Disclaimer: What follows is my own limited experience on a free dating site. Two things to remember, everything I share below is painfully true and you get what you pay for.
Last week I went skiing with a friend and we, as women do, got to talking about dating and the state of our romantic lives. She had recently signed up for an online dating site, OKCupid and showed me some of her “matches,” none of whom looked too scary. Like me, she is a busy, divorced mom not into the bar scene. As a purely social experiment, I decided to follow her lead and create an account myself.
Monday, I began the new week with a new online profile. My screen name, Notadaywasted, summed up my life philosophy and I embellished my profile with minimal details and a couple of random photos which had already seen the light of day on Facebook. Within minutes the messages started coming…
Most of the messages I received were simply overtures like “Hello, pretty lady” or remarks about my appearance. None were from anyone to whom I felt compelled to reply. I had listed a range of ages I might be interested in (40-55), but this did not prevent a few twenty-somethings from contacting me, a state of affairs (ha!) I found disturbing. I mean, I already have 3 sons, know what I mean?
As the day moved on, the messages continued to accumulate. One guy became increasingly explicit over a series of unanswered messages about what he’d like to show me. Strike one, cupid, I didn’t sign up for vulgarities. With each log on to the site come suggestions for matches. Growing up, there was a kid in my town who reliably responded to any and all requests for a match with the following: “Do I have a match? Not since Superman died.” Well, I think a dead Superman would have held more appeal than 99% of the potential matches tossed my way. Strike two, cupid.
The final nail in cupid’s coffin, alternately known as strike 3, came when a friend of mine going back to my undergraduate days, sent me a message asking me how the hell I ended up on an online dating site. My response? More rapidly than Katniss’ arrow flies, I deleted my account.
DelSo 