Saturday, December 3, 2011

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...

1 comment:

  1. Fór fyrst að hugsa um ótvíræðan sparnað þess að fá Mr. Apron í heimsókn versus húshjálp, en svo fattaði ég að maður getur auðvitað ekki notað tímann á meðan í að gera annað og svo eru þrifin hans kannski ekki á heismælikvarða :)

    Hei og sniðug þú með Ms. Naughty, mér finnst hún samt hljóma svo skemmtilega að ég myndi nú kannski ekki lá köllum að vilja hitta hana, bara svona til að drepa tímann meðan þeir væru að leita að soulmate-inum :)

    Anna Pála

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