Playing the dating game....

After trying a couple free sites with no sucess (okcupid and PlentyOfFish) without any sucess, I finally broke down and joined match.com last week. I signed up for the six-month plan. It helps that they have 50% fatcash thru fatwallet, so I'll get half of the fees back.

They actually have a money-back guarentee for the six-month plan - if you set up a profile, and email at least 5 people each month, and still haven't found someone after 6 months, they will give you another 6 months for free. Which begs the question - should I email 5 people just to qualify for the money-back guarentee. On one hand, it's free, but if you can't find someone worth emailing, do you really want a longer membership?

Match does seem to have a better selection than the free sites. It gives me hope - I feel like most of the ads on free sites were for women who had kids, had serious drama, were horribly disfigured, or were still in high school. The women on match seem to be more normal and better looking, and it's reassuring that there are still some nonrepulsive women my age who are still single.

But most of the match.com chicks seem pretty much the same - they love the outdoors (madanthony gets sunburned when he looks out the window), love drinking in Canton and Fells (madanthony lives in the 'burbs and gets sleepy after two beers), and swimming (madanthony can't swim, and has been known to injure himself in the shower).

match does have a "wink" feature - it's not quite an email, just a "hey" to let people know you exist and to look at your profile. I have winked at a few women... and have yet to hear back from any of them. I don't even think any of them have viewed my profile - I don't know if that's good (they haven't seen the wink yet) or bad (they were so repulsed by my picture that they didn't even bother looking at the profile). The wink makes sense to me - I've put work into my profile, why should I write something else? match does say that emails get twice the response as winks - but is that because people email people they are serious about and wink at people who they aren't sure would have an interest in, or because people prefer emails?

I figure it's another resource, and it's worth a shot, but I would be surprised if anything came out of it.