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
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