Friday, December 07, 2007
Mismatch
For whatever reason, I was thinking about my time as a paying, Match.com member this afternoon. Not because it was particularly interesting or fruitful, because it wound up being a total non-starter, but because I wish I would have spent the money on something more worthwhile. I joined up sometime in March, if memory serves, as they were running some kind of special that made signing up for 6 months the same price as normally signing up for 3. At that time, I was feeling a bit more optimistic, or adventurous, or Jebus only knows what, so I created a profile, transmitted my credit card information, and started building a profile. Once I had input all the necessary info…height, weight, interests, pictures, etc...I posted the profile and began clicking through listings. In my opinion, my profile was as clear and concise as possible, and I used a couple of normal pics, so that women would know I am not tragically deformed or morbidly obese.
My goal for signing up was fairly innocent and simple: meet one or two interesting women I might not have otherwise crossed paths with. I was looking for neither one night stands, nor marriage. I would have been happy meeting a girl and going to dinner a couple of times. Given the drought I've been in, that would at least have been something like progress. As it turned out, there really was not any progress to be made.
I thought it might be a little aggressive to start sending messages and/or winks right away, so I browsed profiles, picked a couple of ladies and sent them messages when I had time. People have described me with many words, but charming and flirtatious have not ever been amongst them, it wasn't a great surprise when I did not get any replies. Undeterred, I sent a few more messages over the next few weeks, as I crossed paths with interesting profiles. After my first month on, I had not received a single reply. Given my social disconnect and the nature of email, I wasn't surprised or particularly discouraged. I kept thinking that eventually I would get at least one or two nibblers. Then something strange happened, a girl contacted me. Honestly, that was the last thing I expected to have happen. We traded a couple of emails, then nothing. Assuming she didn't like what I had to say, I let it drop and pressed on.
Around the two month mark I noticed that Match provides a means of checking who has viewed your profile. Obviously, this seemed like a good way to track down potentially interested people, so I checked it out. Surprisingly, my profile had been visited by quite a few women. A couple of the profiles jumped out at me, so I sent those girls messages and sure enough, I received replies. The first girl was supposedly a working model. Judging by her pictures, it was a reasonable assertion. She was tall, and thin with good bone structure, basically what you'd expect from someone claiming to be a model. We traded a couple of messages and she seemed intelligent as well. I thought to myself, "Good times, maybe I need to meet this girl", but things stalled out. She would accept an invite, cancel with a claim of being busy, ask for a rain check, and be out or town or busy the next time I contacted her. That's all fine and good, I understand that people change their minds or decide they're not interested, but the repeated suggestions that we get together some other time started to sound like someone just being polite. The thing is, it was no big deal. If she wasn't interested, all she had to do was say that she wasn't interested. It wouldn't be the first time and probably won't be the last. I finally stopped trying to put something together and I haven't heard from her since.
The other girl just seemed strange. She was an attractive girl and she sounded reasonably sane in her profile, but her email messages were strange in a way I just can't put my finger on. Not threatening or overtly bizarre, but subliminally weird in their structure and how they moved from one subject to another without much provocation. We traded a few messages, talked about meeting up, but ultimately it went nowhere. By this point, I was around three months into a six month membership and already thoroughly bored with the idea of meeting someone online. My impression of Match is that it functions better as a hurry-up-and-hookup dating site, rather than a place where you might meet someone to have a drink and get to know. A friend I ride with was/is also a member and he has had much more success with hooking up than finding girls he would actually want to date. Fortunately for him, that is exactly what he is looking for. lol
So I let my membership lapse and wrote the experience off as another experiment in human sociology which yielded little or no useful results. Part of the blame rests on my shoulders, as my message sending tapered off sharply after the first month. The whole situation just seemed to a bad fit for me. So it is back to depending on random chance and circumstance. Not the best position to be in, but there's not much to be done about it. I think that is the most frustrating part of the whole situation. Not being able to effectively create change is tough to handle. Maybe Chicago, Savannah, or Rhode Island will yield better opportunities, since I will be surrounded by artists and people committed to pursuing art as a career...at least we will all have that in common. Unfortunately, we're looking at a year or more before I'll find out. In the meantime, I suppose I will have to be content with taking Audrey for long rides and busying myself with art making. Now that I think about it, I suppose it could be worse. :)
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