Dispatches from the lack-of-dating front..

Every now and then, someone who I've mentioned that I've been trying online dating asks me how it's going.

The answer... nowhere.

I've had profiles up on some of the free sites - OKCupid, PlentyOfFish - for a while, and I also paid for a six-month match.com subscription (but, cheapass that I am, I got a significant discount).

Match had another promo. If you send 5 emails a month for 6 months, and keep an active profile, and still haven't met anyone, you get another 6 months free. So the first two months, I made a point of emailing at least 5 women per month. None wrote me back. Granted, there was only 1 out of them who actually sounded like a catch - and a few days after I emailed her, she took her profile down (presumably because she had met someone, and not because she was so creeped out by my email). After the first two months, though, I realized this was kind of silly - why was I trying to get extra free months on a dating site that wasn't really working for me. The fact that I was pretty busy with start-of-school stuff at work also made me less inclined to spend hours searching for women who didn't have anything in their portraits that specifically ruled me out, like wanting guy who was tall or who didn't want to date a creepy guy. (Sadly, I have yet to find a woman who does want to date a creepy guy, or I'd be so money).

Since I signed up, I've read a lot more about people's actual experiences on match and other dating sites - this slickdeal thread, this fatwallet thread, and most recently the comments on on this Megan McCardle Thread. There are a number of comments about match that I find to be true, or at least somewhat true.

One of the biggest complaints is that match makes it hard to delete profiles, plus people are lazy - so there tend to be a lot of old profiles, which makes it seem like there are a lot of potential matches - but in reality they are people who haven't logged into the site in months and are no longer interested. This does make it seem like there are a lot more people than there are. It's not a big deal when searching, because you can sort by most recent activity and see when the last time they logged in was. The problem I run into is that I keep seeing the same people's profiles over and over again - I'll be reading one, and it will seem familiar, and I'll realize I already read it a month ago.

People also have mentioned that match attracts a lot of people who aren't really looking for a serious relationship, and I've seen a lot of ads that say this outright. There are also a lot of people who want very specific thing in a date. There also seem to be a lot of people saying that it is way harder for a guy - that the balance seems to favor women.

I still plan on keeping an eye on match until my subscription, and if someone appealing pops up I'll certainly message them, but match doesn't seem to be the end-all solution I hoped it would be.

There are still a few other dating sites I haven't tried - eHarmony, the Spring Street sites (like The Onion), Craigslist, and a few others. But I'm starting to feel that internet dating may not be for me. Maybe I'm too picky, maybe I just am more appealing in person than in pixels, maybe I'm just totally undateable.

And maybe I'm putting too much emphasis on dating, like it's the only thing that's going to make me happy - maybe if I spent more time reading/learning/getting another grad degree/ taking up a hobby / starting a business, I'd care less about being single. But it would be nice to come home to someone other than my kitten (who wants to run out the door when I open it), to have someone to talk to, to share experiences with, to do couples things with instead of always being a third wheel. Plus, if I was married, my car insurance would be way cheaper.

I was hoping internet dating would work for me because dating in the meatspace hasn't. I don't understand how people manage to meet people of the opposite sex. Granted, I don't do things that put me in a lot of contact with single women - I don't really go to bars (I get drunk off two beers, and I suck at making the first move, plus I don't really have any friends who are single and drink to go with). I go to the gym at work, so I can't really hit on the women there because they are mostly students at the college I work for, and employees are forbidden from dating students. I've never understood how people meet at church - I go pretty regularly, but there aren't a whole lot of opportunities for small talk, and my church hasn't had any young adult gatherings or theology on taps recently that I know of.

So it might just be me, my kitten, and this blog for a long time...