domdavis.com

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

Today I got to find out what rejection, web 2.0 style, feels like. Its not all that bad to be honest The girl I had emailed on match.com replied to my email stating she had recently started seeing someone and wanted to see how that was turning out. Of course the pessimist in me says she was just being nice and that I’ve crashed and burned (my male friends agree with this view). My female friends are more inclined to believe that she’s met someone recently and would like to see how that has turned out. Interesting to see the different point of views

So, not to be disheartened by my first response from match.com I set about doing a search for women who lived in Colchester and who were likely to be real (I know, call me picky). There are some… interesting… ladies out there and I think I may need to spend an evening filtering the more unsuitable ones from my searches however I did find one potential match and fired off what was supposed to be a casual, witty, quick missive [but that actually took me about 90 minutes to write and probably sounds forced and stilted]. Here’s hoping she writes back

So literally hours after I put my profile on match.com I get a wink (basically someone saying they are interested). Initial reaction was ‘woo!’. Their picture was really nice (I mean really nice) and they seemed, superficially, to like the same things I did. So I sat down and started trying to write an email to them… and started thinking about it. They’d told me very little concrete about themselves and their list of likes was just a little too comprehensive (owns dogs but likes cats? Likes fishing and soccer? Ok, could be real, but alarm bells are ringing here). There were also odd grammatical errors that just wouldn’t be made by a native English speaker. Call me paranoid here but I just didn’t feel easy about it. Then I checked my profile and saw that its been views a grand total of zero times (check out Mr Popular ). On the off chance it’s real I’ve winked back but I think I’ll save the emailing to people who are more likely to turn out to be real and not wanting to con me out of cash.

If I understand it rightly (and you have to realise that I am very new to all of this) my profile is now live on match.com and visible to people doing searches. I have been told by a variety of sources that my pictures look OK, but they’re a bit staged so I’ll need to get someone else to take some slightly less posed ones. Anyway, we can work on that over the next few weeks, the important bit is that something is out there. I shall keep you all updated on how it goes (or doesn’t as the case may be).