Online Dating Is Hopeless

Kids, online dating isn't all its cracked up to be. It seems like the perfect solution to the problem you never knew you had. College was a great place to meet people. There was a seemingly infinite number of new people you could get to know, and plenty of those found the love of their life. I didn't. (Well, I thought I did at the time, but that's another story for another day, kids.)

Then you enter the real world. I work in an office with the same people every day. I keep myself very busy outside of work, but ultimately don't find myself in too many positions where I meet a lot of new and different people (at least new and different single people). So on the advice of some close friends, I've tried out the online dating world. Two of my closest friends met on match.com, so I want to believe that it really does work!

So I've tried it in good faith. I have plenty of separate stories about the various aspects of online dating and what's wrong with it, but it's not all bad. There are three types of people who use online dating:

1) "Looking for Someone" Honest-to-goodness normal people, who are looking with an open mind for a relationship. Willing to meet new people and knows that some won't be perfect, and that's OK.

2) "Looking for Mr./Mrs. Right" These are the ones who are looking for that one perfect person, and have this perfect vision of who that person is. Odds are 1 in a million that you'll find them online... go buy a lottery ticket. Profile keywords: "Must be (insert superficial feature here)."

3) "Hey, look at me!" These are the people who use online dating because they need an endless supply of dates to satisfy their own self worth. Profile keywords: "I just got out of a long-term relationship...", "I'm hot, you should be too." Profile reads like a children's book (more pictures than words).

I want nothing to do with #3 type. As far as I'm concerned, there are probably plenty of Type-3 guys out there for the Type-3 ladies to find. One of my biggest problems I think is that I really started out as somewhere between Type-1 and Type-2. I wanted perfection... perfection that doesn't exist (in the real world or the online world). I'm not going to lie, I still do want perfection. But I've come to the realization that perfection isn't necessarily what I think it is. The problem is, I still haven't figured out what it actually is.