That crossing out rules thing Mike mentioned in his last post is exactly what I was talking about earlier this week when I suggested that maybe a lot of us had a tendency to give new relationships more of a chance than they deserved. The effort to make it work moves into the foreground, stealthily taking precedence over determining whether or not there is anything to make work, and you cross out rule after rule and soon–if you’re successful–you’ve managed to solidify a relationship that’s exactly what you don’t want.
Someone suggested, in a comment on that post, that women were more inclined to this sort of behavior than men. I don’t know whether or not that’s true in general, but it’s definitely not true around this blog (if you get my drift). While Mike has been busy crossing off rules to try to keep his latest budding relationship afloat, I’ve jettisoned an entire dating service in seven days flat.
It isn’t that I’ve ruled out all of the million or so men on the site or anything like that. Not exactly. I didn’t even exactly rule out all of the couple of dozen men who contacted me in the three or four days during which I was actually opening messages. Some of them were absolutely vile, but that’s another post for another day. The bottom line is that I just don’t believe that we can find life partners–or even casual, friendly relationships–by shopping for them like grapefruit. Despite the fact that I’ve always believed that, I wanted to give it a fair shot. Whether or not a week is really “a fair shot” is certainly open to debate, but in that week everything I saw confirmed my original belief.
Because the Internet gods (probably employed by Google) are psychic, on the very day that I decided to ditch the dating service, an ad presented itself to me inquiring as to whether it was really time to bail on that dating service. “Have you,” it demanded, “tweaked and re-tweaked your profile?
Nope, I sure hadn’t, and here’s why: if it worked, I’d be in exactly the same position Mike described, crossing out rules. I’ve made a good portion of my living in marketing, and I’m pretty good at it. I could, I have no doubt, create a profile that “sells”. But what would I be selling? Not me, that’s for sure. Just an image created to draw someone in, so that one day not far down the road he could sit in a coffee shop with me and cross out rules as he learned about the reality and I could cross out things about myself that I didn’t think would sit well with him. Having chosen with inadequate information, we’d be faced with the question of bailing early or trying to ignore the red flags.
So I’m not tweaking my profile to get a better response. I’m not answering the guy who sent me three separate messages, all with the subject line “sexy”, and who misspelled two out of three words in two out of three messages. And I’m not even going to look at the apparently nice guys who send benign messages and pretend that they could have seen something in the two paragraphs of my profile or a photograph that truly tipped them off that there was some reason to think we’d get along. I hear a lot about how tough it is out there and I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I’m pretty sure that whatever it is lies in the real world, where people relate to one another in three dimensions and not items in a catalog.
Photo credit: aconant from morguefile.com
Really enjoyed this post.
I am all for making friends online, in fact I have made some great ones. I think that was because I was not looking for friends, it just evolved into that.
I think I were to ever meet any one online in a ‘relationship’ kind of thing, it would either be an evolution of an already established friendship or something along that lines. I am not retweaking myself for some random stranger.
Using your grapefruit, if I may? I do my food shopping online, but the one thing I don’t buy is fruit and veg. You need to check if it is rotten before buying
[...] 25, 2009 by Tiffany I mentioned in an earlier post that, despite my misgivings, I’d registered for an online dating service last month. I was a bit dismayed by many of the messages I received, but there was one in [...]
[...] mentioned in an earlier post that, despite my misgivings, I’d registered for an online dating service last month. I was a bit dismayed by many of the messages I received, but there was one in [...]
[...] and chanting of “give it a chance…give it a chance…” under my breath, I was able to hold out for a week. I never deleted my profile, though, and once a month or so I log in and check my messages and [...]