In response to my previous posting regarding a 24 hour online experiment with match.com, I received an email from a friend dubiously knowledgeable in all things dating and internet related. But before I get onto that, let me just tell you a few interesting figures I read recently. At any one time, something like 96% of match.com profiles are apparently inactive: in other words, they are people such as myself just putting up a profile and not paying. Also, the 'rate of response' is apparently incredibly low – explaining to some degree the 'winks' and messages I received from totally inappropriate individuals. Men, increasingly driven by desperation, send shorter and less personal messages to hordes of women, and obviously these messages are not received with any particular pleasure. And so, they get fewer and fewer responses... The cycle continues. They pay up for another six months. I was correct: only a fool would ever pay for online dating.
And then I received this email, telling me about another site called okcupid.com – a name which is, if you ask me, particularly ridiculous. Surely a 'most excellent cupid' would do better than one which is merely 'okay'...? Anyhow, I digress. The point of this site is that it is entirely free, and you can message and 'instant messenger' people to your heart's content. I decided that in order to extend my internet dating investigations, I'd put a profile up – again, for a brief period, merely out of curiosity.
My immediate observation was that the majority of people using this site are computer geeks. Compared to the typical 40+ supposed bachelor of match.com, these people were on average younger, more adventurous, better travelled and more widely read, and wrote with higher grammatical accuracy (a fairly important point by my standards). I sat and waited for the messages to appear, and yes, they did. I think the messages were better written, more personal, responding to specific points made in my profile; very few of them were along the lines of a particularly comedic favourite: 'you intrigue me'. Hm.
To cut a long story short, I was knocked sideways a few days later. Someone sent me a message, interesting and well-written and pertinent, and I decided to respond. I could, after all, ask these people why they were using the site at least and thus gather more information for my investigation. I'd noticed in one photograph he was wearing a BarCamp tshirt and so mentioned that I know a person involved with this in Hong Kong; he responded naming the individual, and it transpires that they are friends and have been for years.
This was already surreal enough, but it later turns out that this same guy was also a close friend – and has been for years – of one of my best friends in Oxford. This friend of mine in Oxford had also, bizarrely enough, met my Hong Kong friends when he visited me there.
The world has suddenly shrunk and is balanced delicately on the head of a pin.
My profile is removed and will never be resurrected, but I'm going to stay in touch with this individual I 'met', purely because he has been granted a seal of approval by being friends with two people whose judgement I trust implicitly.
I think the experience has proved me wrong to some frustrating degree: it seems there are decent, genuine people out there, searching online for their Someone To Come Home To. It is only this most peculiar set of circumstances that mean I'll stay in touch with anyone at all from this site; I could never trust anyone I found online, and wouldn't advise any female to either. As a general rule, the longer the conversations I had went on, the more inclined the men were towards sleaze and it was obvious why they were there at all. I don't see that meeting someone online can ever give you that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you see a person in reality who makes your heart skip a beat. People shouldn't give up the chance of that lightly, just because they are so desperate to find 'someone' to be with.
'When love is not madness, it is not love.' ~Pedro Calderon de la Barca
'People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.' ~Douglas Yates
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Sunday, August 01, 2010
Online Dating
I've recently acquired a new hobby. From 4pm onwards in my Swazi hilltop hideaway, it is cursedly freezing – which means I'm spending a lot of time regaining feeling in my toes by either parking myself in the bath with my laptop propped up on the toilet seat showing whichever movie matches my mood, or I'm curled up in bed hugging a hot water bottle to myself. Just to clarify, this is most certainly not the life I'd imagined when moving to Africa.
The point is I'm 'home alone' a good deal, excellent in that I have a chance to get through some of the marking mountains that appear on a weekly basis, and furthermore in that I have even more Thinking Time than usual. This Thinking led to me needing something new to mock and laugh at, and I finally decided that creating a profile on a dating website back in the UK would serve my purposes well. I have zero intention of being a paid up member, which means I can only 'wink' at other members and can't send them any messages or respond to their 'instant chat' requests.
I went online expecting to find one group of men: the unattractive, the clearly desperate, the uneducated and uninteresting all lumped together in one endless stream of unflattering photos. (Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I would like to firmly reiterate I have zero intention of signing up for this or any other site in any seriousness; I would hate to go the rest of my life having met someone 'online'. It seems a way of having finally Given Up and just accepting that you want Someone, Anyone, and you go to a place where you know people operating with that in mind also loiter. Of course match.com has countless success stories – logic dictates it must.)
Anyway, the point is, they aren't all hideous specimens. I'm operating on the basis not all members can have lied through their teeth or spent hours with Photoshop. I remember one arrogant guy who clearly thinks he is the cat's pyjamas: he is 5ft 10, and in his list of endless requirements for his date he wanted her to be between 5ft 5 and 5ft 8. Right, so he's a successful businessman, reasonably good looking, and yet he is still intimidated by tall women? It is incredible how precise some people are with their requirements, down to specifying eye and hair colour. I can't believe they will also put in a request for the woman to be earning within a certain income range (notably, Mr Arrogant also had her earning less than him...).
There are the guys whose profiles are written in appalling grammar with spelling mistakes abundant. There are those who, without any discrimination whatsoever, 'wink' at me – I glance at their profiles and honestly, if they think we have anything in common they really are desperate. Someone who lists their hobbies as 'eating out, going out, hanging with friends, cooking' is going to have about thirty seconds of conversation to share with me, I suspect. I also like the somewhat vague 'other' that can go into that endless list the site provides.
I was also 'winked' at by someone who declares his favourite holiday destinations to be Las Vegas and Dubai. Considering I've been fairly honest on my profile, for the sake of carrying out this experiment properly, he again is some desperate individual seeking the not-so-elusive Anyone.
The problem now is that I'm being acknowledged by guys who seem genuinely nice. I'm starting to feel guilty for almost 'leading them on'. They don't know I'm not signed up and have no intention of becoming so, and so they send me messages that I can't read and request conversations I can't have. A decent looking individual with kind eyes who has a PhD (sorry, a 'DPhil') from Oxford Uni wants to get in touch; a self-employed photographer and climber from York keeps 'winking' at me; a tall, dark, and decidedly handsome guy who has travelled everywhere for scuba diving is keen to speak with me.
The site is impressively created, I'll grant them that. For anyone with an even slightly addictive personality it spells trouble – and for anyone genuinely seeking their Life Partner, I can see why they keep using such sites. It is unbelievably easy. You are on there and messages pop up telling you who is looking at your profile; you can follow a link to their profile. Presumably paid up members then send a message or start having a chat. It is also fairly brutal in that people will visit your profile and then leave without any remark or attempt to catch your attention, leaving you thinking for a moment, 'What is wrong with me?!' The first evening I went online, I swear they must have withheld the profiles of the decent looking guys, because when I looked last night they'd suddenly grown a few inches, lost a few stone, and weren't all bald or sporting a few jars-worth of hair gel.
Something else that amazes me is the genuine anonymity most of the users cling to – despite the fact their photos are up there for all to see, not one user has made any attempt to make himself 'searchable' on google. This suggests to me that yes, they are all fully paid up members, assuming everyone else would be too. For a single month, it is £30; if you pay for six months up front, you can get them for about £13 a month or thereabouts. It's an expensive business, just to find a date. Surely that money would be better spent joining some club or other, and there you go: whole new batch of people waiting to be met.
If the UK were anything like Swaziland, I'd almost understand the use of such sites. Meeting people here is well nigh impossible, particularly with my job. There just isn't time. And everyone is either in a committed relationship, impressively unattractive, or yet another of the 'single female' masses. Single men, it seems, don't head off in their droves for Southern Africa. But the UK isn't like that: it is small enough that you can date from one end of the country to the other without too much hassle, and there are countless small pubs and big clubs through which to meet people.
Maybe in ten years time my somewhat cynical view will have changed, but for now I hope to meet my Prince Charming, my Mr Darcy, somewhere slightly more exciting and relevant than via a couple of computer screens on a cold and lonely evening. I just hope I'm not making a mistake by clinging onto my decidedly pre-21st century views...
The point is I'm 'home alone' a good deal, excellent in that I have a chance to get through some of the marking mountains that appear on a weekly basis, and furthermore in that I have even more Thinking Time than usual. This Thinking led to me needing something new to mock and laugh at, and I finally decided that creating a profile on a dating website back in the UK would serve my purposes well. I have zero intention of being a paid up member, which means I can only 'wink' at other members and can't send them any messages or respond to their 'instant chat' requests.
I went online expecting to find one group of men: the unattractive, the clearly desperate, the uneducated and uninteresting all lumped together in one endless stream of unflattering photos. (Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I would like to firmly reiterate I have zero intention of signing up for this or any other site in any seriousness; I would hate to go the rest of my life having met someone 'online'. It seems a way of having finally Given Up and just accepting that you want Someone, Anyone, and you go to a place where you know people operating with that in mind also loiter. Of course match.com has countless success stories – logic dictates it must.)
Anyway, the point is, they aren't all hideous specimens. I'm operating on the basis not all members can have lied through their teeth or spent hours with Photoshop. I remember one arrogant guy who clearly thinks he is the cat's pyjamas: he is 5ft 10, and in his list of endless requirements for his date he wanted her to be between 5ft 5 and 5ft 8. Right, so he's a successful businessman, reasonably good looking, and yet he is still intimidated by tall women? It is incredible how precise some people are with their requirements, down to specifying eye and hair colour. I can't believe they will also put in a request for the woman to be earning within a certain income range (notably, Mr Arrogant also had her earning less than him...).
There are the guys whose profiles are written in appalling grammar with spelling mistakes abundant. There are those who, without any discrimination whatsoever, 'wink' at me – I glance at their profiles and honestly, if they think we have anything in common they really are desperate. Someone who lists their hobbies as 'eating out, going out, hanging with friends, cooking' is going to have about thirty seconds of conversation to share with me, I suspect. I also like the somewhat vague 'other' that can go into that endless list the site provides.
I was also 'winked' at by someone who declares his favourite holiday destinations to be Las Vegas and Dubai. Considering I've been fairly honest on my profile, for the sake of carrying out this experiment properly, he again is some desperate individual seeking the not-so-elusive Anyone.
The problem now is that I'm being acknowledged by guys who seem genuinely nice. I'm starting to feel guilty for almost 'leading them on'. They don't know I'm not signed up and have no intention of becoming so, and so they send me messages that I can't read and request conversations I can't have. A decent looking individual with kind eyes who has a PhD (sorry, a 'DPhil') from Oxford Uni wants to get in touch; a self-employed photographer and climber from York keeps 'winking' at me; a tall, dark, and decidedly handsome guy who has travelled everywhere for scuba diving is keen to speak with me.
The site is impressively created, I'll grant them that. For anyone with an even slightly addictive personality it spells trouble – and for anyone genuinely seeking their Life Partner, I can see why they keep using such sites. It is unbelievably easy. You are on there and messages pop up telling you who is looking at your profile; you can follow a link to their profile. Presumably paid up members then send a message or start having a chat. It is also fairly brutal in that people will visit your profile and then leave without any remark or attempt to catch your attention, leaving you thinking for a moment, 'What is wrong with me?!' The first evening I went online, I swear they must have withheld the profiles of the decent looking guys, because when I looked last night they'd suddenly grown a few inches, lost a few stone, and weren't all bald or sporting a few jars-worth of hair gel.
Something else that amazes me is the genuine anonymity most of the users cling to – despite the fact their photos are up there for all to see, not one user has made any attempt to make himself 'searchable' on google. This suggests to me that yes, they are all fully paid up members, assuming everyone else would be too. For a single month, it is £30; if you pay for six months up front, you can get them for about £13 a month or thereabouts. It's an expensive business, just to find a date. Surely that money would be better spent joining some club or other, and there you go: whole new batch of people waiting to be met.
If the UK were anything like Swaziland, I'd almost understand the use of such sites. Meeting people here is well nigh impossible, particularly with my job. There just isn't time. And everyone is either in a committed relationship, impressively unattractive, or yet another of the 'single female' masses. Single men, it seems, don't head off in their droves for Southern Africa. But the UK isn't like that: it is small enough that you can date from one end of the country to the other without too much hassle, and there are countless small pubs and big clubs through which to meet people.
Maybe in ten years time my somewhat cynical view will have changed, but for now I hope to meet my Prince Charming, my Mr Darcy, somewhere slightly more exciting and relevant than via a couple of computer screens on a cold and lonely evening. I just hope I'm not making a mistake by clinging onto my decidedly pre-21st century views...
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