I have deleted my online dating profile. That noise you just
heard, like a chorus of deflating airbeds, was the collective sigh of relief
from thousands of single women across the city.
I’m in two minds about this decision. It’s a relief to be
free of the posturing, the calculating, the humiliation of online dating. Yet I’m
also aware that it made my life more interesting, and that now this blog will
be comprised only of uninspired masturbation jokes and all the other
unremarkable travails of my existence. If you want to stop reading from now on,
I commend your sagacity.
To mark the end of the Modern Dating saga (a saga about as
dramatic and meaningful as the Twilight movies), I feel it deserves some kind
of summative conclusion. More importantly, I deserve one last opportunity to
moan about it. Here’s a round-up of my experiences.
This is how excited people are about my stories
- The first girl I went out with after a week or
so of talking online offered me MDMA while we queued outside a busy bar. When I
refused, she simply shrugged and took my dose on top of her own.
- One date ended early after I accidentally took
her to a gay night and she later caught me hugging a pair of friendly lesbians,
which, I believe, is something of a faux pas on a first date. You can read
about it here.
- I discovered that it’s fairly standard on a free
dating site for women to receive unsolicited pictures of penis’ and for men, at
least in my own case, to receive unsolicited pictures of penis’. The only
difference is that mine came from cross-dressers.
- I went out on several dates with the last girl I
met on the site. In fact, I rather liked her. Until a small misunderstanding
led to her accusing me of faking mental illness to avoid seeing her. Such an
accusation was reason enough to avoid seeing her.
I could go on like this for a long time (and I have, in
earlier blog entries which I will shamelessly link to at the bottom of this
post). The thing is, I have a tendency to play the victim, which isn’t fair to
the majority of the people I met. Most of them were perfectly lovely, I was
simply not up to scratch when it came to dating them. And, indeed, not up to
scratch for dating at all.
Nor do I mean to denigrate the use of dating sites. Since
deleting my profile I’ve spoken to three separate people who have found a
relationship through online dating. All of them had very positive experiences,
and I’m very happy for them. What their success makes quite clear to me is that
I’m simply not cut out for dating. I don’t have the confidence, the ease of
manner, the ability to develop chemistry. What I have is a taciturn manner,
over-active self-awareness, and an unrivalled ability to sit in a darkened room
and consume biscuits. These qualities are more likely to result in your corpse
being removed by crane via the window than they are in marriage.
We all need something to aspire to
I don’t mean for this post to come across as defeatist or
lugubrious. Rather it’s a declaration of pragmatism. And I have been assured
from all corners that romance happens when you least expect it. If that is so,
it hardly matters just how little I believe that this is true.
The lacklustre saga! Modern Dating, Modern Dating II, Modern Dating III,
