The Beauty of Online Dating
Jan 5th, 2010 | By CanuckJacq | Category: This and ThatThe Daily Mail reports that an online dating site has removed 5,000 members who have gained weight over Christmas. I feel like channeling my mother right now:
You don’t want friends like that anyway.
And why would we care about online dating sites? Surely none of us use online dating sites?
What many people don’t believe is that before I became very much a married person, I was very much a single person, and having moved country twice since coming out, I learned to use all the methods at my disposal to meet women. Yes, including online dating websites… with varying degrees of success.
The first woman I met over the internet was a butch vegan with children my age. Despite our differences, she and I became fast friends, and I credit her with a lot of my early queer education (not that way… get your minds out of the gutter).
I had only just come out an
d moved to Bristol. She had just moved there from London. I could barely get a woman to look at me, and she was pulling girls my age by walking up and asking for their numbers. We had nothing in common except that we were both lesbians who needed a friend. We’re still friends.
After that, I met a rather intimidatingly posh girl online. She was very pretty and girly and flirty and at one point, asked if she could “court” me.
After I said, “sure,” I didn’t hear from her for a month. Then she rang up, invited me to a New Year’s Eve party at a pub, where I met her new butch girlfriend and lost my contact lenses in the pub’s toilets.
In an effort to keep as many lesbian friends as possible, I invited the couple to my place for a party two months later. They drank to the point of medical toxicity, propositioned myself and my roommate (jointly), stayed the night and trashed our apartment while we slept. I haven’t seen them since, but I do wish them well.
But the worst online dating disaster was a girl I met online and then made plans with to meet. I gave her my mobile number, so she rang and we talked. She rang again two hours later, while I was at work. I explained I couldn’t talk on the phone at work and she hung up on me.
I went back to work and the phone rang again an hour later and she was crying and told me about various medical procedures she’d had recently. I felt bad for her so I listened, but then explained again I had to hang up
, and she suggested we meet for lunch. I agreed. I bought her lunch in the food court and we had a perfectly normal conversation.
An hour after I returned to work, she rang again, once again in tears. My boss wasn’t even angry anymore, but laughing so hard even he was almost crying. I haven’t answered the phone to an unknown number since. I also didn’t date again for almost two years.
But really, the people you’ll meet dating online are as mixed a bag as those you’ll meet any other way. And if you don’t want to date people who gain weight sometimes, you’re best not dating human beings, or perhaps you should be looking for your beloved in a support group for people with hyperthyroidism.
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Great post! I love hearing about other people’s bad dates; it makes me feel better about my own. I’ve never had a new love interest call me four times in one day in tears (that’s special), but I have had a bloke regale me with a long and strange story about how he once had a flatmate whose girlfriend screamed in bed. It went on and on. He even impersonated the noises she made. I listened with ever wider eyes, wondering where the hell he was going, before he hit me with the punchline: ’so lemur, do you scream in bed?’ Em. What do you even say? ‘Oh I do yes, right noisy I am, scream the house down, I sound kind of like this ”eee-eeee-eeeeek” so I do’.
I met that guy at a corporate function. He was cute and seemed normal. I think there’s a lot of stigma attached to using dating websites, but I’ve loads of friends who’ve met their partners that way. When you think about it, it makes more sense – you already know a little about the person you’re going on a date with, or at least you know more than he or she is cute and seems normal. I suppose the other thing is that it allows you to pick and choose the characteristics you want in a potential date. You can use this for good (like finding someone who likes the same literature as you) or you can use it for evil (like only dating people with eating disorders). I have a hunch, however, that eventually the beautiful people dating site is just going to be one dude sitting drooling over his own profile on the computer screen.
LOL! OMG the screaming guy. That’s … nice.
I can’t believe they took people off the site for putting on weight, that is just horrible, as if people don’t feel bad enough.
I answered an ad in the GCN once and from it I met my best frind, defo a soul mate, all be it a platonic one.
Good luck to people who use these sites and to those who meet people on the net in other ways, why not!!!
LOL…brilliant post!
I know a couple who met through a personal ad in a mag (actual Hard Copy – how retro) years ago. They were both just coming out and became friends, then lovers. Still together 15 years later
So it can work.
I agree with Lemur though, a website for beautiful people only will just be full of either more conceited and/or better liars.
I actually met someone online for the very first time in 1994. We’re still in touch.
And oh hell, I met all you guys online didn’t I?
Yay for meeting people online then.
But as it happened, the one person I didn’t meet online is my wife.
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