Match.com Tips and Bay Area Dating Adventures

I’ll bet there’s an Internet dating blog in most of us somewhere. Unless you got married before the Internet took off–and even then you’d be naive to think none of those were puttering online in search of infidelity. The cool thing about Internet dating is that it has become mainstream enough to minimize the LOSER stigma. “You can’t even get a date at last call? In the self-help section at Borders? There must be something wrong with you!” Now the single mainstream has realized it’s not getting any younger, bars play their jukebox too damned loud to bust out a dumb pickup line and Borders…well, sure–why not? But what if the person you’re hitting on doesn’t want you to see they’re about to purchase a Hustler and the latest edition of High Times? Awkward!

Then there’s me, guitar teacher who works mostly with kids and teenagers all day. Can’t wait around for a soulmate who happens to want lessons. I gotta be proactive!

The problem is that Internet dating has become so trendy that it seems brutally impossible to find someone with the same expectations as yourself. But then, isn’t that what all dating is like? You have some singles posting absurd grocery lists of demands in a partner: Must be over 5′10, make over $150,000 a year, be serious about getting married within a year and having kids within a year after that…basically folks trying to avoid the things that destroyed previous relationships. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that in theory, but I’ve found myself being rejected for being “too desiring of a girlfriend” (DAMN–I accidentally signed up for FRIENDS.COM! No wonder they think I’m crazy!) or not being serious enough because I haven’t presented a play by play game plan of my life before the end of our first coffee. People tend to put expectations on Internet dates that they wouldn’t project onto someone they’d met at a party.

I remember what finally pushed me to tryout Match back in the late 90s, when it was still a bit uncool. I met this cute blond who seemed to have some sort of…well, she was quirky. I met her in the music store, we talked, I gave her my card. She left her first message on my machine weeks later, late Saturday night. I called her back the next day and she hung up on me mid sentence in the conversation for–seriously–no reason other than not liking an answer to a question. But then she called back later. Oh, and she invited me to spend Thanksgiving with her Mom and brother even though we’d never even had a date yet. She asked me if I had a girlfriend…I said no. Being a dork, I returned the question and she said, “That’s personal!” Being said LONELY dork I kept giving her more chances to reveal this strange mental handicap. I drove by a Match.com billboard on the way to a gig and realized there was something seriously wrong with ME and my dating life if I were seriously considering this woman who spoke without use of punctuation. I subscribed the next day.

At this time I wrote my profile essay and copy/pasted that into my greeting email to EVERY woman in a 25 mile radius. There weren’t a lot of photos posted at the time, ya see…had to get the shotgun approach going. It worked, I got at least a dozen responses. These days it’s a cardinal sin to use this technique. Women want to feel like you’re taking the time to write them a personal note that reveals your feelings and personality so they have more reason to glance over your photos and hit the delete key. But at the time I had some quality mojo going, thanks in part to Austin Powers 2, which had just come out on video and given me inspiration.

My first Match fling was a woman with one eye. I know…the jokes write themselves. My friends did all that work for me. One of her eyes was a real looking prosthetic, so she passed for normal just fine until you talked to her for awhile, taking in her soft voice (which REALLY worked for me), looking into her sweet eyes, you realized one of the eyes didn’t really move that much. She told me she wasn’t on Match looking for a boyfriend, as she just broke up with one. She also said she’d fallen in love with a woman the previous summer, causing me some confusion because it seemed to overlap with when she was dating the boyfriend. Three weeks of happiness and I got dumped a few days before Christmas because A. I was so obviously wanting a girlfriend, which she kept stressing she didn’t want to be. B. She wanted to date some women. And C. She’d had dinner with the ex-boyfriend the night before and even though there was no hope of reconciliation (her words) they were giving it a shot anyway.

I jumped back into Match still bleeding from that wound. Dating battlefield! Came upon a really hip, streetsmart waitress studying web/IT stuff. She worked at Kan Zaman on Haight Street and there was something about the smell of hooka and sounds of Middle Eastern pop that got me really excited about this Latina woman. This was my first experience with Borderline Personality Disorder, a painful, yet mysterious mental illness that had her picking all sorts of fights with me, real and imagined. She accused me of still liking other Match girls, she accused me of objectifying women because I was reading an Entertainment Weekly that had ads with a models in it. I made a reference to Carmen Electra being a hottie and got hell for it two weeks later. I know…it sounds like she’s your run of the mill drama queen, but it’s so much more brutal than that. We’d be on a date, laughing, joking, enjoying each other’s company then…she’d get quiet. “What’s wrong?” I ask. No response, a shake of the head. Then it would turn into an argument about why she wanted to break up with me, why it was for the best. I’d be crushed into dust, agreeing that she’s right, so I’d say goodbye and head out the door…and she’d block the door in tears, begging me not to leave her. At one point we must have done that most days of the week, sometimes twice a day.

And yes, I’m aware this says something about ME for putting up with it. That’s for another blog.

Seven months of chaos and I break up for real. It results in a fight, things destroyed, police called.

She starts pursuing me two months later. Shows up a my doorstep, slashes her wrist in front of me when I tell her firmly there will be no more chances. She’s carted off in an ambulance and is safe, Thank God. The cop tells me I have to protect myself and file a restraining order, which I end up doing. You ever reach a point in your life where the only way you can help someone you love is by abandoning them? You want to get on your knees and apologize but can’t because it will only hurt them further? So you hope that someday, as they nurture the deepest hatred of their existence for you, somehow that inspires them to heal.

How’s that for sucking the energy out of the room? Sorry…

I move on, meet some women in the real world, meet some on Craigslist and other places. There are other stories in there, but I want to type about my experiences with Match in the past few years. Not that I’ve been a continuous subscriber in this time, just dabbling with a month here, three-month special there. The problems that were present in the early days seem to have magnified and spread out, confirmed by discussions with my guy friends as they’ve taken the same plunge:

1. Always more guys than women, a fact that will probably never change. Woman gets countless emails a day, proportional to how attractive her photos are (which can be SOOOO deceiving!) so it becomes cutthroat like college admissions, except instead of raising the GPA to minimize the pool of candidates they have to start with guys whose pictures they like and work from there. Everyone else gets ignored, leading to what I like to call “Match Rage”, guys getting angry because they don’t get even a polite “No, thanks.” response. On the other hand, Match has this horrible one-click rejection button that will automate the “No, thanks.” supposedly to encourage singles to reject courteously. That is infuriating too, because who wants to get a form email saying they checked you out and think you suck? How awful would it be if women made business cards like that? You ask for a number, they hand you a card, later in the week you search it for the number and see, “No thanks.” on it? OWWW! I’ve heard from women that the one click rejection inspires hostile emails, so most of them don’t use it anyway.

Then there’s the additional feature you have to pay for that lets you know whether the email has been read, which is lame because if you see the profile you wrote to online a few days later–or “active within 24 hours”–you don’t need a list telling you how many women don’t give a squat about you. Not to mention the empty mailbox is a good clue. But I’ve had pals call me up FURIOUS! “Dude, I saw this cute brunette on Match…she likes the same things I do, her jokes made me laugh. I sent her a note that complimented her, mentioned all the stuff she likes and dislikes in her profile. For two days I see that she’s ‘online now’ and she’s totally blowing me off! BITCH! Nobody could have written her a message as cool as the one I wrote!” I talk him down from his Match Rage (not revealing that I had the same boilover the week before) and talk about how we should become monks…where we would at least get to learn some cool Kung-fu.

Moral of the story, guys simply hate being rejected. Duh. On the bright side, most guys who have used Match have shared the same stories with me, so it’s not like there’s a Justin Timberlake clone being a jerk, hogging all the women. HE’S being ignored most of the time as well…though he might get a date before you.

2. Women posting profiles, but not actually subscribing. Some women (please don’t forget that I’m a DUDE writing this…I know you ladies have the same complaints about guys) are stupidly obvious about it, “I’m not actually subscribing to this site, but you can find me at rosielove at hotmail dot com.” I suspect there are enough desperate guys who will try to contact her this way, but chrissake–you let guys buy you drinks, buy you dinner, end the evening with a peck on the cheek and you’re gonna make us PAY for a service you want to use for free?

Cheap.

Skate.

Places like Match should really tell you if the profile is actually subscribing. I suspect they won’t do that because it will reveal their millions of profiles are actually bogus singles looking for an ego boost of people wanting to date them.  Guys will get smart to the scam and return to hitting on women at Nascar races & stuff. But I’ll tell you how I dealt with it…study the profiles and only write the ones who say online within 24 hours. Maybe within three days to account for busy weekends and such, but a paying subscriber isn’t going to take three weeks off from Match unless she’s found a new guy. You want to increase the odds of your emails getting a response.

3.Women dating other guys while searching for something better online??? Happened to me at least once. I’m not talking about having dinner with a different person each night. That’s fair game in Internet dating. I’m talking about being in a committed relationship with someone while searching for, what, something better? This one confused woman was calling me regularly, offering up all this great conversation until the subject of her boyfriend came up. “Oh, he’s totally cool with what I’m doing.” she assured me…until I pointed out that he’s probably afraid of losing you by saying what a monster you are for doing this. This effectively killed off the phonecalls.

4. Then you have women afraid to post pictures of themselves (which happens more on Craigslist), so they post pictures of themselves in weird lighting, their head turned or Photoshopped out, pictures of their pets??? Please, ladies–none of us wants to date your stinkin’ dog! If you make the grade we’ll accept your pet rhino, so there’s no need to warn us in advance unless we have allergies (Guys–make sure to post  rhino allergies in your profile.) But seriously, what’s up with this insecure hypocrisy? Especially on Craigslist, where hundreds of women post profiles without pictures, demanding that a guy send one first so they can decide whether to send one back? You want to meet a quality guy, right? You know that quality wavers on the Internet, so why go the extra mile of making it that much harder on yourself? Put up a clear photo of yourself! It’ll weed out more of the assholes you didn’t want to meet in the first place. “If he’s serious, he’ll make the effort to know me first.” Uh, no. He’ll get impatient and seek out posts that have pictures.

5. Strippers hoping to lure fresh meat into their clubs? I actually had a woman do that to me earlier this year. We exchanged a few emails, she gave me her number and invited me to have a drink with her at the bar she worked at. A few text messages are later exchanged and she reveals she works at Centerfolds, one of those Broadway hangouts. Oh…in one of the texts she admits she forgot where we’d met, meaning she thought I was a regular client. My pals said I was crazy not to meet her. My argument was that she didn’t offer me any discount at the door OR for a lapdance. She probably would have expected a tip too.

Then you have the dates themselves. For me, these experiences are feast or famine. No date for three months then POW…an amazing woman steps into my life. Well, amazing until problems emerge (hey, I’m still single as I write this), but you get my point. Other times I’ll have a couple dates a week with different women. Those of you thinking it’s all smooth sailing once you get a woman to actually meet you have a couple cold water surprises waiting…

The cost. I know, I know, stop being a miser, get out there and enjoy yourself, spoil a new woman if you’re having a good time. Totally! How often are you getting to take someone new out? Maybe all the time if you’re a swinger, but if that’s you I doubt you’d need to be on the Internet to meet people. But what if you buy one woman dinner and she never calls you again? Then another? And another? The one you took out for sushi (idiot) on a first date and she starts talking about the amazing chemistry she had meeting a bartender the night before. Hey, she was only out with friends…love happens in unexpected places! Every woman is different, as some expect you to pay, others insist on splitting and at least a couple are willing to treat you (hopefully you’re near a Vegas chapel when that happens). I have no system of advice here. You just do what you can and hope you don’t look like a jerk.

So a first date feels like an audition for a second date. I go by the One Hour Rule. If your date has to leave within an hour of meeting you, don’t bother with a followup because she’s already off meeting someone else. You don’t have to be happy about it, but you didn’t REALLY leave that one hour coffee break thinking you had a girlfriend, did you? And for every “rule” that I preach here you can find an exception, the woman who really liked you, but had to get to work or whatever. But here’s the thing…guys tend to act like morons on these sites. They make sex requests in the first email (NOT ME–others, as I’ve been told), go for a sloppy kiss on a first date when no signal was given to do so, they write several emails to follow up the one that was ignored (I’ve had success following up ONCE after being ignored, but never more than that…then again, I’ve never bothered.) So women have a hell of a time dealing with men on these sites, seeing how goofy we act. It turns them off from signing up, turns them off from giving more guys a chance. If you could simply be a gentlemen on your first date and be a scumbag after making it into her bedroom that would generate more positive word of mouth for the first date crowd. More women sign up, more women willing to meet you, stuff like that. Sigh…I’m not even sure what I’m talking about.

But for all my complaining in this blog, I gotta admit there have been some smashing success stories. Beautiful women met, funny stories exchanged, laughs, fears and other things in between. Internet dating has worked beautifully and failed on epic levels, sometimes with the same person! I look at it as dating practice. You hide in your office all day you’re not developing any social skills. Then you finally meet a great woman, score a date and act like one of those freaks the woman on Sex and the City make fun of. And there’s nothing you can do about that–you’re going to screw up! But the cool thing is you’ll–hopefully–learn what not to do when you meet the next amazing woman who could change your life. Then you keep it together and she actually decides to stick around.

That’s my theory, anyway.

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~ by keithmoore1 on August 1, 2008.