“Online Dating” aka “The Match.com Experiment of 2014”

Being single is great.
Really it is. You get to do what you want, when you want. You can fart in bed, or on the couch, or in the shower, and no one is the wiser.
You know, if girls farted.
There is no one, but your cat, to judge you when you eat the chip crumblies that fall between your boobs or the cheetos that get stuck in your hair during your epic three day Assassin’s Creed binges. Underwear lives where it falls until it grows legs and wanders away. Make up is entirely optional, and shaving your legs is just a down right waste of time and money- because eighteen dollars for razors is criminal, and who is going to see your pasty legs anyways?

But then society kicks in. There’s the incessant queries into your love life and lack there of. Grandparents wishing you would settle down before they pass, and maybe pop out a great grand kid or two. Mothers who try to be supportive of your alternate “otherhood” life style, but really secretly pray to any god that will listen that you settle down before they pass, and maybe pop out a grand kid or two.
Facebook home pages deluged by baby pictures. I love your kids, really I do. I know to you, and your crazy brain chemicals, they are pretty much the bomb. They are cute and lovable-especially through a screen where I can’t hear or smell them.
But, I hate to be the one to break it to you, your baby blinking is not a freaking mile stone. They can do that from birth. You do not need thirty commemorative pictures. Colour me impressed when they solve world hunger or break the space-time continuum.
And, the engagement photos and announcements! Your friends and “friends” pairing up all around you. It causes even the best, most emotionally dead, of us to wonder: “Am I missing out on something?”

So, you do what everyone does at some point- you join an online dating site.
Really, who has time these days to meet real people in real situations? This is an honest to goodness question I’m asking. How does this happen? I don’t want to meet a guy at a club…because, well, club guys are douches.
Also, I’m old now. The bass line gives me a migraine and I ain’t paying no twelve bucks for a shot.
I work, I go home, maybe I scrounge up enough nickles and dimes (seeing as pennies are extinct) to go see a movie with my other single friends…maybe not. Where, in this illustrious life, am I supposed to randomly stumble upon “Mr. Right” or “Mr. Meh you aren’t that bad”?

I’ve joined online dating sites in the past. Plenty of Fish was a fun time- you have to wade through a whole ton of crazy to get to the slightly less crazy but still datable ones. But hey, isn’t that half the fun?
This time around I thought, “Hey! I’m kind of an adult now. I’m turning thirty in a few months. I make a salary. Let’s blow some of that cash on Match.com. Let’s get serious about this dating thing.”
Self-five!

I had heard mixed things of Match and after only one very long week on it I know why.
If online dating were high school, Match.com would be the cool-kid table I never got invited to sit at. I am as awkward, and off putting, as dorky fourteen-year-old me was when I decided to try to do the cool guy car-hood slide across the cafeteria chairs.
I am a fat, average looking, anti-duck face making, lower-middle class, sarcastic, no-one lost amid a sea of six figure plus, cross fit loving, health food eating, yacht sailing monstrosities. To top it off they are all ridiculously handsome! On paper it sounds great, in reality- I have absolutely nothing in common with any of these people. I look at the superbly put together, handsome, fit man in a business suit and know, to the core of my being, that I bring nothing to that table- and that if I’m being honest I have no interest even sitting at that table.
Where are the normal men at? Where are the average looking, kinda put together but still trying to figure it out, burger eating, beard wearing men? Where are the men who don’t care if I have zero inclination to run the tri-state double iron man pantheon?

I know that everyone tries to put their best face forward in their profiles. Really, it all comes down to peacock feathers and elaborate mating dances. I don’t begrudge them their looks or success, or inexplicable love of cross fit. The simple fact is I am not, and have never been, from that world. I don’t get it and I don’t feel comfortable in it.

Either way, I’m locked in for another two months and since I am paying for it I am damn well going to make the best of it. Who knows, maybe I’ll find the non-cool kid table and we can make fun of everyone else in order to make ourselves feel better.