Dating Adventures at Mid-life: What the *&^% Am I Doing on Match.com?

So, my tentative New Year’s resolution is to get my hands out of my own pants and down someone else’s.

I say tentative because I have been down the slippery path of online dating before – and I know what I’m in for. Nonetheless, I have decided to dust off my old Match.com profile and try this cyberdating thing once again. Maybe.

As you can see, I am rather conflicted about the whole thing. My experience with online dating has been a mixed bag. I have been on a few sites such as OKCupid and Yahoo Personals, but frankly my “best” experience has been with Match. And that is a highly qualified “best”.
When I first tried online dating, I think like most people, I was a little too impressed with all the starry-eyed ad campaigns that Match.com and its ilk are so good at. You know the ones with all the couples walking arm and arm, gushy and loves-struck, yammering on about soul mates… So, I put my ad up and immediately was deluged with responses. I had hundreds of replies within the first month. Though I had spent a long time trying to compose an appealing profile, I quickly realized I needn’t have bothered – most of the men didn’t bother to read it. The mere fact that I had XX chromosomes, a cute face, and breasts was enough.

Unfortunately, I also realized that I had absolutely nothing in common with the majority of men who replied to my ad. So, I decided to spend more time searching on the site and that is where my first real problems began. I couldn’t help but notice that most of the men in my mid-sized city were not very interesting. The majority of them listed only football and the great outdoors as their only real interests. Trying to find a well-read, artsy type who was actually doable turned out to be like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack. And then there were the Bush fans…Don’t get me started on those.

I also noticed other even more unappealing issues. For one, I was a little too long in the tooth for some of these guys – even ones my own age. I couldn’t help but notice all the 45 year old men who listed an age range of 18 to 35 for their female partners. It was even more amazing when the guy in question looked like Donald Trump without the income.

I suppose I would expect that a guy with a lot of greenbacks – like “The Donald” would only want a pretty young thing. David Buss had argued in Evolution of Desire that the higher a guy’s income the younger his partner. He also claimed as men grew older their partners grew younger – a fact that could be attributed to the fact that most men have more money with age. Well, I guess Buss wasn’t talking out of his ass on that one. But I found that even the Joe Brokes thought they could shag a hot, young thing even if they looked like Carrot Top and had empty pockets.

The most disturbing men of all to me were the ones who listed a high education and income level for themselves and something much lower for their partners. I noticed several men with graduate level educations who restricted the scholastic attainments of their partners to “some college” or less. Now, I’m not a snob. I would date someone with less education than myself – up to a point. However, the men I am referring to only wanted to date women with less education and money than themselves. Can you say control freak? It made me think of the Sex and the City episode where the Ivy league educated lawyer Miranda only gets lucky at speed dating when she pretends to be a stewardess.

I wondered if I wasn’t too old and too smart to get laid.

But I soldiered on and sent some winks. And e-mails followed. Some of them were pretty funny. I remember one guy telling me his unsolicited life story. I don’t remember all the details, but I do know that it could have made a marine cry. As I said, the details escape me – something about a woman “who done him wrong” and a dead dog. Or maybe the woman cheated with the dog. I don’t remember. Anyway, he ended the letter by saying if I wouldn’t have him, he was moving to China. I wished him well on travels in the Orient.

Another man I had never corresponded with sent me a rather huffy e-mail stating that I was the only reason he joined the damned site, and, as far as he was concerned, the month had been a total washout because he hadn’t received one frigging e-mail from me all month! Sorry, dude. Shit happens.

But my favorite was the guy who wrote wanting to know how I would feel about getting a spanking whether I deserved one or not. He ended up saying if I were his woman, he would invest in some good duck tape and hand cuffs. I got to admit, at least he was creative. At one point, I had “Know thyself” as my headline – I quickly realized the error of that one. The number of men who sent me e-mails going “I know myself too well! (wink, wink) was mind boggling. Even more mind boggling were all the comments about my anatomy (Wow, baby, great rack) and the poems. Jeez, what is it with men and poems?

But still I persevered and corresponded with a few men. Once again, I noticed the guys who were writing me displayed a phenomenal lack of interest in me as a person. Both in e-mails and on the phone. One guy yammered on for two hours about basketball. I hate sports. Some didn’t even ask what I did for a living. And after one or two dates, I was summarily dismissed. Eventually, I found a cute, middle aged grad student to cuddle up with and went off the site. The relationship didn’t last, and I tried a few more times. I never got very far. I found my patience got shorter and shorter the longer I was on the site, and as the economy grew worse, there were fewer interesting prospects online.

So, here I am back at square one: Do I try again, or forget about love and buy a new rabbit? I just don’t know; rabbits don’t give you any trouble, but they don’t give foot massages either. Decisions, decisions.