beautyinbeautyout on Datingish

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Monday, 27 April 2009

From the Trenches - Is Internet Dating the Pits?

On a lonely December night, I checked out match dot com and decided to give the internet datng thing a whirl.   Super easy. Answer a bunch of questions.  Upload a few pictures.
Whoa! I'm getting emails from all these men! Winks! Complements. How great is this? I'm not lonely! I'm having conversations. I email some to tell them they're not "right" or some to get a dialogue going. Some misunderstand. Those, I get into mini "cyberfights" with.
They don't know me. I had an Irish husband. So, shoot me if I don't want to remarry someone whose destined from birth to be "40 and angry" (I have this season's "Rescue Me" to thank for that gem of a quote about the Irish). So what if I've made an unfair judgement based on your looks or your religion, stated political orientation. This is the internet, and I can type what I want to.
So why has it gone so wrong? Since December, I've gone on maybe 30 or 40 dates, fell in love once, in hate/obsession once (same guy...dumped me cause he's into the initial passion, not the relationship part), infatuated once (see below for details of my amazing hunk of a fireman turned MIA), have gone on oh so many boring dates (incredible how many men don't even have a little bit of a spark), have been pulled into (clothed) erections on the first date (ick), kissed by the worst slimey kisser (double-ick), and well, what am I doing wrong?
My theory is that I'm looking at a pool of people -- a very large pool -- who may not necessarily come from the same "place" as me, despite all those checkmarks that seem to indicate we match?  I don't even know how to prune this bunch! The universe of potential dates in the circle of people I would meet at a job or my kind of restaurant is far smaller than that in match dot com.
One example will serve: how could I have known the writer was stuck in a bad LSD trip that lasted 8 years?   That wasn't in the profile. How could I have known the same guy (head-burnt-boring in my opinion) would ask for a sex-only relationship after what was in my opinion one of my worst dates?
Then there's the sex preferences. How could I have known the orthodontist is into porn and his idea of perfect sex would be to watch me masturbate? Ugh!  How could I have known from a few conversations that Eric #1 was still stuck n the Oedipal phase? Are there any normal people out there? Maybe they all stay away from internet dating?
Hi everyone! I'm just getting started on Datingish... Drop me a comment if you've got some ideas on what to do first - or just to say, "Hi!"