Internet Dating For Dummies

I've had a phenomenally unproductive day today... as a direct consequence of an innocent tweet and a conversation with a friend last night, today I have tried my hand at internet dating. If you have access to a computer, a picture of a human with breasts, and a lot of time to kill then I cannot recommend this enough as a way to pass the time.


I have been constructing my profile as a piece of living art throughout the day, every time I receive a mail from a would-be suitor that amuses me enough, I update my profile to reflect their advances. At the moment (about 6 hours in to my adventure) my profile is drafted like this:

Cute Name to Attract Mate: OfficialBarrelScraper
Tag Line: Must Have Life Insurance


About Me:
If you own Dark Side of the Moon I'm willing to over look even serious flatulence and excess hair.

I used to spend entire days rocking back and forwards because I could only be reached by a small number of sex pests in a day, but since I discovered internet dating things have really turned around and now I can browse any number of vowel free messages. It's bliss.

I cannot stress enough how much I adore profile pictures where you can clearly see the "ex" having been edited out. This sort of phenomenal approach to moving on deserves a medal. I've put my Dad as my profile picture so you can seek him out and ask for permission to date me should you want to - I don't want to make this shallow by including some picture of my luscious blonde mane of back hair.

Please don't message me to ask what:
a) Dark Side of the Moon is
b) Barrel Scraping is

I'm not genuine and I am solely interested in playing games so please, no time wasters.

My favourite word is "gawjus", please use it with gay abandon and if you can construct a message that's suitable for copying and pasting to everyone/thing on here that has included cleavage in their picture, please can you forward me a copy? You're a gem.

If anything I think language is just overcomplicated these days so if we can just agree that the difference between your and you're is inconsequential and replace either with ROFL then it'll be much more efficient for our long term mating compatibility.

If I don't reply to your message please don't take it personally, I'm just very shallow and have already judged I will never want to merge gene pools.

Thanks,

First Date Preferences:

Ideally something with wool and some passive aggressive sarcasm over dinner.

I'm not great at first dates so in a perfect world we could skip this altogether and just move straight on to separate beds, affairs with our colleagues and arguing over why I can't seem to distinguish between rare and medium rare when cooking.

I like short walks in the city and gender stereotyping.

---

So far, it's been a complete blast. I've yielded responses that have gone from:

"Hey boo boo, u look cute. Wanna chat?"

to

" :-D xxx "

to

"Girls like you make me sick, what makes you think anyone on here would be that desperate to message you anyway? Why don't you do us all a favour and go choke yourself to death with your sarcasm."

All in all it's been an awesome experience. I've learnt that the vast majority of the men who speed date can be divided into two groups:

Men who have muscles and biceps and have no photos where they are not in plain view.

Men who do not exist in any photos not taken on their webcam.

I'm sure the fully paid up "I want to meet a wife" kind of sites are a totally different experience, but so far I have not been convinced that internet dating is going to do anything to help me find the man of my dreams. Tomorrow I'm going to borrow the profile picture of one of my housemates and find out what internet dating is like for men.

The trouble is, it's very difficult to write down anything that really comes across as genuine. On paper, people are really very similar in their likes and dislikes (or the likes and dislikes we want other people to judge us on) and its not until you get to talking to someone that you can judge whether there is even the remotest chance of compatibility. I don't think internet dating is any worse than trying to meet people on a night out (having spent last night boogying in KoKo in Camden with rather mixed results) but it does have a sort of seedy quality to it where you hope no one you know finds out you sunk this low.

I will, of course, keep you posted as to whether or not my knight in shining armour turns up but for now, let's assume that the profile will just continue to grow until I become bored and try Speed Dating as my next challenge.