After a month, I can say with honesty, “I tried.”
I really did give online dating a shot. I meticulously crafted my profile. I added flattering pictures, answered hundreds of questions and filled out daunting blanks asking vague questions no one can answer in a sentence or two. I listed intriguing interests, and I lied about my weight, because it’s the Internet and I can. And after all that effort, I exchanged pleasantries with a grand total of three people who seemed remotely desirable and worthwhile.
Despite my misadventures in online dating, I can’t deny the fact that everyone is doing it. And yet, there’s a stigma. Some just can’t conceive of the idea of falling in love online.
The Internet as matchmaker is nothing new. Since the dawn of the Internet, people have been going online in search of love.
The tech-savvy could log into chat-rooms and forums and seek their romantic fortunes. According to brainz.org, the “first major Internet dating Web site [was] the combination of kiss.com and match.com,” both of which were registered by the same person in 1994 and 1995.
By 1998, Internet dating met Hollywood with the film “You’ve Got Mail,” in which Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan find love online. Dating over the Internet went mainstream, and this sparked a boom of these types of sites in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The 2000s began to see huge rises in Internet dating, and now there’s an online dating site for almost every religion, sexuality, race, location or niche interest.
Today, online dating is widely used by people of all ages. In fact, according to a 2009 Match.com survey, 17 percent of married couples had met online. However, in spite of these staggering statistics, there still seems to be a stigma to meeting your match online. The idea of online dating simply turns some people off. It might seem too impersonal or a little scary.
I fell into the category of being perturbed by online dating. Countless numbers of my friends had accounts with OkCupid, and some had even met their significant others through the site. But to me, it seemed like online dating was reserved for an older generation, people with kids or people who were in some way defunct. What if the person I meet is a serial killer? But, newly single and my curiosity insatiable, I made a profile.
I was hopeful I’d meet that special someone, and we’d go on a coffee date and laugh like hyenas at each other’s jokes.
Within minutes of my OkCupid profile going live, my inbox was flooded with messages. Though my profile stated I was interested in both men and women, I was only receiving messages from men. It seemed that mostly, it was guys near my age, some stu- dents, who offered up a tentative “Hey” as a way to start a conversation, but there was no shortage of men over 40 trying to gauge my interest.
On OkCupid, users answer a series of endless questions. The site takes users’ answers and compares them with other people’s, and this is how the site determines a match. OkCupid divides the match rating into three categories: “Match %,” “Friend %” and “Enemy %.” Older Christian men with children who messaged me clearly ignored our “Enemy %.” Had they looked closer, they’d have realized that my profile states I don’t want kids and I’m an atheist. I don’t think we’d have gotten along.
After some tampering with my profile and inserting an addendum stating that I wasn’t interested in threesomes (I received an alarming number of these kinds of requests), I thought I had gotten somewhere. A really sweet and seemingly attractive guy had gotten my attention. After some witty banter, we exchanged numbers and everything was great until he immediately launched into a detailed description about his anxiety disorder and his depression. Needless to say, that was a no-go.
A few weeks later I received a message from a quirky and intelligent girl. We chatted back and forth a bit and had a lot in common. I offered up my phone number, and that was the end of that. I didn’t hear back from her.
An older gentleman had a different approach. He sent me a long, poorly-written poem that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I thanked him for his efforts and politely informed him that he was out of my age range. I make it a general rule to not date people who are old enough to be my parents.
Notwithstanding my own ill-fated attempt at finding my better half online, some users have had pleasant experiences with online dating. A little over a year and a half ago, psychology senior Jodi Shipley found love over the Internet.
“I dated a guy in Nashville for nearly six months that I met on Facebook through my roommate,” she said.
According to Shipley, the relationship was great while it lasted. Though the two were dating long distance, they were able to travel to see each other every few months. The couple felt a connection in spite of their digital meeting. However, Shipley felt the stigma of online dating.
When asked if her friends raised an eyebrow to the curious circumstances of her relationship, Shipley replied, “Oh, of course they did. They thought I was crazy. They said there was no way it would last.”
The couple parted on amicable terms, and Shipley affirmed that the experience was an overall positive one.
However, ISDS sophomore Becki Meinhold had a different tale to tell, a story that was more similar to mine. Meinhold made a profile through OkCupid. Speaking about her experience using the website, Meinhold said it wasn’t too bad for the most part.
“Just a lot of people looking for someone to love them,” Meinhold said.
However, she received no shortage of sexually suggestive messages from “cliché douchebags” who referred to her as a “sex kitten.” As for using OkCupid in the future, Meinhold said, “I could see dating websites being more practical for older people.”
Desperate or not, the statistics don’t lie. More and more people are turning to online dating to find the Romeo to their Juliet, the Bonnie to their Clyde or the Pepé Le Pew to their Penelope Pussycat. And many of them have been successful.
As for me, I never got my coffee date. But until I do, I’ll stick with looking for love in real life, not online.
