Internet Dating Part I

My friend Bloggiana has decided she would like to start internet dating. She is fresh from a messy divorce and is desperate to kick up her heels. We decide to do it together, so to speak, to become mutual internet profilers. I will write her up, she will do me. This is a no-fail policy, we decide, and off we go.

Before we start, we think: market research. Let’s buy the Guardian and the Sunday Times and let’s google a few and let’s see what’s out there. No point coming up with reams of psychometric data about oneself if most of the people out there can’t read. So she takes page 17 of the Guardian’s Saturday guide and starts making ticks and crosses. And I take the travel section of the Sunday Times and do likewise. Then we go online and start surfing a few websites. Turns out you need to come up with a name for yourself, to preserve your anonymity of course and to give those lovely kind men out there an inkling that you are lovely and kind too. We flick through forty-something men within a 50 mile radius of Lancaster. Man after man after man. I am a bit worried about some of these men. What on earth does Minstrelfinger think he is trying to convey? And how about FriskyBiskit? Why in a month of Sundays would CasanovaSyrup think he is onto something with a name quite so tangibly offputting?

And then there are the straplines. Cockadoodle says he would like you to ‘pop in why don’tcha’. Coffeepot says ‘try pulling down your eyelid and blowing your nose’. Kruschev claims to be ‘half man half biscuit’. The names are bewildering in their display of varying self-image and the straplines are equally bewildering because most of them don’t seem to mean anything much at all.

Undaunted Bloggiana and I read on. We look through some profiles in depth. And the funny thing is, we both conclude, that there are an awful lot of identical men out there. They’re all kinda laid back. They all love to travel (really?). They all like wine and most of them cook and all of them want to walk more and light log fires. We browse through profile after profile. The names may be scarey and the straplines scarier (and take it from me, some of the photos can give you bad dreams) but the people are all the same. They want someone tactile (sorry but I just think that’s a jolly nasty word). They want someone with a GSOH. They say they themselves have a GSOH which is a sure sign they don’t. They say they want nights out and nights in. Bloggiana and I look at each other. This is going to prove a greater challenge than we had anticipated.