Maybe Tomorrow

As you  may recall, I decided to try online dating, since real live dating was not happening.  So I signed up with an LDS site, posted the best picture I could find, had my friend review and edit my profile, and waited for the magic to begin. (My friend, who has had some success with online dating, said she would usually chat with 4-5 guys at a time to figure out which of them were of interest to her.  She's a lot more outgoing than I am, so I figured I would just try for 2-3 at a time.)

I kept waiting - no magic.  I talked to my friend, and found out you actually have to work at online dating.  If you want men to look at your profile, you need to actually be online on a regular basis so your profile will be one of the first ones to show up.  And you should also be searching for potentially interesting men.  So I started working - I did some searching and found a lot of middle aged divorced men from Utah.  Oh wait, maybe that's an overgeneralization.  There were also younger, non-Utah men on there, but not nearly as many as in the Utah contingent.  I also made sure to go on more frequently.

The results? A couple of flirts from guys who refused to post pictures, including one who's ideal woman was a cross between Anna Karenina and some other fictional character, and the suggestion that I hook up with my cousin, who was also on the site.  None of which interested me.  Needless to say, I did not renew my subscription.

Now, maybe I just didn't go into this with the right attitude.  After all, there are tons of stories about people who have success with online dating, who meet their eternal companion and live happily ever after.  And maybe it's possible.  But personally, I prefer live interaction.  It's easier for me to be accepting of differences if the first thing I learn about you isn't that you have horrible spelling and worse grammar.

Not long after I decided not to renew, I found this article that says the whole online thing is still just a game of chance, and you would do just as well trying to pick someone up in a bar.  Well, I pondered that, as drunk men seem to think I have really nice eyes (even if I can't immediately smell the alcohol on the guys at the shelter where I volunteer, when they give me the same compliment ten times in three minutes, it's a pretty good sign that they're no longer sober).  But since drunk men are an immediate turn-off for me, I figured I'd have even less success in the bar than I did online.   The fact that I don't go to bars may have figured in there somewhere as well.

So for now, I'll just keep looking for dates the old fashioned way.