Online Dating Is For The Birds

As you can probably tell from many of the other posts I have here, I am quite single, and have been for quite some time.  There are times when it does have some advantages (when I get around to rewriting my “lost” blog entry about Valentine’s Day, you’ll see what I mean), but there are times when it really sucks.  And frankly, I’m not exactly the right type to hit the bars.  So, like any introvert with access to a computer, I went to the internet.

There are countless dating sites out there, probably far more than I can even try to count, so I had my work cut out for me when I began to check them out.  First off the list were sites that deal with more adult hook ups, and by “adult,” I am referring to relationships of the “friends with benefits” nature.  I may be old-fashioned, but such relationships are not what I’m looking for.

I also eliminated anything you had to pay for right off the bat.  It just did not feel right to be paying a site to find me love when there was no real guarantee it would succeed.  This also began to whittle out other sites, some of which offered  free profiles, but they had hitches, usually that you had to pay to do things, like see who is interested in you.

It’s not like I was not game to pay if there were results.  It was more based on one site that said there was a message for me, and once I signed up, I found out that the message for me was really from the website itself, telling me about the next tiers I could access with bigger payments.  I did not particularly care to be suckered like that, so now I shy away from a lot of those types of sites.  Once bitten, twice shy.

I also tried that one dating website, you know, the one with the personality profile to find your match.  They told me I could not be matched, twice.  There is nothing that shatters what little bit of self-confidence I had more than a dating website that throws up its hands and says, “I give up.”

So, this leaves the free sites.  I tried a couple of these, combing through the profiles on them.  The first thing I seem to notice is that somehow, “my area” had broadened to locations three states over.  And, profiles seem to come and go real fast.  One such website said I had a message from someone who was interested in me.  By the time I got to the website to check out the message (which was not more than a couple of hours, at the most), the message was gone, and the user was gone.  It also turned out that this “free” site also had some other tiers of performance that I could access with a nominal fee.

The last site I tried actually got me a couple of contacts.  One of these contacts turned out to be a “pornbot” trying to get me to sign up for some webcam site.  The other two were women from Ghana.  I have nothing against Ghana.  I have never been there, and, honestly, I probably will never go there.  I was reluctant to consider a relationship with women a couple of states away from me, I really had no intention of considering anyone who was across an ocean from me, diagonally.  Besides, one of them had that she was from Colorado Springs on her profile, and soon began asking me for money to repair her computer.

So, I pretty much have closed, deactivated or suspended any accounts I had on most of these sites, at least the ones I had not closed down before.  Well, that is not entirely true.  I am still signed onto one dating site, though it really has not been all that active.  I keep it because it’s free and covers a niche that many of the other dating sites did not cover.  It’s a science fiction related dating site.

Who know, maybe that site will be the one.

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