Tricky Times

A lot of my friends have had quite an interesting social life in the past few years, thanks to these dating sites. Some of them are married now or living with someone they’ve met there and some even have kids already. Others have made good friends who have then introduced them to even better friends.

That’s the problem when you’re done with your education and just working now, life becomes a routine and there aren’t that many opportunities to meet new people. At my office I never meet new people except the occasional new courier. And even though some of them are cute, the ‘conversations’ don’t really allow any margins for a beautiful friendship to develop. ‘Sign here, please’ – ‘There? OK...thank you.’ You see it’s very hard to squeeze in an invitation to a concert or a dinner party.
And where I come from, men aren’t exactly famous for chatting up women sober, in broad daylight. So, Look4Soulmate.com is a great invention, I think.

The problem of course is all the pervs, the married men looking for excitement and those who only want casual sex and preferably something kinky. These men stake out every single (literally) woman who places an ad on these sites and waste our time with endless messages. Some of these guys are straight forward and can easily be dismissed right away. Others try to hide their agenda at first and it takes a few messages to uncover them, like the one I told you about last time. It’s terribly time consuming; first you have to read through the pile of messages you get, delete those you have no intention of replying to, answer the others and try to lure out the ones who are just wasting your time and so slowly, narrow down the options. Seriously, if you want to find one decent bloke there you need to spend about 2-3 hours a night sifting through the pile. I have plenty of other things to do with my time so I try to be blunt, I hate if people are wasting my time.

Therefore, I can’t help but respect Mr Apron, who’s become somewhat a celebrity on Look4Soulmate.com. At least he’s not pretending to be anything other than he is. He simply writes to every woman who signs up and asks if he can come round and do housework like hoovering and dusting, wearing nothing but an apron, while you and preferably a few of your girl friends watch. Of course it would have been best if I could have saved that minute it took to read and delete his message and not to have received a message from him at all but at least he’s honest, he gets credit for that.

I have three friends who also have ads on this website and we often talk about the men who are writing us and compare notes. Some of us have received messages from the same guys and when we compare them we usually see that they copy/paste them and what appeared to be an interesting, fulfilling conversation at first - turned out to be a standardised monologue about their inner self and meaningless praise towards whoever was reading. So, obviously you have to be quite aware and on your toes when meeting men online.

I learnt a great trick too. I signed up for another account as well and placed another ad under the name Ms Naughty. I described her as a petite brunette with short hair, in her late twenties, looking for some company when her young son was at his dad’s. ‘She’ ticked the ‘Casual Sex’ box and implied in ‘her’ ad that she’s willing to try anything at least once.

Then I check out her Inbox regularly to see the nicks of the guys who write to ‘her’. If I come across messages from the same nicks in my Inbox, I instantly delete them, without reading. That’s usually about one third of all the messages I get...

It's a Jungle Out There

Even though I’m not strategically looking for a knight in shining armour to spend the rest of my life with, I don’t mind browsing and think it’s only natural to be out there, in case something good comes along. Who knows what might happen?

Since I’m mostly done with clubbing and such methods of scouting around the scene, which have never been successful anyways, I’ve decided to try Internet dating. After all, I actually know a few women who have found the love of their life (or hitherto) there.
They also ran into a lot of opportunists and weirdoes so when I decided to place an ad on one of those dating sites couple of days ago, I thought it best to be accurate and concise to scare them off:

‘I’ve no interest in casual sex and can’t be bothered with any bullshit. Am a postgraduate and have a good job that I like. I have great sense of humour, am smart, kind, caring and spontaneous. Don’t smoke and have no children.’

There, I think that covers all the fundamentals; I’m not searching for just sex (only have to reach for the phone to take care of that), I have a rather high IQ and wouldn’t have much in common with men without brains and ambition. So I thought this ad was quite good and said everything that needed to be said in the beginning.

After half an hour my ad had been viewed 122 times and I had 9 messages waiting. Most of those guys had had an ad in there for over two years, which I didn’t think was a good sign. Very few of the ads said anything useful, typically just ‘I’m a good looking guy interested in meeting a woman who’s beautiful inside and out.’ Such an ad doesn’t really raise an interest and since most of the messages were ‘Hi!’ or ‘Hi, wanna chat?’

I started to seriously doubt these guys’ communication skills. Somebody should explain to them that although ‘Hi!’ might work as an opening line in a bar – where people can actually see one another and make all sorts of judgements based on appearances – you need a little more effective approach to catch someone’s attention in the cyber world. So I decided to completely ignore those amateurs.

The messages kept piling up and as nightfall drew closer, the more explicit and crude messages I received. Despite what I’d said in my ad I was still offered cyber sex, one guy wanted to come over straight away to warm my bed, two guys gave detailed descriptions of what they wanted to do with me and one man said he and his wife needed a ‘bit of a change’. What happened to going on mini-breaks? I soon got frustrated with all this nonsense so I started scavenging through the ads myself.
I found a few quite interesting bits, amongst them an ad from a man and a woman in the north who were coming to town soon and wanted to spend a night in a hotel room with a young woman. NB, they‘re married...but not to each other.

Anyway, the following day I received a message from a man who sounded really nice. He‘s interested in literature, theatre, concerts and well, sounds just very intellectual and interesting. I instantly started visualising a sexy, romantic philosopher. We hit it off right away, the messages went back and forth and he just sounded better and better; witty, well educated and had an apt for life. Too good to be true, actually.

He hadn’t said much about his situation so I started wondering if he had a stroll of children or three marriages behind him. So I asked straight out about his domestic circumstances. There was no hesitation, the next message started off: ‘I’m a happily married man, father of two...’

Oh really? AND YOU DON’T SEE ANY CONTRADICTION IN BEING ‘HAPPILY MARRIED’ AND HAVING AN AD ON LOOK4SOULMATE.COM????