My Man Catalogue (Part 1)

Adventures in Online Dating

The wild and strange world of online dating was a daunting and intimidating thought at first. I toyed with the idea for a few weeks before I decided to take the cyber plunge. I realize that many girls can become self critical of themselves with this method of meeting guys, especially when it really can be superficial – at least to begin with. The services can all ‘claim’ to connect people on various levels of compatibility, blah, blah, blah... but at the end of the day it’s the photo that is the deal maker or breaker. It would be naive to think that it’s not – and if someone told me that it wasn’t important, I would guess they were lying – to me or to themselves.

I think we have all heard the horror stories of online dating when people basically pretend to be someone they are not and then when they meet for the first time, it’s a big shocking letdown. Because I am who I am, I wanted to insure that this wouldn’t happen with me and when I finally posted my profile, I was as honest as possible about who I was, and what I looked like. I posted about 6 photos – from all unflattering angles and candid party shots. There was even a drop-down selection for body-type and I had selected the “Queen Sized” option; I didn’t want to create any false representations whatsoever.

What I found the most frustrating, which was something I totally didn’t expect, was that I would constantly get contact proposals from guys that I knew wouldn’t like me. I would check out their profile and under their preferences they would have written “Skinny girls only”. I didn’t think less of them for that – you like what you like and that’s fine – but then don’t be sending someone like me invitations. When I would ignore their emails, some weirdoes would even get upset and email a second or third time asking why I wasn’t replying. Hello?! Have you seen all my photos? I’m not your type – and I just wanted to save both of us some time and effort.

After I had surpassed this odd twist and had made some good initial connections online, but even then some in-person meetings went well and some others I could tell they were disappointed with the ‘live’ version of me. It threw me the first time and my self esteem took a bit of a hit – but I surprisingly got over it after a couple more times. After the first dozen meetings, my new attitude was: Screw it! It’s not like I would see them ever again anyway. It was pretty fun and slightly addictive – like what social networking is like today – that’s what this site was like back then. I would log on at least 5 times a day to check out the latest ‘talent’. There was one guy I contacted that was my ultimate bad-boy dream; he was the lead singer in a punk band... Yum! Although we had a fabulous time together, once again, I knew early on that he didn’t have romantic feelings towards me after his initial 'once-over' and I wasn’t the least surprised when he never asked me out again. O well... everything happens for a reason.

To be continued...