Losing my online dating virginity
Call me fickle, but after my tirade last week against the concept of online dating, I signed up this week to a well-known singles' site. Just to see what it was like.
At least, that's what I was doing at first. I signed up 'for free', uploaded a photo and started browsing through women, 'for free'. Within about 10 minutes, one of these free women sent me an email. But I couldn't read it... unless I paid. As an innate
ly curious man, I had no choice but to reluctantly reach for my credit card.
I know lots of people do online dating - a quick look at the site I'm on tells me there are 58,623 of them 'Online Now' - so what follows is probably old news to you. But for me, this opened up a whole new world...
Pages upon pages of women's heads. Of all descriptions. Haircuts and smiles, beckoning me to click and find out more. It was overwhelming. So I customised my search.
The process reminded me of a football manager simulation computer game I used to play. In the game, you'd pick the attributes of your hypothetical ideal player and then trawl through a list of names from Arsenal to Argentina. When you found the player that best fit your criteria, you'd make a bid.
And here I was a decade later, scrolling through pages looking for something I wanted. But instead of imaginary football players, it was people. Real people.
My thought process went something like this: no, yes, no, maybe, no, maybe, no, yes, no, maybe, maybe, no, no, no, no, no. Because after the initial excitement, it soon gets repetitive and enthusiasm wanes. Plus there are lots of ugly people. And yet, the chance — however slim - of finding your soulmate on the next page makes the whole thing horribly addictive.
Meanwhile, there was still the email from the mystery girl who had lured me into this intriguing new dimension. The message I'd received was reasonably entertaining and came from a woman with a very attractive profile picture whose English, although perfectly coherent, had a hint of foreignness about it. I replied.
So that was day one. But I didn't prepare myself for day two, which was very much like day one — and that was the problem. Once again I was scrolling through endless faces but I wasn't sure if they were the same ones I'd looked at yesterday. My latest 'football manager search' had rendered an unwieldy 84 pages of results and my quest for love quickly descended into a soul-sapping slog with about as much romance as an episode of 'Top Gear'. I casually flicked through ladies as if I was looking for toasters on eBay. I was also perturbed by the fact you couldn't look at anyone's profile without them knowing about it, thereby removing about 95% of the joys of online stalking.
I was interrupted from this growing disillusionment by an IM request. The email girl from the day before wanted to expand our relationship and I chatted to her for about an hour. It was good actually, she seemed funny and smart.
Inevitably, the online soon began seeping into real life. On the tube, every woman I saw I imagined as a thumbnail image. And by day three, I had become adept at whittling down profiles. Due to my shallow nature, I quickly realised I should steer clear of the following: photos that only show part of the face from the same specific angle, girls who refuse to show anything below the neck, expensively-made but somehow slightly tragic 'professional' shots. The less shallow part of me avoided hot girls who had no concept of punctuation, plus anyone using the phrases "work hard and play hard" or "I like socialising with friends" (which seemed to be about 60% of candidates). At the risk of sounding mean, it was pretty tough to find a profile blurb that was genuinely interesting or witty. With a handful of exceptions, everyone just seemed a bit dull.
Yet I sent a few messages out - most of them unreturned. I also received - and ignored - emails from people with subtle usernames including sexylady_croydon and oooyeah84.
I brightened up when I saw the IM girl pop up online again so I decided to 'wink' at her. But to my surprise, she did not wink back. The next morning, I quickly logged on to check that this was a temporary glitch in our affair. But my wink had still not been returned. What I experienced next shocked me. It was the grave, thudding feeling of rejection. A woman I had never met had managed to put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. And I had actually paid money for this.
In the meantime, I'd been exchanging emails with another girl but she had not convinced me she was worth pursuing so I decided not to reply to her latest message. And rejecting her made me feel bad — another dubious privilege I was paying for.
This was when I realised online dating's sinister side. Or more specifically, that it's just a virtual version of real-life dating, which can be cruel and unforgiving. Being online doesn't shelter you as much as I thought it might.
And that's probably why I felt mildly elated when the IM girl finally responded to my wink, and accepted an invitation for a drink to become my first online, real-life date. I feel that's a tale for another column...
Looking for love? Find someone on Match.co.uk
