I Suffer Online Dating Woes So You Don’t Have To
Another in our apparently continuing series of suffering and experience begetting knowledge and humility. Expect installments until I’m broadsided by an Expedition on my way to work one morning.
The world of online dating has been much discussed, yet for every person I’ve met who’s done the virtual rounds there’s two more that don’t have a clue where to begin finding their sweetheart on this great big wide web of ours. So here’s a little rundown, site by site:
MySpace – Though commonly mistaken for one, MySpace isn’t a dating site. No, this site is for thirteen year olds (and those whose social faculties haven’t developed beyond age thirteen) to accumulate hundreds of inane superlative messages from friends and well-wishers. MySpace users print and store these messages, and at the onset of the winter months combine them with saliva and hair gel and work them into a thick paste that they coat their personages with, emerging from the resulting shell for the first My Chemical Romance concert of spring. Truly a natural spectacle, but not your best bet for a fun Friday night. Moving on.
Match.com – An average site for average people. It’s hard to have anything against the nice, bland folks haplessly looking for love on Match.com. A thousand ex-quarterbacks will marry a thousand ex-cheerleaders thanks to this site, and you won’t know until they hop a tour bus to your city with their toddlers. Might be a good fit if you’re a homebody. Too bad they’re getting sued for fraud. Next?
Craigslist – In all seriousness, Craiglist personals has become a magnet for spammers and phishing attempts. The only reward for sifting through the hoaxes are some of the saddest, bitterest, most pathetic creatures ever to take up a keyboard. Fellas: there’s no girl under 160 lbs. on here who you’d want to talk to; the nice ones are nice ‘cuz they’re big. Ladies, two words: roofie colada. I’m not sure I’d even trust Craigslist to find me a couch anymore, much less a date. What else we got?
Consumating – This hip, attractively-designed site was started as a joke in the wake of endless babbling in the web design community about tags. The concept is simple: a dating site that uses tags, branded to appeal to the hipsters who’ll be in on the joke, and rounded out by some breezy Questions of the Week. The community is still relatively small, so good luck finding a date if you’re not in San Francisco or Brooklyn (it’s a site for hipsters, remember?). Most of the users seem to be there to outwit each other with clever tags that substitute for flirting (ex: omg_best_tats_evar or lets_listen_to_old_nirvana_records_ironically), or alternately to check out each other’s haircuts and cat pictures. If it’s hipster ass you want, you’re better off with a Burning Angel account and a box of tissues. But wait! There’s more suck!
Spring Street Personals (aka The Onion Personals, aka Nerve Personals) – This used to be a pretty cool site. Sure they had the same reductive, insultingly one-dimensional profiles as other sites, but it’s all about the people, right? Time was, you could almost always find a novels-n-cafes type girl on a Spring Street site. A few months back, however, they overhauled their system to compete with MySpace and other more “social” sites, offering blogs, friend networks, and a billion other badly implemented features that nobody looking for a date gives a lukewarm shit about, much less is willing to pay exorbitant fees for. Now their user base is starting to resemble little more than the honors class kids that the Match.com kids used to beat up – brighter than most, but not, y’know, interesting. And if one more girl says her favorite sex scene is from Secretary I’m going to flip out. More?
Geek2Geek – No. Pictures. Oh, I get it. It’s a site for geeks. Geeks are ugly. Why not just mail out a brown paper bag with every account signup? Appearances aside, there aren’t interesting people here, either. “Geek” isn’t the same as “smart”; it just means you’re hella into unpopular stuff. I have every faith that one could find their D&D diva or LARP ladyfriend here, though. Oh god, are we done yet?
Make Out Club – Are you 17? Can you write three pithy, offputting sentences or rattle off a list of bands where you were asked for a personal description? Is there an excess of x’s in your AIM screenname? Can you take a picture of yourself looking disaffected because you were whoring yourself to other indie lackwits on the internet well before MySpace came along? All of the above? You just might be a Make Out Club member. Congratulations: the door prize is dying alone. A brisk step to your left and…
The Impersonals – Another tiny alt-dating site. Simple, inoffensive, but still at that stage of community development where there’re just enough users to be significant but not enough to actually get you a date. Good hustle, though. But what’s that in the distance?
OkCupid – You know those tests in cheap women’s magazines that are actually kind of fun to take if you’re in a doctor’s office or drunk? Imagine an entire dating site predicated around pairing people who answer those tests similarly. Oddly, it attracts more of the Geek2Geek types than the Match.com types, though just barely. Probably used to be a good community. But then, if you had a time machine, getting a date wouldn’t be your top priority, eh McFly? And it’s not the last!
eHarmony – What happens when you really, really want to have a baby? Or you lose a tooth in a bar brawl with your buddies and decide you’re too old for this shit and it’s time to git yourself a lil’ lady and settle down? You go to eHarmony, friend, and have the creepiest – and apparently most effective – online dating experience that a moderate amount of money can buy. Note the photographs of happy-looking, moderately attractive, middle-of-the-road type people, all paired off with a partner of the same race. eHarmony: when you’re ready to settle.
Which, by the way, you should be, because we’ve just covered ten sites and you’re still here reading, presumably without anyone on your lap. But wait, you say, what about Lavalife? What about Plenty of Fish or True or Yahoo! Personals? Is there any hope?
Maybe. Online dating works for lots of people, and for some personality types more than others. I’m not actually here to tell you how to find love online. Chances are good that if you need a manual, it ain’t gonna work out for you.
The sole kernel of wisdom I do have to pass on is this: online dating is, fundamentally, no different than met-her-in-a-bar real world dating. It’s confusing. It waxes to an overwhelming plethora of choice and wanes to a unfathomable loneliness-in-a-crowd. It’s commoditized at every turn. It’s unfair. Its risks barely seem to outweigh the rewards.
But you’ll probably try it anyway. Then you’ll go back to more “traditional” means of meeting people, and then you’ll probably try it again. I’m just re-entering the “traditional” phase of that cycle, if you couldn’t tell, but inevitably I’ll be back. No matter.
Love is not just a click away. Not just.