Category: Relationship

UGT: Online Dating Tour de Force

This post is part of User Generated Tuesdays. If you want to be read by 1,000 new friends please go here. This is written by Kavin Stewart, who works at Offermatica and blogs about his online dating experiences.

[Noah's Note: Kavin mentioned to me in passing about his online dating experiences and I begged him to write an article about it. I have never used any of the sites but I am fascinated with how America transitioned from online dating being taboo to being generally accepted. Enjoy]

Ah, stereotypes! Where would we be without stereotypes? Why, there would be smart jocks, handsome nerds, californians who don’t like to surf, and completely sanitary hippies running around all over the place. DOES.NOT.COMPUTE.

In honor of stereotypes, and also in honor of my ongoing online dating binge (hear, hear!) I’m going to introduce you to the type of girls that hang out on each of the sites on which i lurk, in all their stereotypical glory.

match.com

i like to laugh AND have fun. seriously, BOTH! can you believe it?

What do you think happens when you advertise a dating site on television with no particular position or goal in mind other than getting craptons of people to sign up for your site? That’s right. You get a huge group of completely random people with nothing whatsoever in common. match.com girls are like mystery grab bags. Sometimes you find something really cool. But mostly, they’re just as boring and mainstream as gap khakis

yahoo personals *

I wouldn’t even acknowledge this match.com clone with a separate heading except that i already did and I’m too lazy to delete it now. Girls here might as well be chromosome-for-chromosome copies of the girls on match.

* not a real heading

eharmony

the sound of my ticking biological clock keeps me up at night

What kind of people sign up for a site that pitches itself so shamelessly to desperate people via tv spots starring a folksy geriatric “doctor” who advocates horoscopey bullshit like 29 dimensions of compatibility? Me, that’s who. However, writing a dating blog gives me license to indulge in all kinds of stupid behavior for the sake of a good story. It’s like i’m drunk all the time, but times ten. what’s your excuse eharmony people?

My favorite thing about eharmony is they ask you these compatibility questions which are cunningly designed to ruthlessly stomp out any iota of original thought. You might ask why? Why would they want to do this? My theory is that people will seem more compatible with each other if they’re all reduced to indistinguishably similar blobs of humanity. “Oh, you like stuff? I like, totally like stuff too! Let’s get married!”

Whatever the case may be, everyone on this site seems to think they should answer questions as if they’re competing in the miss america pagaent. One of the questions is “What are the THREE things for which you are MOST thankful?” You can basically sum up all of the answers I’ve ever seen by picking three of the following:

1. my family
2. my friends
3. my health
4. my education

I’m spellbound.

spring street personals

i liked burning man before it got so mainstream

First, some background: there’s a little site called nerve that you you can think of as what you’d get if vincent gallo stopped directing movies with pornographic scenes in them and just went full-on into the porn business — a “cerebral” porn site (think naked people with instruments instead of sport cars). nerve decided to create a personals section. Then they went to sites like fark, theonion, etc, and created personals for them that all looked different but tied into the same pool of users — the conglomeration of all these sites is called spring street personals.

As you can probably guess, spring street attracts a relatively specific crowd. If you can’t stand girls who use “sassy” as self-description and “partner in crime” as your-description then you might find something you like here. the girls are clever enough to distinguish between “there” “they’re” and “their” or “its” and “it’s”. picture the type who does bookings for the fillmore, writes on the side and shops in hayes valley and you’ll have an idea of what to expect.

plentyoffish.com

i like boyz L0LZ!!!!!!111!!!11!!!

This site is a really good example of the principle that paying money to do something has value in and of itself. Why? Because it provides a filter on crap. if you pay $X to put your profile on a site, you’ll probably spend some effort on it first of all. and second you’ll probably have this thing called a “job” where people pay you “money” to do things that generate “value”.

Still curious? Imagine the teeming mass of idiots on myspace. now throw out anyone who would be embarrassed to openly look for dates on the internet. there you have it. A distilled mass of only the most shameless idiots.

So… what bucket do you fit in?

Note for ladies: Kavin is single and ready to mingle..