- you respond in one of a couple of ways. Flight or fight. 

Your phone is ringing, you look at the screen. Panic! Wow! What can he possibly have to talk to you about? You’ve basically shared your life story with each other for the past fortnight. Okay, let it ring a couple more times- play. it. cool. The conversation begins, if a little awkward at first. This anonymous e-mailer is now a person on the end of a telephone, with a voice, a breathing pattern, accent, talking speed and most of all, intonation.  Then you realise, you do too. Excitement mingles with a bit of fear. Fear that you are now going to have to rely on spontaneous wit, rather than re-reading and spell check. You’re ability to interact with humans is being assessed. You sense your voice being scanned for ugliness, so you attempt something of a Jessica Rabbit style huskiness, though you probably sound more like Danny DeVito.

So, this particular gent, is now in fact just that. A Gent. Someone of the human orientation and not just re-interpreted binary code. I wonder how long it will be before people feel that emailing is an intimate communication tool. I am part of a generation of people who have begun to fear face to face contact as we move ever more deeply in to the digital age. I still however, find emails to be fairly unobtrusive and distant as far as communicating goes. Texting holds hands with this theory. Which generation will start to feel about emails the same way we feel about phone calls? Is society regressing from physical and face to face contact? Will we begin to count our friends on facebook with more profound meaning than those in our physical realms? Or is that already happening?