Even in the future
year of 2013, when rocket cars and human cloning are common, there’s still
something of a stigma about internet dating.
It can’t be because
it’s geeky; the whole world is now officially the geekiest it’s ever been. We’re
all using the internet at any given moment, and there are lost tribes in the
darkest Amazon jungles that still made the effort to see The Avengers.
Maybe it’s because
online dating smacks of desperation. It’s basically an admission that you’re
incapable of meeting people in the real world because you’re socially inept.
There’s a kernel of
truth in all this, but more on that later. First and foremost, I have excuses
to make, namely that I work nights in a bar, so seldom get to socialise in the
evenings.
As a result, I’m on
an internet dating website, and I’m here to tell you people that it’s every bit
as soul destroyingly awful as you suspect it would be.
This is because…
1. The Only People Who Message You Will Be Hideous
Swamp-Donkeys.
I doubt that I can
solve every issue besetting modern feminism in one drunken blog post, but one
of the most frustrating things about women’s liberation is the constant,
defeatist hypocrisy. I ended up shouting at my car radio the other day because
a plumbing advert aimed at women said that they should call whatever firm it
was “if the man in your life is too busy” to fix a leak. Clearly, this is
because women are too stupid to understand the concept of a spanner, and
because they probably lack opposable thumbs.
In the
non-patronising world outside of advertising, women are capable of doing plenty
of things off their own back, including sending the first message on a dating
site. But damned if they will. They’ll sit there like a group of preening
Sirens, luring in the desperate, stupid, horny men of the internet – otherwise known
as “the men of the internet.”
The only exceptions
to this rule are the women who aren’t getting any attention, due to what could
politely be described as unfortunate genetics. These women will sally out into
the wider online dating world and send the first message, meaning that as a guy, I’ll often
get an e-mail saying “Hefty101 wants to meet you!”
The response to this
is almost always the same. My first thought is “Oooh! Cool. Someone wants to
meet me,” followed by my clicking the link and then “My eyes! My eyes! Sweet
Jesus, my eyes! How badly did that woman offend the God of Faces to earn such
punishment?!”
2. It Makes You Feel Like A Hideous Swamp Donkey.
When messaged by such
shudder-inducing HippoCrocoPigs, there’s an immediate moral dilemma. On the
one hand, basic politeness compels you to respond to someone who has taken the
time to send you a message. On the other hand, responding to the message would
only prolong the encounter with someone you have absolutely no intention of
dating, romancing, or not-chasing-out-of-town-with-a-pitchfork.
Most people, faced
with this crisis, ignore the messages from people they’re not attracted to,
which is perfectly normal and understandable.
It’s also crushing to
your own self-esteem when you send messages and hear nothing back. You start
using these sites as a normal person, only to slowly become a gibbering,
paranoid mess convinced of your own hideousness and the hopelessness of your
ever getting laid again unless it’s at a conference for blind, deaf mutes with
head colds. You’re clearly only on an internet dating site because you’re
pathetic and unloveable and now you can’t even manage to attract a member of
your own worthless, date-proof kind because you’re too short and have a shitty
job and- heyy! A message! I wonder if-
Nope. Swamp Donkey.
3. It Turns Everyone Involved Into Objectively Horrible
People.
I’m willing to bet
that even the most hard-hearted of people wouldn’t point-blank ignore someone
who was speaking to them unless there was a good reason. Even if a member of the
terminally aesthetically challenged struck up a conversation in a bar or at a
bus stop, it would be bad form to just quietly back away without making eye
contact.
As established, dating sites foster exactly this kind of behaviour, and it makes everyone, male
and female, into judgemental dicks. I refuse to message anyone who uses the
word “banter,” just because it gets on my nerves. I’ve personally implemented a
“no Welsh people” rule just because it’s £6.50 to cross the bridge and I can’t
be arsed with paying it. It’s only a forty minute drive to Cardiff, but no, I’m
too cheap, and next time someone says you can’t put a price on love I’ll be
quick to correct them.
If the fact that
everyone involved in online dating was encouraged to be shallow, cheap and
judgemental wasn’t bad enough, there’s also the people who are stunningly
deluded. Women who are 5’ 2” and a size sixteen list their body type as “average.”
They may well be average for their lumpen, pendulous, wheezing families, but to
the rest of us they’re kidding themselves.
Men are even worse in
that they’ve managed to weaponise this type of delusion. I’m told of male
profiles that list the exact details of the women who will be considered – “nothing
above a size eight” etc – and these profiles almost always belong to a bloke
with a face like a blind cobbler’s thumb.This kind of ridiculousness makes everyone else feel justified for being an emotionally numbed asshole, and the whole cycle starts over.
4. It’s So Fucking Laborious.
Have you ever tried
to flirt with someone over what is, essentially, e-mail?! There’s a reason we
largely stopped doing that as a species. It’s slow, there’s no guarantee that
the other person will actually get your message in anything like a timely
fashion – turning a sharp, clever comeback into a day-old non-sequitur – and sending
someone a more honest message (“I like the looks of your face and body, you don’t
seem retarded and I promise I’m not a serial killer, can I have your number?”) doesn’t
seem to yield many results.
This means you often
find yourself wading through awkward flirting and stilted, written-word
conversations towards a distant shore of maybe buying someone a drink, and all
of a sudden you’re nostalgic for the good old days of your youth when a Bacardi
Breezer and a smile would earn you a fumble with an orange-skinned dullard from
Essex.
In short, internet
dating is a horrible, judgemental, soul-crushing slog that serves only to
remind you of how cheap, shallow and unattractive you are. It’s an exhausting,
grinding, frustrating, emotionally sterile facsimile of the romantic
experience, and the really worrying thing is, it might actually be the future.
As we all work longer hours, spend more time communicating solely via apps and work
ever harder to surround ourselves with our impersonal technological cocoons, we
might soon enough all be reduced to internet dating.
Take my advice. Go
and hit on someone in the pub before it comes to that. For old times’ sake.
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