Adventures in Dating 2.0

The Internet hosts a wide variety of novel match making services. Personals applications, Social Networking sites, Chat Rooms, and the like all provide the socially inept, like myself, dating opportunities previously unavailable before the Information Age. I can’t imagine how socially-awkward Baby-Boomers found true love without the World Wide Web to aid them. I’m guessing they didn’t, and tried to fill the void by spending up the National Debt.

So I hopped onto one of these sites one day, match.com, and quickly set about building an attractive profile. 34 SWM – Enjoys Rubik’s Cubes, oddball science news, and Star Trek marathons. I was a little miffed that the “How many children?” question wouldn’t let me enter “2.5,” but took it as an encouraging sign that the site administrators lacked my cleverness. I added the catchy one-liner, “Let’s Do Some Peer-to-Peer Saliva Swapping,” to my profile and hit the “Save” button.

Match pulled up a list of potential mates based on numerous compatibility factors such as eating habits, political leanings, and leisure activities. With my electronic bait out in cyberspace and so many potentials, all I had to do was sit back and wait for the ladies to start throwing themselves at me. Right?

Wrong. A whole week passed without a single response. I quickly concluded my profile exuded such brilliance it was probably intimidating members of the opposite sex. I’m such a brainiac that it can frighten women away at times.

So I set about taking the initiative. After intensively researching a dozen or so local single women’s profiles for common political and intellectual interests, I went with the one who had the cutest picture. A career-driven 28 SWF into healthy eating and books on evolutionary biology. She wanted kids too! Cha-Ching!

So I messaged her, suggesting that, with so many personal interests in common, we might be successful at cohabitation and, eventually, through regular, vigorous copulation sessions, successfully recombinate our DNA to produce viable offspring, whom we could live vicariously through.

She never replied. Probably a bot, a computer program set up to lure desperate men into surrendering their e-mail addresses to some company that resells them to spam marketers. That’s the only possible explanation for why she–or rather, it wouldn’t respond to my Don Juan-esque advances.

So maybe my success lay in a different medium, something face to face, yet non-traditional. So I signed up for a Speed Dating event, twelve dates in an hour, five minutes each, short and to the point. I’d never dated before, so this seemed like a good way to get some practice.

I arrived early to scope it out. After peeking through the windows to make sure the coast was clear, I casually slid up to the bar and looked around nonchalantly.

“Are you here for the Speed Dating thing too?” a remarkably attractive blonde woman asked me. It was like she appeared out of nowhere, smiling dazzlingly at me.

“Wh-Who me?” I stuttered, doing my best impression of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming Mack truck. “I have no idea what you’re talking about! Excuse me I have to to go now!”

I sprinted out of the place as casually as possible, but did manage to sneak back a little while later and spy on the event through the bar window. It looked like fun, but also intimidating, what with all that confusing eye contact and baffling social-subtext to decipher, especially that odd blonde girl. There was definitely something very suspicious about her.

It’s like Groucho Marx once said, “I would never join any club that would have me as a member.”