Why I probably won't find love online...

The book I am reading right now Super Crunchers, which looks at the impact that databases, regression analysis, and other methods of applying math and computing power to the huge amounts of data that are now available is impacting a number of areas, such as medicine, business, and education. It's increasing profitability and accuracy, but with the usual reluctance from the old-guard and privacy concerns.

One of the examples of applying algorithms was dating sites - it specifically looks at eHarmony, and talks about how many marriages have come out of it - which still only works out to about 1% of the site's users.

I have yet to put up a profile on eHarmony, but I've tried match.com and a number of free dating sites. I have yet to actually get any dates out of them, let alone anything long-term. While, like many things, I'm probably partly at fault for this - I tend to be picky about who I contact, there are probably things that need to be improved about my profile, and I'm not all that interesting or attractive - but I've also been less-than-impressed with most of the profiles - and I feel like I keep running into the same profiles over and over again, which suggests that while there may be huge numbers of users on the services, most of them have been there for a while -which suggests they aren't having any better luck than I am. And I'd be thrilled if I could find one profile for a woman who doesn't enjoy watching sports, going out drinking every weekend, and traveling around the world, none of which really interest me.

I'm not really sure if I should be thrilled or depressed by this stat. On one hand, it suggests that I'm not a complete failure - that while online dating works for some people - and I certainly know people that it has worked out great for - it also seems like it doesn't work for a much larger number of people. So it's not completely my fault, and maybe even the fact that I am not an online-dating success story does not necessarily mean that there is no hope for me.

On the other hand, I'd always kind of thought of online dating as my last resort, if I couldn't meet someone through the "normal" channels (work, friends, school, church, ect). I haven't had any luck with any of them - I work in IT, so the bulk of my coworkers are guys, I don't have a whole lot of friends (and none of them seem to have single, dateable friends, at least not ones that they think would work out), I'm done with grad school, I don't have any cool hobbies that put me in contact with the opposite sex, and I never really understand how people meet at church - they must go to way more fun churches than the one I go to.

So even math can't seem to help me now.