21st Century Dating

What have I done

So my boyfriend very suddenly broke up with me a few weeks ago and after doing my wallowing and the usual stuff a girl does after a break up I decided to try a dating app.

So, after I scheduled an appointment with my hair dresser to dye my hair like the main character of an anime, I googled what dating apps there were.

Oh my god.

I’ve seen less options on the Cheesecake Factory menu.

I mean, Jesus, there’s a dating site for trump supporters to hook up. Like we need more of that in the general gene pool.

I thought about what I wanted at the moment. I didn’t want another relationship but I’d like to just flirt with someone to get back in the groove, ya know?

I found this site called BeNaughty. And I thought to myself “why not, I want to flirt and be sexy and this one seems good”; I registered, started scrolling through a selection of partners and with two minutes had three dick pics.

No message, no disclaimer, just dick. I hadn’t even posted a profile picture yet. These domestic invaders looked at my name and thought to themselves “ooooh mystery woman with the name USER24601 is gonna love this.”

That’s right, my username had not been approved yet and I still got three dick pics. Three. Thank GOD that site blurs out the pictures because they have an algorithm that protects your eyes from seeing things you can’t come back from.

There were at least 25 men on that app who’s profile pic was blocked because it was just a picture of their dick.

I realized very quickly that this app was not for me. You know, not for nothing, but that is a weirdly confident move to just use a picture of your genitals as your profile. What mindset are you in where you are SO SURE that this is the picture to bring people in. I’d never do that, I’m insecure just putting up a username because it’s obviously not my real name but I’m like “okay let’s see, I like koalas, wait no they might think that’s a clue to me having an STD. I know I’ll use a character name from a movie, no then they might think I’m super athletic like Wonder Woman and I am not.”

So, after that fiasco, I took a little Google quiz and they said I should try Zoosk. I have no clue why they named their site that but it is like a damn zoo where you’re between the enclosures of a sexy beast and a weird looking spider and then BAM! They’re charging you to feed the animals. Want a drink? $15. Want to send someone a message? Sign up for our premium account.

That ones not so bad, I mean, in 15 hours I had not seen one dick so it has a leg up. Of course I didn’t pay for that feature exclusively sooo there might be one in the inbox.

Like any zoo, they have this feature called Carousel where you hit the X or a Check Mark below a profile picture. They give you their age but that’s it. You can’t click on it to see what this persons interests are or what movies they like. Nope Zoosk said “you’re going to judge these books by the cover.” The thing we have been told our entire lives not to do, and this website calls us out on our shit IMMEDIATELY.

“Oh looks don’t matter to you? Well here’s a relatively nice guy, sure his beard is uneven and yeah we know he has a lazy eye and this picture is taken from his lap while he’s sitting in a vehicle. He’s wearing a flat brimmed hat and he’s in your general age range. Are you going to be a dick and say no because of how he looks?”

Let’s talk about that lap angle profile picture for a second. So, in these two apps there have been four different varieties of profile pictures for men:

1. Dick
2. Lap angle
3. Hike selfie
4. Taken by someone else

The dick pics are just a standard now, it’s like going to the dentist, I don’t want it but it keeps sending me reminders that they’re waiting for me to give up.

Why can’t men take a good selfie, why they always put the camera in their lap to take a selfie. I don’t want to see a guy by blowjob angle, all the girls take such cute selfies and all the guys are immediately taking a picture at the level their bar is set for a relationship.

The hiking selfies are not bad. I just don’t hike, me and nature do not get along so when I see a hiking selfie and this person looks genuinely happy, in my mind I’m thinking “they just found a great place to hide my body and because I don’t hike normally, no one would ever look for me on a hiking trail.”

Then we have the pictures taken by someone else. There’s levels to this, because if it’s grainy and just a terrible picture it was probably taken by a friend. But if it’s a really nice picture, not professional photographer level but this person definitely took a minute to find a good angle, my instinct says wife or girlfriend took it.

So. Zoosk is pretty entertaining for me and I’ll probably stay on it for awhile just to see what kind of chaos it throws my way.

Then, I was on Facebook checking up on the other kind of chaos when I got an ad for this site just called dating.com. That url must have cost them big time. But it advertised an international site so you could chat with people from all around the world.

“Yes, let’s widen our search.” I thought to myself at 2 am over a glass of Merlot.

Because I need all the help I can get. I’m gonna throw a net over the globe and drag back any poor sucker that gets caught on it. Suddenly I turned into a SuperVillain, I was no longer happy with trying to find someone in my state, nope I WILL INVADE THE WORLD.

So, I registered for this third site. Not really knowing what to expect. I wanted an English Duke or someone with a moderate castle in a country far away where I can live out my fantasy like a romance novel character.

I must say, that site’s selection of partners is a feast for the eyes. I can browse singles from London to Brussels and sprinkle in a few from Moscow. This is what the internet was made for.

Even though I had initially started this endeavor to flirt and meet new people I quickly realized that’s not what my journey was about. I wanted to test my deductive reasoning. I have always dreamed of being Sherlock and now my skills could truly be put to the test. I also realized that I was not gonna be happy with most of these guys purely from what I could deduce from their profile picture.

Let me give you two examples, the extreme sides of the scales:

A well groomed man in slacks, suit jacket, and a clean button down shirt taking an okay selfie in the mirror of their moderately clean bathroom. He has a tasteful tattoo peeking out from under his collar and his cuff but it does not go up his neck. It says his name is Jack, he’s 32 from Georgia.

A 65+ year old man whose username is “Mr. Thicc, aged 29” even though he’s CLEARLY sporting a ZZ Top style fully gray beard and is wearing a dirty Novelty T Shirt, a camo flat brimmed hat, and the photo is taken in a truck from the passenger seat with his phone in his lap.

I am aware that A could be a catfish, but at least they used a good picture.

So no, I’m probably not going to date anyone from an app and honestly I don’t see anything wrong with that. I am a millennial female under 30 who grew up with horror stories about meeting up with people that they met online. I write in my profile that I’m not interested in meeting up, just texting and chatting and meeting new people. I am very up front about what I’m looking for with all the guys that message me.

Another weird thing about dating apps is that the men on them seem to have two goals: either to find someone who hasn’t seen their penis, or to find a wife. There is no middle ground. On the site aptly named Dating.Com where you can chat with people all over the world, has this weird feature where (if you pay for it) you can have the system send an automatic message to people that it thinks you would match with. So you suddenly get a barrage of these very poetic emails with very eloquent albeit rehearsed speeches of love and devotion and promises to be attentive and loving. It’s real hard to resist one guy named Massimo who lives in Southern France as a pilot who sent me a message asking me how it feels to travel and experience new things that alter our perception of the world and of life and how he longs for someone to share a lifetime of experiences with, and he hopes it’s me. Ooooh and that man has all the muscles outlined on his body in his profile picture.

Dating apps are strange, people. I’m not sure if I found one to recommend to the general public but it’s a unique experience no matter which one you try. Unless you identify as a woman, then you’re pretty guaranteed at least two dick pics. That seems to be a universal experience.