Two Questions

So we’ve (well, I’ve) discussed the central issues of online dating as a systemic thing.  While the system is inherently interesting and ripe for parody, the prime fun comes from exactly where you’d expect: with individuals themselves.  People are, after all, an endless source of entertainment.

There are two basic questions that everyone must ask when approaching an individual via the online thing: the first is, “Should I message this person?”  The second, then, is, “How should I go about doing that?”[1]

The first question should be answered, of course, by the profile itself.[2]  This is the first place where the profile becomes a liability.  Five minutes of browsing an internet dating site will tell you a few things:

1.  Every person on the planet is “laid back” or “chill.”
2.  Everyone likes their family.
3.  Everyone likes to have fun.
4.  Everyone likes to have fun whilst hanging out with their friends and family.
5.  Everyone likes to laugh, preferably while having fun with family and friends.
6.  Everyone has a wide variety of tastes.
7.  Every woman is totally in to sports.  Unless she hates sports and anyone who likes them.
8.  Practically every woman is drama free.

Also, I don’t know what the majority of pictures posted by men look like, but the majority of pictures posted by women indicate that they spend, like, all their time wearing sundresses and hanging out with three or more of their friends in super-dark bars with some sort of creepy-ass dude lingering in the background.[3]  Either that or they spend all their time riding bikes or lying in grassy fields reading books or riding bikes to grassy fields whilst carrying books, presumably that they then intend to read.

Then, of course, there are the group pictures.  These are the freaking worst.  There’s at least a 50/50 shot that the pictures aren’t captioned, with the additional chance that they’re not captioned with any sort of useful spatial information.  So you get a picture of multiple women (who, odds are, look at least vaguely similar enough to be confusing), “In Vegas last year with my girls!” or, “Me and Jen at Lollapalooza.”

It’s fan-fucking-tastic that you and your collection of blandly photogenic friends had a great fucking time in Vegas or hiking in Banff or at the Gavin Degraw concert or whatever insipidly generic white person thing you were doing, but, holy fuck, TELL ME WHICH PERSON IN THAT PICTURE IS YOU.  I cannot read minds.  I cannot guess who you are based on some zen mind trick based on the fact that you also claimed to be 5’6” and of average build in the initial questionnaire, either.  Why?  Because about 75% of the female population is about 5’6” and pretty much everyone claims to be “about average.”[4]  It gets especially bad when there are, like, ten pictures, each without proper captions, each with multiple people, and a rotating cast.

I have a policy: if I can’t figure out who the fuck I’m about to email, I don’t send an email.  Now you might be saying, “Hold on there, Sparky.  What if you’re passing up the golden opportunity to meet the woman of your dreams because of a dumb, superficial policy?”  I’m glad you asked, hypothetical detractor.

First, I refer you to my initial assessment of internet dating: it doesn’t work.  So I pass up yet another opportunity to waste my time composing an email an email to someone who won’t respond.  Whoop-dee-do.

Second, posting a shitload of pictures with multiple people in them and not bothering to say which of those people you are indicates one of two possibilities.  The first is that you’re someone who pays zero attention to detail, at which point I am already annoyed by you.  The second is that you’re expecting me to read your mind through the goddamn internet, at which point you and I will not get along.

Third, it usually is actually possible to figure out who the person is if you really care enough to try to figure it out.  So if I really do find the person interesting enough to waste my time doing that I’m probably finding her interesting enough to bother sending an email even without having a concrete idea of what she looks like.  Especially since I’ve found that I tend to be at least slightly surprised upon meeting them in person, anyway.

So, basically what I’m saying is that if you’re going to make me work for it, you’d better be someone I find worth working to meet in the first place.  It’s really that simple.[7]

Anyway, yeah, here’s what I’m saying: pretty much every goddamn profile is the same.  This, I believe, contributes mightily to the whole, “Internet dating doesn’t work,” thing.  Because, when it gets right down to it, everyone is pretty much the same.  So when you put them all right next to each other they kinda blend together.

Oh, and the whole, “I’m drama free,” thing?  Um, how do I put this?  That sends one message and one message only:  “I am about to drop a drama bomb on you.”  Hell, if they insist it early and emphatically enough they’re saying, “I am a goddamn drama bomb factory.  I make the United States’ rather impressive ordinance production from WWII look like nothing.”[8]

This, by the way, is why I still do the internet thing.  It doesn’t really work, in my estimation, but the whole thing is still endlessly entertaining.  It’s a bizarre way to armchair psychoanalyze and otherwise anonymously judge random strangers.  Who actually wants to meet people when you have all that going on?

Anyway, that’s not actually what I set out to write here.  I was talking about two questions.  Let’s pretend that you’ve answered the first question in the affirmative because, um, otherwise I don’t know why I’d be talking about the second.  So you’ve seen something that makes you say, “Yes, I do want to email this person.”  Now you’ve got the problem of, “How do I do that?”

Now your best chance (I think) is to attempt to initiate a conversation.  I mean, people like talking about things, specifically things that interest them.  So, y’know, that seems like a good approach.[9]

This is the inherent problem of the internet dating thing, though: there’s only so much you can say to start a conversation with a complete stranger.  So you’re reduced to combing through their scanty lists of interests in an attempt to come up with something.  Anything.

Chances are good that you’re about to say all the same things that someone else said last week.  So, basically, the whole thing boils down to hoping that you say something that makes them at least think about you long enough to actually want to respond.  Which means that all but the most well thought-out original email[10] is, in effect, “Hey, you’re cute.  Check out my profile and get back to me if you like what you see.”

But you can’t say that, because that’s completely and totally unoriginal.

This is the aggravation of internet dating.  You’re pretty much damned if you do and damned if you don’t.  For some reason no one talks about that in the commercials, though…

-

[1]Well, for most.  There are plenty of people who don’t seem to ask either question.  For them the answer to the first question is seemingly always, “Yes.”  The answer to the second then runs on rails.  Their victim then gets a “wink” (which is a diabolical device that says either, “I’m too lazy to come up with something to say,” or, “I can’t be arsed to actually pay for this service, so even if you wanted to respond it wouldn’t get us anywhere.”  I have responded to two winks in my three-ish years doing this.  One was because the winker was, well, hot.  The other was because I was thinking of sending a message, anyway, and she beat me to the punch), a fairly obvious form email, or your basic, “UR hot.  Wanna see my penis?”

[2]Let’s get one thing out of the way: the primary arbiter will most likely be the picture or pictures.  Let’s not pretend that people are doing this for some noble purpose or that they’re ultimately actually looking for someone who shares their interest in 18th Century Latvian folk art or whatever.  If you’re doing online dating you’re ultimately asking yourself the question, “Do I want to see this person naked?”  If you don’t, chances are you won’t message them.

And let’s not pretend this is a, “Guys are pigs,” thing, either.  Women and men may have a different way of justifying it and might have different scales to answer that question, but ultimately if you don’t find someone attractive you probably won’t be dating them.  Internet dating is an extremely superficial exercise, anyway.  You’re deciding whether you would want to potentially date someone based on a few words in a survey and a couple pictures, after all.

[3]In Texas a cowboy hat is practically mandatory, too.  Also, at least one picture shooting a gun.  I was the worst Texan ever, in that I did not bother to own a gun, a cowboy hat, or cowboy boots.  That said, I recently briefly lamented the fact that I didn’t bother to procure cowboy boots or a tattoo whilst in that state.  I’m better now.

[4]The “body type” self-descriptors are goddamn ridiculous, by the by.  You generally have a continuum of options: slender, athletic, average, a few extra pounds, curvy, BBF/Big & Tall.  These are all pretty meaningless and pretty much everyone lies about them.  Why?  Because it’s human nature.

That said, some of this shit is ridiculous.  “Athletic” covers such a huge range of body type as to be useless.  If you’re looking at, say, a swimmer, a gymnast, a professional softball player, and a body builder there’s a good chance they would all say they’re “athletic.”  And there’s a good chance they’d all look very, very different.

Moreover, “curvy” is a stupid term.  I tend to take “curvy” to mean, “Woman who isn’t a stick figure and possessing of traditionally proper feminine appearance.”  Y’know, the traditional hourglass figure.[5]  Online dating, however, seems to have resulted in that particular descriptor meaning any damn thing the person using it wants it to.[6]

[5]I have little or no patience for the idea that women need to be stick figures, by the by.  If my first two thoughts upon seeing a woman are, “Oh, honey, have a sandwich,” and, “I’m pretty sure I would break you,” I’m pretty sure that I’m not thinking, “Man, she’s attractive.”  But that’s neither here nor there.

[6]Kinda like “decimate.”

[7]Fuck.  I just realized this could read as an argument in support of ten pictures with multiple people and no captions.  I…um…

Okay, new plan.  For anyone who reads this, if you do that I’m going to send you emails with shit like, “Hey, that brunette that’s only in a couple of your pictures is hot.  She single?” or, “So are all five of those hotties sitting around the table going to be in on this or what?”

Also, um, I shouldn’t be allowed to access the internet.  There’s just no excuse for me.

[8]Probably not in so many words, though.

[9]It is, of course, best to take this with a grain of salt, as I have been doing this for more than three goddamn years and have ended up with one second date-esque thing out of the deal.  Although, in my defense, that one that ended up at a gay bar had the potential for a follow-up date, since the only way that story could have gotten better is if I’d ended up going on a date with her gay friend and I’m always willing to consider taking things way too goddamn far just to have a good story about them.

Also, yeah, I am currently thinking, “Hmm, that would have been one hell of a story…”

So, yeah, something’s telling me it’s a good thing it took me nearly a year to come up with this one.

[10]I occasionally pull off a truly bizarre and memorable first email, apparently.  I think my best, which has long since disappeared down the memory hole sadly, was to someone who had a picture up of her dressed like a pirate and painting a child’s face and who lamented in her profile that she never met guys anywhere she went.  It had something to do with suggesting that hanging out with midget pirates probably wasn’t a good method for meeting new men.

That one got a response.  Then, predictably, it went nowhere and fizzled after about four emails.

Comments

[Firedrake]

Thank you particularly for the "drama free" comment...

Seems to me that a woman might very easily get lots of responses by looking at the "standard" profiles women post and aiming not to match them. So why don't they? (a) They worry that the responders would be weirdoes; (a.1) they don't want to seem too different from the boring mainstream; (b) they don't think of it; (c) ?

[Geds]

Every once in a while I send someone an email about how it would be so good to meet someone wh is actually drama free, so since she said it then we should hang out. I never get responses to those for some reason.

Anyway, to the question, that's actually a fairly interesting question that deserves a bit more space than I can give it here. Perhaps I shall write a post for for Friday.

This opens an opportunity: anyone have questions? Stick 'em here and I'll consider making a Q&A post out of it.