Internet dating is the modern-day bar scene for people out of college. It has its positives, and some very severe negatives. I moved to the DMV about two years ago fresh out of a relationship. So clearly, not knowing anyone and not wanting to date people I worked with I hit the match.com scene running. I found out a few many things about men in the area and went a series of dates that ranged from hilarious to outright strange. To set the stage for this tale, at the time I had met and dated two people for a month or two each and rejoined match.com post dating. The only problem with this was that I realized that over a 6 month period a lot of these men were the same ones I saw EACH TIME. There may be a few new additions, but oftentimes page after page were the same ones I might have dismissed time and time before for various reasons, all active within a few days before. So, seeing this as depressing and figuring this, my third time on match.com since moving may be my last before a break to let the merchandise rollover a bit, I decided to sit down and really work on finding a gem in the rough… with a bottle of wine to drink alone. A few glasses in, I decided clearly I wasn’t casting my net far enough. I had pretty stringent search criteria so I deleted that and setup a search profile for 50 miles (in DC that’s the equivalent to a two hour drive on some days) and anyone qualified as long as they didn’t have children, smoked or were divorced (a girl still has to have some prequals). Lo and behold I was stunned to find many men outside my previous 15 mile range. And seeing a few drinks deep into this evening I decided to go on a wink-athon. This is colloquially known as when you max out your daily allotment of winks per match.com guidelines. Somewhere along the lines I winked at a young gent’s profile that had very few pictures and even fewer words and broke the cardinal sin of using text talk in his profile. But one out of his three pictures made him look amazingly hot and he said he had a really cute dog. Hoping the picture was recent, and since the wine was flowing, I overlooked the ‘lol’ in his profile. The next morning, hung over and slightly mortified, I woke up to find many messages in my inbox. My wink-athon had been a huge success, but most messages were dreary and boring. But the young gent with the dog and text talk had put together whole sentences and wrote me a thoughtful message. He was smarter than his profile lead on, and seemed genuine and fun – but sadly lived 44 miles away in another state. A week deep into emails and chats – and once were my bitter attitude to dating almost made me stop talking to him, we finally decided to meet at a park to walk the dog. We planned on spending an hour, maybe two in the park and then calling it a day – but what was meant to be 2 hour date ended up being 9 hours and I went home giddy and losing my voice from talking and lau
ghing all night. He called me first thing in the morning the next day, and took me out again that next night. One year later we are inseparable and are getting hitched in September. No other world could have brought us together except the internet dating sites. So all the creepers and bad table manners for the months before made this gem worth the wait and find; plus where else would there be an outlet for men to lie about their height?!
Miss Off-the-Market
Thank you Miss Off-the-Market for reminding all of us that there are Happily Ever Afters and you have to kiss a lot of frogs!
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