You have seen her picture online, so there is no doubt in your mind that she is beautiful. She could very well be the girl of your dreams, you think, searching for her address in the dark as the clock approaches midnight. If she is not, though, at least you will get some action. I mean, she did want to meet up in the middle of the night.
You walk up to her doorstep, all of this flooding your thoughts. So, imagine your surprise when this beautiful woman does not answer the door, but rather, a middle-aged man who says, I am bisexual, if you want to come in.\
You can laugh now, but it's a true story told to me by an anonymous online dating aficionado, let's call him ""Poindexter."" If you choose to enter the world of online dating, this could happen to you.
But, luckily for you, I embarked on my own online dating expedition to serve as a guiding light; to warn and escort you through this foreign but booming trend.
When I first began my online dating endeavors a little over a month ago, I soon realized that online dating is a service. It is like finding a good attorney or the best insurance agency. The multitudinous options are quite different, offering various qualities of service and different features, and if you want the best outcome, you are probably going to have to pay for it.
Now as a college student, $20 a month or more is not something I am willing to dish out. So, I Googled ""online dating."" Sure enough, within minutes I had my profile all set to go on the cost-free dating site:
www.plentyoffish.com.
Plentyoffish.com was started not by a corporation, but by one man named Markus who, according to the site, was ""sick of seeing faceless corporations prey on people looking for love."" Some of the site's features include e-mail, their version of instant messenger, rating pictures, public forums where people can voice dating opinions or experiences and the ability to add or be added to people's favorites lists.
If you are interested in online dating strictly to expand your list of one-night stands, look no further than plentyoffish.com. It is free, and most of the people on the site seem to be looking for that same thing. If you are looking for something more serious, AVOID IT LIKE THE PLAGUE. The ""profession"" box is left blank on many profiles, or it's obviously false—for example, I received an e-mail from a guy whose profile indicated that he was a writer, but his grammar was worse than my three-year-old cousin's.
So, in conclusion, plentyoffish.com seems to be populated by white trash. Even our friend Poindexter agreed that plentyoffish.com was mostly filled with people in the market for ""booty call"" and not much else.
Just because the attitude is casual, however, does not mean the effort is as well. Poindexter, a 24-year-old man, joined the online dating world when he was approximately 14 or 15. His hobby began because at that age he was ""very anti-social and not very popular in high school."" The Internet gave him the opportunity to ""meet people without being social.""
Over the years, Poindexter has developed several useful strategies that he employs to get ahead in the online dating game. For example, he does not limit himself to one dating site. If he sees a picture of a girl that he likes, he saves it to a disk just in case her profile goes down.
Also, he messages many people at once, to increase his odds of meeting someone worthwhile. One time, he reported sending 216 messages in 48 hours. It may sound extreme, but within three days he had only received e-mails from five of the girls, and only two of the five were willing to meet him. On average, he said he goes on a date with a girl he met online approximately once every other week, although he is now accustomed to being stood up by many of the prospects.
Basically, therefore, if you want serious results, you have to work for them, and learn to deal with the frustrations of extremely sparse feedback.
Online dating is not just another outlet for meeting people, it is a subculture. It is an addiction to seeing the ""new message"" post, to clicking that browse button just one more time, or to knowing that an entire world of people is waiting on the screen in front of you. It is socializing in a unique form, with boundaries and norms foreign to its outsiders.
Searching for either your mate, a friend or nothing more than Poindexter's ""booty call,"" the online world is beneficial in the sense that it allows you to efficiently sort through thousands of possibilities in a moment's time. Rather than meeting five prospects at a party and hoping one of them has at least some of the qualities you desire, you can skip the small talk and delve straight into the basics: who the person is and what he or she wants. And instead of considering five candidates, you can decide from a pool of more than five million.
Would I recommend it? Yeah, sure, why not.
Though I must say that if you do not wish to find yourself chopped into tiny pieces and buried in someone's trailer park, dish out the cash and join a reputable site. And, if nothing else, it is just another way to meet more people.
Another anonymous source, ""Reginold"" said, ""Everyone in the real world has one thing in common: They cannot wait for their next time to speak. On the net it is a give and receive conversation. You do have time to express how you really feel about a particular subject because no one is cutting you off by taking their turn to speak. Life is a garden, dude. Dig it.""
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