The Internet dating world is a cesspool

Totally sweet use of "Needless to say," bro. You totally railed that ass day and night until you found yourself a future ex-NickMordo. 8)

I just read through this whole thread. It was the perfect use of half an hour after a long day at work. I don't see myself ever dating online, mostly because I'm fucking horrified of the concept but also because I'm way too ambivalent about my sex life (or, as it stands now, my lack of one).

Besides, I'd reject any woman with a grammatical error in her profile.

 

The one positive thing I can say about dating sites/services is that even a shitty one can help you find somebody.

Most of the online ones weren't even round when I was still single. But my mother found out about this dating service the local JCC was running. My brother and I had been bugging her to start dating again, so she agreed to sign up as long as I would, too. I had never even dated a Jewish girl and she was hoping to change that.

Each person would fill out a profile, which was the front and back of a page, and submit pictures. They were all in two binders, one with men and one with women. The pickings were...slim. There were four women anywhere close to my age when I started. One signed up as a favor to the guy running the service. The other three were all friends who signed up together. I found this out when I went on a date with one who almost immediately told me that her ideal man was Randall Cunningham, not somebody I'm ever going to confused for.

I end up dating another one of the friends for about a month, but that was going nowhere. The service was pretty much a joke. My mother went once and quit.

I'd pretty much given up when I got a request to meet from a woman who had signed up more recently. About a week later, we had our first date. We celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary this past July.

 

Haha ... the new girl I've been dating for the last two months? Met at a bar in hilarious fashion. A lot better looking and less desperate. I lucked out I suppose.

 

Perfect!

 

Pre-internet dating, a TV anchor/reporter friend of mine did a story on video dating. He went to the local company that did the videos. The standup in the middle of his story was his 10-second video date greeting. I believe the line was "Hi, I'm Al. I like horse racing and restoring old homes, and I don't make as much money as you think."

Station management didn't think that was very funny, but a woman who signed up for the site did, and they've been married for something like 18 years now.

 

Approves of this message.

 

His partner on the show tried to horn in on his date. Al said... 3... 2... 1...

"I don't think so, Tim."

Sorry. I'll go hang my head in shame.

 

Online dating is useless. Everyone says it helps you weed out people who aren't right for you because you get to know people before meeting them, or whatever. But I think online dating is just as superficial as going to a bar. It all comes down to photos. If you like the looks of the person in the photos, you respond and give them a shot. If you don't like what they look like, you don't.

And allow me to deliver a rant about eHarmony. Maybe seven or eight years ago I tried to sign up with them, and went through their whole personality profile survey they have you do when you register. 45 minutes of my life that I'll never get back. At the end of the process, the site gave me a message saying they've analyzed my responses and determined that they don't feel they can match me with anyone. It said they feel it's more honest to tell people that than it is to take their money when they feel they can't help you.

Well, that's very noble and all. But it made me feel undateable. And hell, maybe that's true. I can laugh at myself. But it really did make me feel like shit. Probably two or three years later I finally read that they reject a certain percentage of people, and it may have to do with your answers to religion or whether you're divorced (which I am). I guess it didn't like my answers, because I got rejected. But the damage was done as far as I was concerned.

Between that experience and the fact that I think it's all superficial, I'll never touch online dating again.

 

Well of course dating is superficial. Who wants to date someone they aren't attracted to?

 

Sure it's superficial. But you can learn at least a little bit about the person via their profile. I've been seeing someone I met on Match for four months now. And while I thought she was very cute from her photos, if it wasn't for her incredibly witty, funny and intelligent profile, I probably wouldn't have tried to contact her.

Things are going quite well, and I give the thumbs up to online dating. I've used it before and I've always managed to have a few good dates (and some bad ones, but you have to deal with that; I've had plenty of bad dates with people I've meet "in the real world," too). It's not perfect, but nothing is. It's a very convenient way to meet people in a very inconvenient world.

 

I forget where I read it, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that eHarmony will also reject your profile if the survey returns any indication of depression.
http://digg.com/newsbar/topnews/Why_eHarmony_rejected_you

Your reaction is perfectly understandable; I felt much the same when eHarmony told me to take a hike. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say it's useless -- clearly there are plenty of success stories out there -- but it hasn't worked for me and, to be honest, it only gets more and more difficult to muster up the energy to jump back in again.

 

Not that it makes me feel especially proud to say this, but if I'm paying $20 to $40 a month for a dating site, then I kind of hope they screen out the depressed people. How are you going to be attractive to other people if you don't even like yourself that much? From their perspective, I imagine it's more desirable to just give people the boot right at sign-up, as opposed to fleecing them for a couple months membership when your computer algorithm suggests that there is no chance they'll find a good match on your site. (To put it into terms from earlier in the thread: I'd rather just have a girl say she's not interested in me than giving me the "let's be friends!" spiel.)