The online dating minefield

Online dating has been a growth industry for at least ten years and is now seen as a perfectly respectable way to find your future partner. So as a single man in a new town, I recently joined the Guardian Soulmates dating site to give it a whirl.

I’m no stranger to online dating having tried different sites in the past. I simply hadn’t been meeting enough new people in my previous life and all my friends had partners and were ‘loved up’ and settling down. I moved into a new flat share and learned that my flatmate had met her current partner through Soulmates, so I’ve been trying it for the last couple of months, and the experience reminded me of why I gave it up before.

The initial experience can be quite fun: write a few phrases about yourself, add a recent photo that makes you look halfway human, publish it and sit back and watch the emails roll in. At least, that’s the idea. In reality, it doesn’t work, at least not if you’re a bloke. Men outnumber women with an average of 5 to 1 on any given dating site, and women almost never send the first email, so already the odds are looking bad.

No problem: if I make the effort to email people and just be myself, they will see me for the wonderful person that I am, right? Big fat wrong.

Firstly, for every email I send out, I have to assume that there are at least another 5 guys emailing the same girl. So I write something clever and funny to get her attention. No response. Rejection always sucks, but get used to it buddy: it’ll happen a lot. Maybe they don’t respond because I’m an ugly son of a bitch with the poetic grace of Bernard Manning? Nope, that’s not it. I’m not magazine cover material but I know where I stand on the cute stakes and it’s at the right end. And as far as being personable and friendly goes, that’s sorted too: I know a little about a lot of things, so I can hold a conversation; I can tell jokes, throw in compliments to make a girl go weak at the knees and be funny as the need arises. Actually, anyone who knows me might disagree with that last one, but you get my drift.

The problem is that the woman I’ve just emailed is also receiving so much email for other men that she simply can’t respond to them all. Men figure this out pretty quickly and realise that the only way to increase their odds is to send more emails out to more women. It becomes a numbers game and nothing to do with the person at the other end at all. Pretty dismal stuff.

A handy feature allows you to find out if your email has been read. If you see that your email was read, it’s even worse when you don’t get a response. You begin to think there’s something wrong with you, or what you wrote, and spend the next few emails trying out a weird guessing game of subject matter to see what sticks. Maybe email A should have been sent to girl B instead? What a load of marketing bollocks.

If someone asked you out in the real world, you would have to respond in some way, you wouldn’t just ignore them would you? OK, maybe you would, but I think that would make you a wanker. The anonymity of dating sites allow a level of discourtesy that wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) be tolerated in the real world. The web may be great for bringing people together, but in this case it’s also great at keeping them apart. I think if someone has taken the time to contact you and you’re not interested, you should at least have the courtesy to drop a quick, polite note saying ‘thanks but no thanks’. I was taught that good manners cost nothing; with online dating, bad manners cost twenty quid a month.

So let’s assume you get a response: it’s time to start chatting. Depending on the person this could be a week’s worth of random banter or a discourse on the nature of self. I don’t recommend the latter and the former needs to be tempered with some real world stuff or you’ll find you ultimately have nothing in common. I’ve learned to only swap a few emails over a few days before getting to meet the person; anything longer than this and you run the risk of any spark fizzling out before it’s even begun.

So the emails swap regularly and you arrange a date. It might be awkward, but no – it goes well, laughter is had, you say goodnight with some nice fluffy thoughts in your head. Leaving it a couple of days to ‘be cool’, you eventually fire off an email asking her out again. What were you thinking?

If you’re lucky and you do get a response, it normally goes something like this: “You’re a really nice guy but I didn’t feel the spark” or “Let’s just be friends?”. I’ve had the second response and wonderfully, it was genuine and I have got good friends out of it. But getting the first response really says “I don’t fancy you”. After all the emails, the date and the aftermath, you finally get to hear that she thinks you’re about as cute as a two legged badger that’s been wrapped in a curtain and strategically shaved.

Bugger.

When we are attracted to someone for the first time, it’s because we have already seen them, probably interacted with them, formed an opinion about their personality and looks and probably wondered what it might be like to, uh, get close to them.

And there’s the rub: Online dating can never replace that first rush of meeting someone, not knowing about them and fancying them because they have nice eyes or a cute smile. Looking at a blurry picture, a vague list of likes and dislikes, and swapping a few emails paints a very small 2D picture of a rich, interesting, complex 3D person.

I’m coming back into the real world. This is one place the social web can take a back seat. I know there are success stories, but they are actually quite rare and evidently online dating is not for me.

Right, where do I meet women these days?

What?

Whaddya mean they have all gone online?