According to the adverts that the book of face is serving up to me I can meet attractive single local women at Mate 1. Having tried online dating before I suspect this to be lies for all but the loosest definitions of ‘meet’ and ‘attractive’.

So I’m thinking of changing my online dating profile to a simple picture with 1 line of text:

I can has date?

And, yes, I am brutally aware that that is not grammatically correct, but that seems to be the point of lolcats (e.g. I can has cheezburger?). If you still don’t get it wikipedia can explain.

So I’ve actually managed to engage in email conversations with two whole women since I’ve joined the online dating sites. I’ve still yet to actually meet up with anyone on anything that remotely resembles a date (although we are working on this) and the possibility would seem to be becoming even more remote as one of the two has emailed me to politely say ‘thanks but no thanks’ (although, if what she has said is true, its to online dating in general rather than me in particular). I think I stand at something like 30/0 at the moment. Not good stats. That said, I did get an icebreaker request from someone who only lives 150 miles away… what’s the betting that goes nowhere?

This weekend was going to be a quiet weekend. I’d deliberately kept it free to just relax and not have to worry about doing anything. Turned out to be a rather full one Friday night I went for, what was supposed to be, a quick drink in Quilters with my neighbour. It turned into a 6 pint sesh (bearing in mind we were only there for 3 hours this isn’t bad and if you think 6 pints of lager is a lot, try drinking 6 pints of lemonade in that space of time, it’s not as easy as you might think), most of which was spent talking to some women that Marcus has managed to make friends with that night. I also spent 5 minutes having my hair played with by another girl who was quite obviously off her face on something, but who likes playing with hair (hell, I’m not going to complain). The night was topped off with a kebab in front of the telly. You can’t ask for much more than that

Despite protestations that I was going to stay in bed until gone 10 my body decided that I’d had enough sleep at 7:30 and I finally gave up and got up at 8, headed out to get some food in for the parents (who came for lunch and took away the old mattress, my old office chair and a whole load of boxes - wooo, I have space again!) and join a gym. Yup, you read that last bit correctly. I discovered on Friday night that the LA Fitness Gym (which is quite close to my house) has a pool (ok, its 18 meters long, but its a pool) so I thought I’d go investigate. It may surprise you to learn that I was already a member of a gym, but this was near the ex’s house. My new gym is about a third the size and doesn’t quite have all the facilities my old one did but it’s also a third the price to be a member and doesn’t require an hours journey on the train to get there.

Saturday night I went out with my neighbour again, along with one of his mates and two of his colleagues. We were later joined by some more of his friends, one of the bar tenders from Quilters (who are, incidentally, all very attractive, including one who, if I discover she is single, may need to be invited out to dinner), her cousin and her cousins breasts (these do need mentioning in their own right as they were very large, very nice and very much on display with a combination of pushup bra and low cut top which ensured a steady stream of men trying to talk to her [she didn’t speak a word of English] and attracted the gaze of any men within eyeshot). I went clubbing for the first time in god knows how long (since I quit drinking in fact), actually got onto the dance floor, despite the crap music, and spoke to some more women (I seem to be picking up the nickname of Long Haired Guy) and had my hair stroked some more (beginning to think this ‘we don’t like long hair’ rubbish from the online dating sites is a bit of a fallacy).

Given I didn’t get to sleep until 6am and I woke up at 9:30 Sunday was a complete write off which involved me watching Lost (in glorious HD), Hot Fuzz (again, HD ) and going to bed early.

So there you go, two nights out on the lash and the liberal application of about sixty quid had netted me new friends, and has seen me talking to more random women than I’ve managed on both dating sites I use. Got a mate coming up next weekend. Given what my quiet weekend turned into God alone knows what a planned pissup is going to be like

The new site is paying dividends already and I have just entered into an email conversation with a girl. Actually, let me qualify that, I sent notice that I was interested, she sent back her photos, said she liked the look of my profile and would like it if I wrote back, I wrote back, also releasing my photos and now may, or may not have scared her off. We’ll see Way past my bedtime now but I suspect I’ll be up until 11 just on the off chance I get a reply tonight (God I am sad ).

Given I’m getting precisely nowhere fast with match.com I’ve joined another online dating site that does psychometric profiling and doesn’t release photos initially, which seems like a fantastic idea if you ask me. Kicked off a couple of icebreaker requests and we shall see what we shall see.

Well, its been a week and no response from the two email I sent out on match.com. I’m going to guess they’re not interested. That, coupled with a ‘Thanks but no thanks’ I got from a wink I sent puts me at 4 for 0.

Anyway, I’ve gone through and set up a whole load of searches for the local area around the stations on my line (well, so far from Colchester to Chelmsford, still need to do the stations on the metro services from Shenfield to Stratford but after a few hundred profiles I was going a bit cross eyed). I’ve also removed all the unsuitable matches. Hopefully this should make future searches easier as I’ll just need to look at the new profiles since I last looked. New emails have been sent and people winked, so all that remains to do is wait and see if they garner any responses.

Not that I’ve spent all day say browsing match.com (its true, I’ve spent some of it browsing other sites too ) but I am getting a little frustrated with its search feature. I have long hair. I happen to like my hair so it’s not going anywhere in a hurry. It would seem that the vast majority of women out there find long hair a turnoff (seriously girls, not all long hair is bad, I actually look after mine ). Match.com allows people to specify if they find long hair a turn on, turn off or if they don’t care. It also allows you to specify what your ideal match’s turn ons and turn offs will be in the advanced search section. You’d think, therefore, that I could just filter out all the women who don’t like long hair and be done with it. No. Doesn’t seem to work like that. I can specify that they must find long hair a turn on and still get results with people who find long hair a turn off, and near the top of the list too. Highly annoying. I’ve got very adept at clicking on a profile, scrolling to the bottom, seeing the inevitable Turnoffs: long hair and moving on. Since I’m obviously not going out tonight I’m going to go back to looking through hundreds of profiles of women who live near stations that my train goes through

So, it’s taken a few days of procrastination but I’ve send out another couple of emails on Match.com. One I fully expect to crash and burn on due there being a slight issue with distance (its a delicious irony that I just moved from the area she lives in) but then given I received a wink from someone nearly 150 miles away from me (either she thinks I’m seriously hot or, much more likely, doesn’t have a clue how far away I live) I figured I’d give it a go (plus she was incredibly cute (the one I emailed, not the one who winked me)). I find it amusing that that email was nice and easy to write (10 minutes) compared to the one I sent to a nice looking girl who lives in a lot more locally to me (2 hours). The instant I get my rejection emails I’ll let you all know

My brother has decided that I should not be messing about with online dating. I think he still sees the social stigma associated with such things (but then he’s probably only web 0.1a and hasn’t even heard of web 2.0). He’s of the firm belief that the way to ‘pull birds’ [his words] is to go to the pub and use A Line. He was even gracious enough to provide me of a line of my very own. It goes like this:

Don’t you get on my train in the morning?

This is a variation on his (supposedly very successful) ‘Didn’t you go to my school?‘ line which is currently his weapon of choice. Personally I’d be mortified if I was in the same pub as him when he used his line so there is no way on the face of this planet I’d be using my custom made variant in public. There is also the slight problem of follow through. Let us consider the following:

Me: “Hi, don’t you get on my train in the morning?”
Her: “No.”
Me: “…”

There would seem to be a small leap of faith from there to ‘So, dinner at my place then?‘ and it would appear to run a large risk of being slapped.

Not only this, but I am supposed to now run everyone I decide I like past him. I’m not sure where this idea came from since I’ve certainly not done so in the past. Let us return, once again to our fictitious pub:

Me: “Hi, I’m going to take a photo of you, send it to my brother and, if he thinks you’re cute enough, I’ll be back to hit you with a killer line…”

I don’t know about you but to me it lacks finesse. There is also plenty of opportunity not only for rejection (the reason why I can’t approach random women in the first place) but for massive putdowns which would crush the spirit and bruise the soul. I know my brothers heart is in the right place but when it comes to dating (and computers) I think I’ll continue to just ignore him