I could only handle a month on Match.com. It wasn’t you, it was me.
Why? Well, it has nothing to do with the dates or the women. It was not you, it was me.
After all is said and done, for me it has to do with the chemistry, the je ne sais quoi.
Something that I can only find and not discover. All of my friends have multiple stories of not only successes but marriages.
Besides, it is expensive (to do it right, you need to spend more than $50 and oftentimes more than $100), it is time-consuming (it really is a time-sink), and what’s more — and this is the big one — it really made me begin to commoditize women.
You heard me: commoditize. Not objectify, I already did that, but seriously women became fungible assets.
To quote a friend from LA,
“if one date didn’t do as I wished, I wouldn’t call her back, if it wasn’t perfect, there was a queue of willing dates that could fill every night of the week with at the very least company. And there was often much more. And there was rarely a second date. How could there be? No one really ever stood out. They all blended into the next. And there was often some type of sex available. When it was all said and done, I felt at the very least dazzled, but generally overwhelmed and completely untouched by any of the women that I dated. At the end of the week, I couldn’t remember any of their names and few of their faces. It all became tawdry, disingenuous, pethetic, and desperate.”
Whether a woman “puts out” or not, there is zero incentive to treat any one of the dates like anything but shopping. In such a ready economy of scale, and when its such a seller’s market for single men, especially in DC, there is a sad and jaded misconception that the perfect women (the perfect thing, to make all my dreams come true) is out there and you just have to do the work to find her.
I really don’t think she exists if you try to find her in that context. At least not for me.
Mind you, I test drove a bunch of cars and finally drove off with the sweetest little ride ever. And I love her to death. And she is sexy and fast and capable and beautiful and I have committed to her for a very long time. On the other hand, none of these test drives were done over the Internet. The one car I discovered online was “great on paper but disappointing in real life.” The rest were discovered by wandering the lots and talking to people.
The good old fashioned way.
On a final note, if I ever do online dating again, I am going to go JDate all the way.
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And you would be a catch! Ahhh, to bring home a nice Jewish boyfriend named Chris!
I can appreciate a truly honest opinion.
On Match:
Holy moly. You actually did many many dates in a week, many with experiencing sexual availability? You must be one of those cute predator types that looks for desperate women. No wonder you had a lousy experience. Most of the people I know go the route of exchanging more than a couple of emails, getting a sense of the other person, having a platonic coffee/lunch, after which they decide via email whether to go out again.