Among the various seedy tasks incumbent on the dating blogger is trawling the internet looking for quirky sites that might be worth testing out and writing about.
A few months ago, I found one such site. It was called Find Your Face Mate and its unique matchmaking shtick was that of bringing together partners with similar facial features. Humans are naturally drawn to people who resemble themselves, apparently.
It sounded a bit arrogant, not to mention creepy, to want to go out with someone who looks like you. But then again I'd been on various dates with girls I considered uglier than me, so maybe this would at least be a step in the right direction. I uploaded my face and awaited the deluge of hot lady Dan-a-likes.
[Related article: Why online dating is so addictive]
Two weeks later, I received an email: Dan Juan, you have a new FaceMatch!
I logged on, excited to see a) if the girl was hot and b) if she actually did look like me. I was surprised at my match's identity for two reasons.
Firstly, the person was from the Far East. And I mean China, not Essex. Secondly, they were definitely, unmistakably a man.
He is gay, I assumed. I have mistakenly inputted my search criteria as 'man seeking man' and am receiving only gay facemates. I checked my settings only to confirm that I was not registered gay; but they'd just decided to send me a man anyway. It seemed they had taken this lookalike thing too literally.
I logged off in a small huff, then a month later I received another email. Cue a second wave of excitement. At last, a woman who would match my beauty and we would marry and our kids would look like us too and... oh, it's another man.
His username was "Woopygoldberg" and he was definitely not my type, although he did admittedly bear some resemblance to me (white, pasty-looking).
The blurb on the site says it uses "sophisticated facial recognition software" and a "proprietary algorithm". I don't know what that means, obviously. It's such a confusing bundle of letters that I'm not even going to bother searching for a definition. But I do know that, whatever it is, it's not doing its job.
When I received a third email from Find Your Face Mate a few weeks after that, I knew what was coming and I was right... another geezer. I signed out forever and dismissed this invention as the worst dating website of all time.
Until today when, lo and behold, I stumbled across a Canadian newspaper article about the Find Your Face Mate website.
It wittered on about couples being attracted to similar-looking partners blah blah, then I read the line 'the website launches on July 7'.
But I've been using it for a year. What's going on?
Well, I'm not sure exactly, but I fear that the site I signed up to was a dummy site that has only been used by me and three other men in the last 12 months.
That's the bad news. But the good news is that as I'm still registered on the site, from 7 July onwards I will be sent date invitations from lots of women resembling me. I'll keep you posted.