Thursday 13 January 2011

The Evil Lair of Online Dating!



Despite hating the concept, idea and everything about online dating. I thought to myself I'm not allowed to berate it without actually rating it first. So for the sake of humour in my blogs (no really!), I decided to set up a fake account, put a picture of Leon Lai in my front picture (erm... look him up on google for those who don't know who is) and start exploring one of those websites. I should also note that I did not pay a single penny to use the whole site because donating to a site like this that I won't use is the same as Posh Spice paying to get herself a gastric bypass!

First, input your details. Seems fair enough, you put your name, your whereabouts, your looks and then it comes on to 'Body Shape'. Originally expecting it to be apple, pear or orange shape, instead the 3 options were 'Slim', 'Curvy', or 'Cuddly'.... which all I can guess are slang terms for 'Relatively Normal', 'Admits that he/she is fat' and 'Morbidly Obese'.

Having clicked on 'Slim' (again, this is Leon Lai, not me) and put in my personality (my own), I went in to the dating world with a mask covering my face. And oh dear... My first impressions where as expected, desperate people desperately looking for someone! On a scale of 1 to 10, the standard ranged from 6 to -6!. While I was looking in my local area, I noticed that there were people I recognised as well. (I won't mention who to save their privacy) and all I can say is there's no surprise here!

Some of the profile pics and their age showed that either there's clearly been some sort of age-reducing skin lotion I haven't heard about yet or some people have been lying on their pictures and profiles...Some of them are clearly exaggerating and some are trying to hard such as posing in a bikini....some of them less...which made me want to throw up...and almost succeeded.

The website had a personality match finding service where it compares my personality to other people by a percentage and matches it by the highest number. So far my best match has not been higher than 65%. I can understand that trying trying to match a person who has nothing better to do than write blogs and try to make jokes about online dating websites can be difficult. But then I tried altering my personality details to make it look like I'm a racist who is on the sex offenders register and an anti-semite. Oddly enough, I started getting matches of over 70-80%!

I can't help thinking every profile I look at has a 'problem' with it. If you're on that website, there's gotta be something wrong with you. So I clicked on this profile but for the sake of this purpose, let's call her 'Hannah'. Now 'Hannah' has a fairly decent, self-taken pic of her face and she matches some of my personality. Her ideal man is a 6ft, tall, dark and handsome fellow who will whisk her off into the sunset. Okay, she doesn't like everything that I like, for example, she likes Sex and the City. I just like the first bit.

Looking through, all seems fine until I see her height. She's 5ft. Instantly clicked away. The thought of a person who is a whole, footlong, subway sandwich between me and her made me think that I could place 12 stacks of 1 inch thick books on her head and she still might not be as tall as me! But that wasn't the only problem. Her other photos showed her and her massive obsession with ponies...NEXT!

After a few days, I noticed my profile had been getting quite a few views and they were clearly interested in my personality ;). Some of them have even 'liked' my profile. Something I thought I'm grateful of and thought I'd return the favour. Unfortunately I cannot show you what I saw for privacy reasons and the best way to describe it is to write what I said in my head:

"OH MY GOD!!!!! She looks like she's been beaten with Adrian Chile's face and put her nose in a deep fat frier! She's got more wrinkles than my grandma! That e-mail said she was 22 but she looks closer to being a mummy! An actual Egyptian mummy! GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!"

Regrettably, I sent an e-mail back to her saying 'Sorry I've been taken' to put her down safely (the social equivalent of saying 'It's not you, it's me' in a break-up).

Okay, I'm being a little harsh on this. It's sort of understandable that if you can't find love out in the real word, you're sort of forced to look through other mediums and I get it. There probably is a match for everyone and he/she might be on that particular website. Ideally, not hiding their faces like I did.

A week later, I decided to close the account and never access it again. For the sake of not receiving any more dodgy messages and for the sake of my eyes to never see some of the awful things I've seen there again! (I was better off making my eyes watch 2 Girls 1 Cup again!)

Blog is complete and I will now try to scrub my eyes out!

1 comment:

  1. 1) Humour content: 0.
    2) You're never 6' ho-train!
    3) Don't think just because people have signed up to a dating website that they can't get a date in real life. Signing up for one doesn't perpetually rule out the other. If this was a blog post from 10 years ago or something I'd understand the attitude a bit but times have moved on a little particularly in the younger generation. I know several people who've met others through last.fm, twitter and even geo-caching!
    4) This is basically just a blog post with the summary: Will thinks people on dating sites are ugly. Which is pretty rich from someone who wouldn't even put their own face up on the site. Wonder how many messages from even -6 ratings you'd get then.

    ReplyDelete