Internet Dating: A Personal Review

Submitted by maz on Sun, 07/26/2009 - 21:44

Over the last two years I’ve used Internet dating websites on-and-off. I’ve given the following sites a good stab:

There are probably a few more that I forget, but I feel having been a paid-up user of most of these sites for some period of time that I am entitled to write my opinions about them. As should be obvious from the names of the sites alone I’ve tried a variety from the “vanilla” to the “niche”, and I found them all wanting…

One big problem I had with the big sites like match.com is how utterly backward they are. For example, if you’re a guy then you’re expected to make contact with girls; if you’re a girl then you’re expected to wade through hundreds of emails from guys and decide with whom to continue a conversation. Perhaps girls have no time to go looking for themselves they’re so inundated with messages? Perhaps guys have to do the looking because girls never message them? The size of these sites’ userbases means that this cycle is likely to be self-reinforcing from now on till forever: as soon as a girl joins she will be noticed and contacted, and a guy will get the hint pretty quickly that he’s going to have to “do the chasing”. I don’t believe this power exchange is always a healthy one.

Other things which gave me grave cause for concern about the big sites was their “money back guarantee”: under what circumstances am I able to claim my money back? If I recall match.com’s policy, I had to make contact with five people each month for my six months of membership, and if I did not “find love” I could ask for another six months’ free membership. I would love to know the definition of “finding love”, but never managed to get a response from customer services. Is it a date? a hug? a kiss? a second date? sex? a long term relationship? marriage? Actually, who cares! By the time I’d been using match.com for five months I found the site to be more of a chore than something enjoyable (which is what I believe dating should be).

One of the things I noticed would happen quite a lot on the site was if somebody managed to sneak a profile past the moderatrixes which was in any way provocative, their profile wouldn’t last very long before someone presumably made a complaint and the profile was hidden away. I remember a user posting a profile with a username “kinbakusomethingorother” and suggesting things she enjoyed for fun were “all in the name”. It wasn’t long before her profile vanished, presumably for breaking the “no solicitation” rule.

Hang on a moment… we are grown-ups… isn’t there some expectation that a relationship between sexual beings might involve some sexual expression? Perhaps, but we shouldn’t talk about it openly. So what are we allowed to talk about? Unfortunately it seems that we’re not allowed to talk about very much which is truthful on these kinds of sites:

We want him to think of you as being fragrant, flawless and a fabulous catch!

— Secrets To Keep, MSN Dating and Personals (advertising match.com)

What a great foundation upon which to begin a relationship: lies and concealment. Pearls of wisdom continue with their advice for men:

You were neither threatened by, nor made fun of the fact that she ogled Daniel Craig and openly declared her undying devotion to him when Casino Royale came out.

[…]

You sensibly keep your opinions about other women to yourself. Women do not like their date to flirt with another female.

— 10 things you didn’t realise she liked about you, MSN Dating and Personals (advertising match.com)

This really is a strange world we live in…

The “alternative” dating sites were not a huge amount better, I found. While the balance of “chasing” was a little more even (I admit being a bit surprised when my first interaction on alt.com within an hour of joining the site was a “welcome” from a pro-domme), money-back guarantees and brain-dead user policies abounded. The only exception was ctrl-alt-date.com, which seemed to balance interaction, privacy and was run at a price nobody could beat. My huge thanks to Steve for giving that site a go.

During the Internet dating process, to someone else who was also trying dating sites at the time, I wrote my thoughts about it all. While I understand the need for personal safety, it’s possible to spend too much time staring at pixels on a screen and not enough time actually meeting people and dating:

[…] I will deliberately over-generalise: to me, match.com and datingdirect.com (“the mainstream dating websites”) seem to be geared up for people to find a good “physical” match — a large proportion of the questions lead us to categorise ourselves by physical attributes like hair colour, eye colour, build, and the “search” seems to heavily invest in these criteria. The “geek sites” like ivorytowers.net […] seem to be about categorising ourselves intellectually and perhaps philosophically. And the “alt sites” like alt.com and collarme.com are geared up more for finding people with shared kinks. I don’t for a minute think that one website could do all of these things together, but all are necessary ingredients in finding a partner, which is why the “meeting people” element of dating seems so crucial.

I’ll stop ranting about dating websites and end with something positive. Here is what I wrote to a good friend I met via one of these sites. She means a great deal to me, so much that what sometimes felt like a huge waste of effort and energy was most definitely worth it:

While I don’t begrudge the fact that I’ve gained a very interesting friend through Internet dating sites (in the form of you), that’s it — I’ve given up!

However, my personal conclusion still stands: Internet dating is stale and broken.

Tag:

Category: