When you lose the one you love, there's always plenty more.Many years ago my mother signed me up for something called "
Cotillion". Cotillion was a way to force children, who are already struggling with the joys of puberty, into incredibly awkward rituals involving the opposite sex. I think there was some dancing involved.
Kids show up dressed like they are trying out for the local production of the Great Gatsby. While everyone is roughly the same age, they are in drastically different stages of development. Boys and girls get randomly paired up. Girls giggle and boys faces flush strawberry-red. Half the girls are taller than their counter-parts and nothing feels natural.
In a lot of ways this is what the whole match.com experience reminds me of. I'm not really opposed to the idea of match.com and I'm still lurkin around that cyber-singles club. There does seem to be something constricting and unnatural about the whole thing.
In Cotilion everyone was over-dressed and no one was really sure what anyone looked like under all that tuxedo and taffeta. The same is true with the photos that your potential mate displays on his/her profile. Everyone I know who's been on a few "match-dates" has a story about meeting someone who looks significantly different than their given picture. In fact meeting up with a Carmen Electra who turns out to be Cameron Manheim is basically a right-of-passage that every match.man has to go through -- probably more than once.
Part of the training in Cotillion was sorta like "finishing school" type stuff. Proper dining manners, please and thank-you, that sorta bullshit. So your behavior during these dances was severely restrained. The same holds true again for the world of Match.com. Even your first phone call or face-to-face meeting always feels like your staring in a reality show rather than a easy-going get-together.
Match.com isn't the only game in town though when it comes to meeting singles. If that service strikes you as a little stiff and structured head across the tracks over to Myspace.
If Match.com is Cotillion reborn, Myspace is like a fraternity's Halloween party. After all, everyone knows that for most women, Halloween is the time of year where they can live out their deep and secret
fantasy of being a total whore. Not that I'm looking down on it. I'm all for it. It's better than most men who use Halloween to dress up like a woman.
Match.com's romantic sensibilities remind one of the 1950's, but over here in Myspace town it's the seventies all over again. As a result the women on Myspace are a lot more "
liberated" but at the same time it's much more of a
train-wreck.
Despite the dangers and pitfalls with Myspace I think I might prefer it overall to Match.com. The only problem with it is that (since its not a strictly dating site) it's not as easy. With Match.com you know that everyone there is online to be approached by random strangers who might want to fuck you. In Myspace the chick with her boobs falling out of her shirt might just be a closet exhibitionist / prude / 14 year old.
It's extremely easy to just send "Winks" out to random Match.com girls. In fact that's sorta my M.O. I figure no one is being really genuine so there's not much point in spending all the time studying all that profile mumbo-jumbo. I basically make sure I'm in the target's height range, that they are non-smokers with no kids and if the picture is good -- they get a wink.
I figure if and when they respond THAN there's a time to get to (sort of) get to know someone.
The other thing I've noticed about Match is that you really gotta move on this stuff. Everything seems so forced and artificial that you gotta set up that face-to-face meeting soon to see if there is any actual chemistry. Otherwise things fall apart almost right away.
Of course when they do it is no big deal what so ever. You simply stop getting replies and move on to the next one. My favorite "break-up" so far has come as a result from one of the "joke entries" in my profile where I claim to be an artist (which is true) who works in various mediums including paper mache` (which is untrue).
Every once in a while I will get into an email string with a woman who will bring up that Pap-mach. "So I see your into paper mache...How interesting! I didn't know serious artists ever used that!"
So I respond, "heh...acually that's a lil joke. I work mostly in pencil and digital painting"
(no response).
see that? We just broke up. It's happened at least twice. It occurs to me now that maybe I SHOULD get into Paper Mache just to pick up some chicks.
okay that's all for now. Next post I'll give you the 411 on Long Beach Becky.
-B
Labels: girls, memories, on-line dating
