A little sidenote on my experience with online dating...

First of all, you should understand how much of a jump from my comfort zone the idea of online dating was.  I mean, meeting total strangers out of the context of my daily life? Plus I have to be honest, I had not really dated before.  I took one look at the cheesiness that was match.coms homepage and I had to think hard about it.  I mean I prayed about it.  And everywhere I heard online dating...online dating.  From my friends, from the radio, from the television, from the... yeah, ok, from the internet.  This, I felt, was fate and it was telling me to create a profile and throw it out there for the online dating world to see. 

I signed up for match knowing that there was some cost, and I decided this was a good thing because sometimes you get what you pay for, right? The first couple nights I got emails from a lady who was trying to get a date for her son and a guy with a t-shirt that said "I love hot moms". I mean this was the best people watching I have done in a long time.

Then I got an email from Adam, and he sounded really nice and he looked great (match makes me feel super judgmental, by the way).  I was sort of excited. And it got better from there! Because it turned out Adam was not a complete stranger but a good friend of my roommate's from Ball State.  We had the same science clock.  He had a great sense of humor and an interesting job. And did I mention he was adorable? And I left my purse behind on the first date and took me back to get it without complaining, so I knew he could partially put up with my occasional dysfunctionality.  Man, I thought, maybe this match.com website is the best decision I ever made.

So we were dating for awhile and I thought things were great! But you can probably tell by now (possibly the use of the past tense tipped you off) that things did not work out.  I was ready for let's be in a relationship! while Adam was ready to start dating someone else.  One of the fundamental things about life that sucks is how easy it is to form feelings for someone that are not mutual.  An ironically funny side note is that match sends out emails periodically with people they say match your interests and what you're looking for.  One recent email had his picture at the top with a 97% mutual match.

I like to get my money's worth so a couple days after Adam called me (would have been nice if he bought me a drink first) I tried to get back on and gave my number out WAY too early.  I ended up having a conversation that sounded like this:

"can we talk?"- guy

       "sure but I have to warn you that I just got done chaperoning prom and I'm a little tired"-me

"so we can't talk"- guy

       "no, we can talk, go ahead"- me

"so can we talk?"- guy 

       At this point I decided I did not really want to talk to this guy. Ever again.  Like I said, I was really tired and not interested in answering the same question THREE TIMES IN A ROW.  So I said, "apparently not, we are not doing a good job of communicating."

Not very many, yet way too many, exchanges later he told me if this is the way I approach dating, I will be single for a long time.  This might be true.

I am sure somewhere here there are deep lessons that I have learned but right now I'm just slightly bitter.  Part of me thinks I'm being immature because I got my feelings hurt, and maybe I am, but I don't want to actively try to date again for awhile.  Plus there are only so many "how the fuck ru?" emails from tallhotscott (p.s. not so hot) that I can take.  So I'm hiding the profile... at least for awhile. 1 out of 5 relationships start online, 1 in 5 probably meet in college,  and somewhere in the ballpark of 0.01 are arranged right? So that leaves me 2.99 out of 5 other ways.  I'm looking for suggestions.