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| It's raining men! But, unfortunately, they are not quite as well-dressed as this. |
I have this friend who shall remain nameless, and my friend
met her husband through an online dating service. She has told me of the good
experiences she had while immersed in the world of online dating, and has also
assured me that, even when the inevitable weirdo or creepazoid turns up, I will
have some great stories to tell should I choose to date online. I am still not
sold on online dating as a way to meet the perfect man for me, though. First, how
am I going to sift through my possible matches to makes sure that my potential
dates are both mute and orphans? Second, is there a filter to ensure that my
potential dates are neither too clingy, as was the person I most recently dated
before deciding for the umpteenth time that I would never date again, nor too
aloof, as was my ex-husband? Come to think of it, there should be search
filters for every conceivable fault known to mankind. For example, I would love
to rule out any man who uses the phrase “It is what it is,” or any man who
would ever consider wearing a fanny pack, except in the form of a money belt
while traveling in a foreign country.
But, unfortunately, even online dating can’t help me make
sure my potential future matches are fault free. Lately, although I would not
say I am at the point where I am ready to start dating exactly, I have
been getting kind of curious about what’s out there. Well, I don’t mean that I
wouldn’t date anyone right now, but it would have to come from a situation in
which I was friends with the person first. I would want to get to know a guy so
I could see what I was getting into before allowing the situation to progress
to a dating relationship. I think I would be much more comfortable that way,
though I must sadly say that it is difficult to even find suitable male
friends. First, as a teacher who works with 99% women, I don’t have all that
many places to meet guys, and, second, many guys either want to date you up
front, or they will not be interested in hanging out with you at all,
particularly now that we are all no longer in our twenties, and some people
don’t want to waste their time with anything that isn’t likely to turn into a
long-term relationship. But, I am not one of these people.
I would like nothing more than to have a male friend or two
who I could get to know and do fun things with, plus, it would help me to
remember how to interact with men because I am around women so much of the time. And, when you are around women all the time you tend to forget that men don’t
want to hear things like the story of the new automatic bra sizing app you’ve
found, or that Spanx are more comfortable if you buy them in a size larger than
what you usually wear. However, as I said before, meeting suitable men is hard,
even when you just want to be friends with them. You can’t go online to meet a
male friend, because, in the code of online dating, you would have to mark that
you were looking for a “casual relationship,” and then, as soon as you marked
that down, you would start receiving private messages of photos of men in their
underwear or worse. In online dating speak, a “casual” relationship means that
you don’t want a relationship at all, and, to use nineties lingo, really just
means you want a booty call.
Plus, if you do somehow manage to meet a nice man who is
willing to be friends with you, you still will likely have to deal with his
baggage in some form, or he will end up wanting to date you and you will not want
to date him, or worse yet, you will end up wanting to date him and he will not
want to date you. Although I am only really looking for friends right now, at
least until I have known someone for a while, or until George Clooney moves
into my neighborhood, I did go online to peruse some dating sites, you know,
just to see what’s available. The results were truly terrifying!
I went onto a free online dating site called O.K. Cupid. I
chose this site because Buzzfeed, one of my favorite places online to waste time,
has mentioned it several times. All I did was choose a username and password,
and I did not put up a profile or any photos. The site then allowed me to
browse eligible men in the Atlanta area. After spending 30 minutes on the site,
my main question was, “exactly what are these men eligible for?” Some appeared
to be eligible for parole, while others appeared to be eligible for an
immediate shower, and still others seemed eligible to take up residence on the
feminine hygiene product aisle of Rite Aid, right next to the box of Massengill.
I mean, many of these profiles were frightening!
I didn’t even bother to read through most of them. One of
the first things that made me stop reading was when I could see that the guy
had written a mini-thesis for his profile, meaning what he wrote was very
serious, or that he was clearly trying to be very clever, or, my favorite, when
he listed so many of his favorite books and movies that there was hardly any
room for anything else. It was also a big turn-off to me when I recognized the
names of many of said books and movies from top critics list of the last 20 or
so years. I mean, let’s be honest here folks, while we all probably have read
some award-winning literature, and watched some deep and meaningful movies that
probably make us better people for seeing them, who doesn’t enjoy kicking back
with a book so trashy or un-erudite that you have to hide it when your friends
come over? And who doesn’t want to just watch Tropic Thunder, or Team America:World Police every once in a while?
Also, aside from the novellas these guys wrote to detail the
facts that they don’t like to eat leafy vegetables, or that they are “always
sarcastic, and if you can’t deal with it call the wambulance,” there were the
profile pictures. Oh my, were they terrible! I mean, some of these photos were
such that if I were tagged in one on Facebook I would remove the tag
immediately, and then delete it from my profile hoping the online ether would
swallow it up and keep it from reappearing ever again. There were profiles in
which guys included pictures of themselves dressed up as sci-fi characters, as
pirates, in swashbuckling attire, wearing MC Hammer pants, and wearing kilts.
Now, my friend Larry likes to wear a kilt sometimes, and he is a very nice
person, and, in my opinion, the only person who I consider it acceptable to
ever wear a kilt. Men, please wear normal clothes in your dating profile
pictures!
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| Men, do not post shirtless photos on your online dating profile, unless you are this man! |
Then there were the men that felt the best way to entice
women was to not wear shirts in their profile pictures. When I see a shirtless
man in an online dating profile picture, my first thought is not, “Ooh, look at
those muscles! Does he work out?” My first thought is, “Can this dude not
afford a shirt or something? Does he even have a job? DELETE.” The other
phenomenon I noticed in some of these men’s profile pictures was that some of
them seemed to include photos of themselves all cozied up with women that I
guess were their female friends, or maybe their former girlfriends, or
something. Now, guys, let me just tell you that, at least for me, showing me
the other ladies you might possibly be out in the evenings prowling around with
is not the way to my heart! After my half hour search, I had found one man who
was attractive, wearing normal clothing, wearing a shirt, not pictured with his
former high school prom date, and who didn’t write a Tolstoy-esque tome about
the finer points of his taste in board games. However, because I am not ready
for the world of online dating, I clicked right on past him, exited the site,
and then proceeded to play about five rounds of Scramble With Friends.
Maybe one day I will be ready to start dating again, but, in
the meantime, perhaps I will just continue to enjoy the company of my knitting
and my cats.
Rene Magritte painting courtesy of http://www.wikipedia.org/
George Clooney image courtesy of http://tvrecappersanonymous.wordpress.com/
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