Catalogues are flat, all you know of a person's appearance right away is likely a picture they picked for a very specific reason and tweaked to misleading perfection. For that reason, using anything less than a painstakingly edited headshot puts you in the same pool as the guy who took a selfie in a windowless shack with no lamps. I intentionally used a very realistic picture I took on the spot on a Monday morning. This is real life, boys! But perhaps I haven't faked hard enough because sensitive boys seem to be assuming I tweaked the hell out of that picture and am actually quite ugly. That's why they tell me "I'm out of ur league" when I don't immediately surrender all personal contact info, right?
We have to take them at their word. Men are pros at this... most chicks' profiles I've looked at have been pretty forward with how unappealing they are, we seem to like to get the worst out there and move up from there. Guys, however... I know women mostly exaggerate about their bodies... my gender has taken the word "curvy" and turned it into a flowery coverall for obesity. From guys, I've seen some very creative use of the "athletic" body type (bicep curls using Pringles cans is apparently a popular sport); even though I don't care about height, I read an article that measured men lie to add two inches of height ON AVERAGE, so I subtract two and still sometimes they come up short; anybody who calls himself a student is really working at Subway while "taking a break" from never going back to school, and "entrepreneurs" are plain ol' unemployed; "single" can mean single, married, divorced literally yesterday, polygamist with ten wives, undead and therefore technically the previous marriage expired at death, homosexual looking to experiment or twenty unmarried squirrels in a trench coat. Us chicks, we want you to know right away that we have three kids or are technically still male... just please don't notice how chubby we are!
You are so bombarded you start filtering for the dumbest crap. This is probably more of a problem for chicks, but first you delete all the "hi" and "hey sexy" out of your inbox. Then you block certain key factors like if he's making duckface in any of his pictures. Then you start judging them by how their first names sound like something you would name a dog. Then you start judging them based on the number of characters in each message and how frequently they "lol". Before you know it, you will only accept 6'7" accountants with photos taken outdoors by red barns and who write exclusively in couplets.
You forget those are (allegedly) people. Part of the reason the internet is great is we feel all comfy and secure, lying in bed behind profiles and photos that are as misleading as we want them to be, who paint us however we choose to paint ourselves. But when we are staring at facade after facade of person after person, we start to go numb in the brain. We start comparing the numbers, the self-descriptions, the shallow bullshit that they are wanting us to compare. But tucked away between the basement weirdos and man-children, "WOO!" girls and secret parents of twelve are normal, smart people who happen to work at sexy, stable jobs and don't want to take chances with the face tattoo offering them a shot of whiskey at their favorite wings place. People who are interesting and worthwhile who simply haven't settled for anything less than what they want.
Being single is too often treated like a disease. It is normal to be lonely, to be attracted to people, to want to have sexy fun, but why the rush? Somebody advised me to ask every guy why he isn't married yet, because holy shit you aren't married?! You didn't immediately settle for the first member of the opposite sex that would have you?! What's wrong with you?! And I think... why am I not married? Because none of my exes were right. I'm not a bed-wetter, sociopath, or hiding any major deformities. But there are a lot of other people who are, and I'm not interested in them.
Online dating sucks because, as with anywhere in the world, good people can be hard to find. And we have no idea how to go about it.
That being said, I'm deleting the fuck out of my profile.
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