I never talk about my love life here, for two simple reasons: first, because my mom and other family members read my blog (Hi, Mom!) and second, because there isn’t one.
Internet dating rakes in billions of dollars every year because of people like me — people who are lonely and simply want to find a companion to accompany them through life. Like other industries that purport to instantly and efficiently solve life’s problems — lose weight, make money, enlarge your… — it is a scam. A big, fat scam.
I’ve been a Match.com member since it started. Luckily, my charter membership means that I don’t have to pay for it, because it would have been like, oh, paying huge sums of cash for an ill-conceived and disastrous war. On the other hand, I have paid for my Gay.com subscription for the last two years. That won’t be happening again.
In all, I’ve tried internet dating for more than a decade. And it has resulted in exactly one relationship, and that lasted only a few months and involved a guy who lived about 100 miles away.
Let’s explore the realities of it all, shall we?
Match guys too good for you. Gay.com guys are too bad for you.
On Match, the profiles generally include photos of tanned, athletic, shirtless guys frolicking on a beach or climbing a mountain. Their interests include visits to the gym, vacations at Machu Picchu, lavish entertaining, their private practice as a doctor, lawyer, or marketing director, and meeting guys exactly like themselves.
On Gay.com, the profiles tend to include descriptions (and often photos) of genitalia — generally embellished. Additional qualities of the Gay.com man include being closeted, doing drugs, living with roommates, being both gay and Republican, and being puerile and immature. And this is only the 50 to 60-year-olds I’m talking about.
Match.com has the very useful “Who’s Viewed Me?” function. This allows you to see exactly how many people have been intrigued enough to view your profile… and how many people were turned off enough by it to not contact you. That’s usually all of them except the ones that you would never want to contact yourself.
Gay.com doesn’t offer this service, but they do offer “Hot Lists.” Since no one at Gay.com would ever entertain the notion of replying to a profile, instead they add you to their Hot List in the hopes that you will see it and contact them instead. It’s a passive aggressive field day over there. And as if that non-communication isn’t enough for you, you can always enter a chat room and not talk there as well. That is, unless you are part of a clique of guys whose entire life revolves around the chat room, in which case you can watch them ramble on for hours creating an impenetrable wall of in-jokes and chatter that you can never join in on.
There is something about me that is so unpalatable that I can’t seem to make any headway. When I receive a very rare response to my profile, it is from someone who is:
- Old enough to be my parent (or sometimes, grandparent) — or young enough to be my offspring
- Proud to be a drug user
- Looking for a sugar daddy who will spoil him
- Just looking while his girlfriend is out of town
- Unable to carry a conversation past “Hi” and “what’s up?”
- Seeking someone to have an “open relationship”
- Closeted enough to want to be discreet, but not educated enough to spell “discreet” properly
- Unable live on his own, still has a roommate at 40, doesn’t have his own car
- Of the opinion that when one leaves the house, one must drink and party until 3am
I am an adult. I tend to be responsible, I own my own house and car, I take others into consideration when I make decisions. I do not break the law, I do not judge others by how much they look like an Abercrombie and Fitch model, and I do not want to meet a guy who will give me all his money — or vice versa. I do not want to jump into bed with someone, be anything other than monogamous, or pretend that we are just friends.
And this is why I will be single for the rest of my life.
