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...