On Your Radar

Danger! Shallow Water February 3, 2010

I love swimming, I used to be on a team, but the idea of having to dive back into the dating pool is one that I dislike as much having to do any ironing (and I iron about once every two years). So just to have a taste and feel what the water feels like I dragged my butt onto the dating website on which I met my ex-boyfriend. Yes-we-met-on-a-dating-website-nowadays-there-is-nothing-wrong-with-that-peopl e-meet-on-dating-websites-all-the-time-get-over-it.

The dating website in question, we always used to say (me and my ex), is really good. It has all kinds of quizzes and questions through which it’s always recalculating your matches and there are fun ways to see other people’s profiles and get in touch with singles.

I’d been getting a few messages over the past days and I had been looking at this matching game and I had scoured the pages and pages of my “matches” but I could not see anyone that I was remotely attracted to. I was not responding to any of my messages either (all but a 40 something yr old American who actually made me laugh out loud and I figured he deserved to at least know that he made me laugh but I left it at that). And it’s not that I wasn’t interested in any of these guys because of my break-up being not so long ago, I just wasn’t.

Until one match came along. I looked at his profile and he was really cute. So I sent him a message, with a pun in it even. He never sent me anything back. And I started thinking and realized that this had happened to me before. When I first got onto the website I sent a fair few messages to guys I thought looked cute and sounded interesting and they never responded.

Even worse, I’d been doing the exact same thing with the message I was getting. And that’s when it hit me that on a dating website you become the most shallow version of yourself. It is mostly about looks, if you’re even vaguely interested in a person it has got something to do with their looks at least. Sure enough their interests come into it as well. But even on that level you’ll act shallow because if they don’t have the interests you like in someone else you won’t be interested in them either.

To contrast this, I was sat on the tube today and across from me a guy was marking homework assignments. I did not think he was very attractive, but just the sheer fact he was marking homework and the deep thought he was in was attractive to me. This is something you can never get across on a dating website and it probably wouldn’t even matter.

I for one am very happy that I wasn’t ready to dive back into the dating pool head first, because I think I would’ve had to climb out with a concussion. Those websites should have a warning sign on them: Shallow Water!