my match

For my birthday last week, I received a subscription to Match.com, the dating website. Unlike e-harmony or any of those others, Match.com lets you put in what you are looking for, and then searches exactly within your parameters for matches. You can show interest by "winking" at a person, or just send them an email through their in-house message system (so personal information is not revealed).

I have been signed up for about 10 days now. Here are some things I have observed so far in my brief foray into the world of online dating:

1. Creepy, desperate, unattractive guys will descend on a new person like a duck on a June bug. In the few short days I have been on, I have been "winked" at by 30 different guys. Of the 30, I have already hit the "no thanks, not interested" button on all 30 of them. If Darwin was on Match.com, he'd have a field day with some of these people. It's really that scary.

2. What frustrates me the most is that they don't even seem to read the profile. I list that I am looking for someone is a specific age range, then get "winks" from guys who are definitely not in that age range. (Does the 52-year-old guy think..'well, she put a range that I am way too old for, and I'm scary looking, but maybe she'll overlook all that'?) Or they live in NYC. Or they don't fit another one of my parameters that are rather important to me, such as size, religion, etc.

3. I received an email the other day from someone. The misspellings in this were astronomical. To me, it's simple. You are trying to impress me. Why send an email full of misspelled words? One of my biggest pet peeves in life to begin with is people that can't spell. Sending me an email full of misspelled words is the quickest way for me to hit the "reject" button. (Charissa Holland, I expect you to back me up on this one!)

The most frustrating/perplexing/odd/fascinating thing about this whole experience so far is that when I joined, it was at the prompting of a friend, who urged me to do it to get my mind off of a stupid boy that had broke my heart. But, when I hit the "my matches" button, guess who was number five on the list? The boy. I didn't even know he had a profile on there. But there he was....and the computer matched us up. (See...Billy Idol even gets it...why can't he?)

So what does this all mean? I'm not quite sure yet. I guess we'll see what happens......

....to be continued.