The New Internet Dating?

by Charl Pearce

internetdating

Long gone are the days of eyes meeting across a crowded room, love letters left in library books and someone throwing pebbles at your window and its place is internet dating.  With sites like match.com, E-Harmony & OKCupid becoming the new “set up” tool, I let curiousity kill the Charl and succumbed to the intrigue of a site called Plenty of Fish.  I came, I saw, I groaned, I vommed and I continued to hover around and found myself logging back in (but mostly for the utterly bizarre and ridiculous messages from the array of gentleman that seemed to find my profile intriguing).  The number of men that I a) replied to on there or b) contacted off my own back, I could count easily on one hand.  It appears that I may be a little too picky for internet dating – I was turning into Gingerlocks.  Too old, too young, bad grammar, bad teeth.. and for some reason, messages with offerings such as “can I put my finger in your ginger bum hole?” just don’t do it for me, sorry.  (On a side note – if you’d like a compilation post of some of the funniest messages I received, let me know.  They might raise a giggle… or a restraining order)

A friend of mine once parted with actual hard earned cash to join a dating site.  She filled out a list of her interests, hobbies, her personality traits, what makes her tick, what she likes in a man, what she doesn’t, she uploaded some pictures that made her appealing to the opposite of sex, and she sat waited.  A whole 10 minutes of waiting patiently for Mr Right to sign in and snap her up.  And then she was matched.  With a guy.  Old enough to be her grandad, ugly enough to star in The Hills Have Eyes and 2 ex wives.  Reason she was matched?  Because they both liked chinese food.

“You should have gone stand outside The Golden Wok takeaway at 8pm on a Saturday night and bought yourself a new lipstick with the monthly subscription fee!” I said as I shook my head in disbelief and felt the happily ever after in the digital world drifting further and further away.

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In my personal experience, a less stigmatised form of internet dating can come in the form of Twitter.  You may mock, but lets look at this way:

On Twitter you open up your timeline to people of all walks of life, but ultimately you end up following people either in similiar social circles as yourself or people with similiar interests as you, a similiar sense of humours.  Twitter offers you a snapshot of someones day to day life and through this you can get to know these people better than you ever could via some awkward messages on a dating site.  Sometimes I’ll tend to follow gentleman who a) make me laugh out loud at my timeline, b) show actual intelligence and use good grammar b) have attractive photographs. 

Yes yes, I’m shallow, let it go.  (I don’t know about you but I need  physical attraction first and foremost when it comes to finding me a “mate”, whether someone has good “banter” or not, if he doesn’t make me envisage recreating THAT steamy Zac Efron shower scene from the film The Lucky One, then its not going to work.)

The Twitter courtship takes place a bit like a David Attenborough wildlife documentary, hopefully culimanting in a “the male penetrates the female” finale – with some spooning, hand holding, chinese takeaway sharing and cinema trips thrown in for good measure.

I’ll give you a case study in the form of Gentleman A.

– Gentleman A began to follow me after I was RT’d into his timeline with one of my very rare funny tweets

– I follow Gentleman A back after an eye appeasing profile picture, a scout at his bio and reading his last few tweets which indicated that he was not a) a nutter, b) a Jeremy Kyle reject, c) a pig

– All is quiet after the initial introduction. Gentleman A probably rolls eyes at amount of times I mention lipstick/fancying someone and I read Gentleman A’s and think “this man is rather amusing, and he knows his way around a hashtag”

– Gentleman A begins to “like” my pouty Instagram selfies – and I’m not talking recent ones, I’m talking 3 week old selfies – Gentleman A has been doing a little research has he not?

– I spot a tweet from Gentleman A and reply, Gentleman A replies, and a few follow up tweets with flirty undertones fly across the interwebz like eyes meeting across a room

– Over the course of a week or so, the odd tweet is exchanged, I check his timeline a couple of times and he likes a couple more Instagram selfies until…

– “New Direct Message Recieved from Gentleman A”

– The initial conversation continues over the privacy of DM where mild flirtation turns to full blown flirtation after the unspoken subject of relationship status comes to fruition.  Both are declared single – HURRAH.

– Phone numbers are exchanged, the flirtation moves from Twitter to texts, to Whatsapp, to the phone, to Snapchat, to a whirlwind couple of weeks of constant conversation…

….and VOILA.  There’s the “connection” that your Plenty of Fish, Match.com or Uniform Dating (stupidest website theory ever) can’t create.  You more or less know before you’ve initiated the direct contact that you’re going to get on with the other person because you already know what news articles they find interesting, what makes them laugh enough to RT, how they interact with other people, and most importantly, through the power and cliche of Instagram: what they eat for lunch (Gentleman A eats the tastiest looking food in the land).  All is looking good and a potential romance/a date could well be on the cards.

Here’s a flaw though…

One of the ways in which Twitter and Internet dating differs is a thing called distance.  On dating websites you can set your search results to pick up everyone within a 5 mile radius so that you have a hope in hell of perhaps finding a Beckham in a city of Pete Dohertys.  On Twitter you can’t really specify this, so you could end up exchanging flirty tweet exchanges with someone in Outer Mongolia.  

And lets be honest, long distance relationships pretty much suck and never work. 

Dating 374 – Charl 0

5 Comments

  1. char

    I’ve always been majorly skeptical of things like dating sites and online matches. I don’t see anything wrong with the old-fashioned “meet people in real life” thing, but I suppose that if more and more people spend more of their time online, that’s where it starts to make more sense to look for other people with similar lifestyles.

    Reply
  2. Alyssiarose

    I’ve also used Plenty of Fish! I’ve actually met a few potential matches on there, but I agree it’s full of old people, and perverts. The amount of messages I get that just say, ‘You are hot’ Or ‘Hi’ are halarious. However as I said I’ve met a few potential matches, and a couple of which I am hoping to meet in the coming weeks! Thanks for the witty post, I enjoyed it as always! x

    Reply
  3. Camila

    Oh man, I was POF and after a few weeks realized it was a total circus. It didn’t seem like there was anybody normal on there (wait a minute, I was there). So funny that I stumble across your blog post today, via @TerriLowe actually, because I just read this manic and hilarious article on internet dating by the legendary Sinead O’Connor, get a cuppa, it’s a long one: http://www.sineadoconnor.com/sineads_post_type/tour-diary-entry-27-strictly-over-18-no-exceptions-do-not-read-if-u-are-under-18/

    Reply
  4. Mark

    I find the whole prospect of ‘dating’ weird, whether it’s IRL or online. I think when two people get together on a ‘date’, or, as I prefer to call them ‘interviews’, everything is just way too forced. You don’t do this with any other type of relationship; imagine auditioning for a new ‘best friend’?

    I’ve never been on a date and I don’t think I’d ever approach a relationship with the view of ‘I want this person to be THE ONE and we’ll be together forever etc etc’ I don’t see what good that would ever do. Expectations are too high and people end up falling when suddenly the other person isn’t so interested or they’re scared of commitment or whatever.

    I met my ex online, but not on a ‘dating’ site, per say. We met for sex and beer drinking and generally hanging out and then BOOM we accidentally happened. And that lasted like 8 years, so can’t be too bad.

    I was on POF and OkCupid a few weeks ago and they really annoyed me. People try so hard to ‘sell’ themselves on all of those things one should be in a ‘relationship’ or try to make themselves appear to be a ‘suitable candidate’; but in reality I don’t think any of that actually matters because ultimately you’re gonna have THAT spark, or you’re not. And as you said, there’s got to be that physical attraction to begin with if a spark follows that I don’t think it really has anything to do with whether you both like chinese food and both answered ‘yes’ to whether the ECHR should be scrapped in the UK.

    Reply
  5. Sarah

    Alternative online dating story:

    – Girl has night out in home town, realises she’s at least got off with every man in the room/her friends have got off with every man in the room/every man in the room is a complete loser she’s known since high school.

    – Girl goes home and drunkenly signs up to the free trial of Match.com, goes round and gives a few people “winks”, forgets about profile.

    – Gets a few grim messages, ignores.

    – Gets a really well thought out, well written message from a man who looks OK in his very small profile picture, and girl decides to sign up for a month just so she can message him back.

    – They message, text, email, meet, and 4 years later they live in a little flat in Manchester with their cute cat.

    So it DOES work. You just have to be extremely lucky and expect to get a load of crap too. But I’m totally behind your Twitter theory, I’ve met some fantastic real-life friends using it so I imagine it’d be great for forming THOSE kind of relationships!
    X

    Reply

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