So lately, my OKCupid profile has been languishing. I've been in full-blown hermit mode, spending my evenings snuggled into my (brand-new, absolutely beautiful, and far-too-expensive) sheets (from anthropologie) with Netflix and hard cider. (I'm twelve episodes into the first season of Roswell. Also, The Man Who Cried is currently streaming, and I highly recommend everyone out there watch it. It's a gorgeous little gem of a movie that was terribly under-advertised and under-rated, probably because it was directed by a woman, but it is intense and beautiful and it has a great cast.)
But my profile is active and everything, so I still get email notifications of certain kinds of things, and I totally got an email when this guy that's friends with this guy that I maybe kissed a lot a month ago was checking out my profile.
I may have laughed inappropriately loudly and for an unacceptable length of time.
But it did get me to go back to the site to see what else had been up lately, and WOW. Apparently, September is the month where people scope the dating site profiles of people they peripherally know in real life.
Stop it, people. YOU ARE CREEPING ME OUT. Also making me feel like a loser. Why do I have a profile on OKCupid again? Weeks like this, I forget. Seriously. Why do I? All I want to do is lie in bed and watch Netflix. And I am not going to invite some random internet stranger over to do that with me. I mean, real talk, I've had entire relationships during which I wouldn't have invited the person I was dating over to do that. Netflix in bed is serious business. Netflix in bed is more or less the absolute pinnacle of intimacy.
But OKC. Right. It's a little disconcerting to look at my visitors list and see so many familiar faces. I mean, it's funny and all for about 30 seconds and then I rapidly go into a shame spiral for even having the damn profile to begin with, and then I become concerned that these familiar faces might want to sleep with me, and then I get all nervous and all it does is reinforce my decision to become an agoraphobic hermit shut-in who watches Netflix in bed every night.
I'm sure in a week, when my extroverted tendencies have again conquered my introverted tendencies (I am constantly at war with myself, it's really unpleasant) and I'm all social butterfly again, I will be flattered by all these creepers. But right now, I'm just weirded out.
P.S.- You should probably keep a throw-away OKC profile with no pictures so you can scope out your friends and your friends' friends without causing existential meltdowns in the people you're checking up on. I mean, I totally understand curiousity, I'm more curious than a cat that's only got one life left, but really. A little courtesy, here. It's the internet. You can TOTALLY BE ANONYMOUS if you just put a little effort into it.
Showing posts with label OKCupid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OKCupid. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Adventures in Internet Dating Sites
I have a profile on OKCupid. (Really. Stop laughing. Ok, keep laughing, it's pretty funny. But can you at least keep it to belly laughs and giggles, and dispense with the snickering? Snickering makes me feel judged. Thanks.)
In the year or so I've been using this only-slightly-less-cess-ridden-than-Craigs-List pool of humanity, I have met in person exactly one man. He (read: his dick) was not right for me. Really, really not right for me. Wow. Nice guy, honestly. Just not for me.
Anyway, I've had the usual barrage of online dating adventures: the polyamorous guys that are sort of sweetly earnest about wanting to maintain multiple relationships, the completely illiterate bros who refer to me as "shorty" and/or "gurl" and like to ask if I like to give head, the intensely earnest single father's who gravitate toward me because I already have a kid and then ask me why I don't talk about her at all, because obviously a child is the CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE and is the only thing a parent should ever talk about.
(Side rant: I actually had one of these guys tell me I was a bad mother when I calmly tried to explain to him that being an unhappy, boring person by giving up every part of my life to a three-year-old would be a terrible thing for her. He honestly didn't get it. What in the flipping hell is wrong with people these days?)
Oh, and then there was the guy who is, by his own admission, about three hundred pounds over weight and always cranky because he's in "chronic pain" but felt that introducing himself by telling me that he's better than me was a good idea. No, I'm not joking. This happened.
Lately, I've been exchanging rather pleasant, intellectual messages with an English major-turned-Army enlistee. The nature of our communiques being what it is, I sometimes spend several hours in between doing minimal amounts of work while I sit at my desk and get paid composing responses. He's really rather intelligent, and I enjoy a good verbal jousting match more than most people. We almost maybe kind of sort of worked out the nature of evil last week.
Anyway, this requires me to be logged into the OKC site for (on occasion) hours on end. Since the site design is horrificly bad, there seems to be no way to consistently turn off the built-in chat function. Every time I think I'm safe, it randomly turns itself back on (sometimes when I haven't even clicked anything).
How do I know it has turned itself back on? I get an instant message.
Some of these are too mundane and/or vulgar to even be funny, but every once in awhile I hit comic (and secret internal mean-streak gratifying) gold.
Like the other day. I got hit up by this guy. Who knows how much of what he was telling me was the truth. Being a somewhat reticent person, I have a hard time believing people that just out with all sorts of really bizarre and personal details of their lives to another person without any provocation, warning or prompting.
So this guy. He's been with one woman his whole life. She's now refusing to sleep with him anymore, so he's trolling OKC looking for no-strings-attached sex so that he can get his jollies. But he loves this woman. Oh, and they're both in their mid-20s. So, it's not like it's weird that she's refusing to sleep with him or anything. In the course of this convesration (which, I'll confess, I dragged out for some considerable amount of time because this guy was amusing) I gave him relationship advice, told him about the time I was the other woman, and apparently made him so horny with my dry, intellectual treatment of his problems that he had to go rub one out in the bathroom.
What. The. Hell.
Why are people so goddamn NUTS?
But these are all pretty standard for the wild and woolly world of looking for love in the internets, right?
Please tell me yes. I really don't want to have to face the reality that I'm just a freak magnet.
(Side note two: My paranoid-android self took over for about half this conversation because some of those questions were just too pointed for my taste and I still think maybe it was someone I know or know of that was trying to get me to admit something or otherwise embarrass myself.)
(I'm crazy, too. xoxo!)
In the year or so I've been using this only-slightly-less-cess-ridden-than-Craigs-List pool of humanity, I have met in person exactly one man. He (read: his dick) was not right for me. Really, really not right for me. Wow. Nice guy, honestly. Just not for me.
Anyway, I've had the usual barrage of online dating adventures: the polyamorous guys that are sort of sweetly earnest about wanting to maintain multiple relationships, the completely illiterate bros who refer to me as "shorty" and/or "gurl" and like to ask if I like to give head, the intensely earnest single father's who gravitate toward me because I already have a kid and then ask me why I don't talk about her at all, because obviously a child is the CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE and is the only thing a parent should ever talk about.
(Side rant: I actually had one of these guys tell me I was a bad mother when I calmly tried to explain to him that being an unhappy, boring person by giving up every part of my life to a three-year-old would be a terrible thing for her. He honestly didn't get it. What in the flipping hell is wrong with people these days?)
Oh, and then there was the guy who is, by his own admission, about three hundred pounds over weight and always cranky because he's in "chronic pain" but felt that introducing himself by telling me that he's better than me was a good idea. No, I'm not joking. This happened.
Lately, I've been exchanging rather pleasant, intellectual messages with an English major-turned-Army enlistee. The nature of our communiques being what it is, I sometimes spend several hours in between doing minimal amounts of work while I sit at my desk and get paid composing responses. He's really rather intelligent, and I enjoy a good verbal jousting match more than most people. We almost maybe kind of sort of worked out the nature of evil last week.
Anyway, this requires me to be logged into the OKC site for (on occasion) hours on end. Since the site design is horrificly bad, there seems to be no way to consistently turn off the built-in chat function. Every time I think I'm safe, it randomly turns itself back on (sometimes when I haven't even clicked anything).
How do I know it has turned itself back on? I get an instant message.
Some of these are too mundane and/or vulgar to even be funny, but every once in awhile I hit comic (and secret internal mean-streak gratifying) gold.
Like the other day. I got hit up by this guy. Who knows how much of what he was telling me was the truth. Being a somewhat reticent person, I have a hard time believing people that just out with all sorts of really bizarre and personal details of their lives to another person without any provocation, warning or prompting.
So this guy. He's been with one woman his whole life. She's now refusing to sleep with him anymore, so he's trolling OKC looking for no-strings-attached sex so that he can get his jollies. But he loves this woman. Oh, and they're both in their mid-20s. So, it's not like it's weird that she's refusing to sleep with him or anything. In the course of this convesration (which, I'll confess, I dragged out for some considerable amount of time because this guy was amusing) I gave him relationship advice, told him about the time I was the other woman, and apparently made him so horny with my dry, intellectual treatment of his problems that he had to go rub one out in the bathroom.
What. The. Hell.
Why are people so goddamn NUTS?
But these are all pretty standard for the wild and woolly world of looking for love in the internets, right?
Please tell me yes. I really don't want to have to face the reality that I'm just a freak magnet.
(Side note two: My paranoid-android self took over for about half this conversation because some of those questions were just too pointed for my taste and I still think maybe it was someone I know or know of that was trying to get me to admit something or otherwise embarrass myself.)
(I'm crazy, too. xoxo!)
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