What it’s like to be a woman

Regrettably, I decided to try online dating.

I’ve non-jokingly likened dating sites to Hell before, and I still feel that way, but sometimes I get these clever little ideas wedged in my brain that whisper things like, “Justin, there is a whole world of ridiculously smart and interesting girls out there who would love to be nerdy with you if you’d just meet them on the interweb!” And then there’s the more sinister, “Sure, I’ll bet there are plenty of ladies out there who’d love to discuss things like awareness of death and evolutionary psychology and the meaning of Trout Fishing in America if you just check Duke’s Philosophy Department!”

There are some partial truths in there, I learned. In fact, the past 24 hours have taught me a lot of things. For example:

-- Ridiculously smart and interesting girls *do* advertise their singleness on the interweb!
-- Some of them might even prefer or at least not object to nerdy (or even philosophical) guys!
-- But the clincher is that any display of male interest is likely to be received by them about as loudly as the fluttering of a moth’s wings.

It boils down to one basic truth: Oh my goodness is the dating game lopsided in favor of female-folk.

I know this because after devoting an embarrassing amount of effort to making my profile short but not terse, original but not weird, clever but not goofy, smart but not pretentious, attractive but not showy, romantic but not cliché, and serious but not desperate, my stats looked something like this:

30 hours elapsed.
15 profile views.
1 person secretly rated my profile a 4 or 5.
2 unsolicited messages! (Both from cat ladies – I won’t make a judgment about whether or not they are the crazy type.)
5 messages sent. 2 returned. 1 kind of went somewhere.
6 profiles saved. 0 reciprocated.

I have no idea how these stats compare to average, but me being pretty average, I imagine it’s not far off.

Naturally, I had to see what it’s like on the other side of the gender divide, so I fabricated a female account. I put zero effort into filling out a profile. Not a single word was typed. All I did was answer a few survey questions and upload one picture of a vaguely attractive but not stunning girl operating a remote controlled car. Her face can hardly be seen because it’s tilted downward and shot from a distance. Stats?:

30 minutes elapsed.
55 profile views.
1 person secretly rated my profile as a 4 or 5.
4 unsolicited messages literally within two minutes of the photo being uploaded. Here they are:

1. Hey there sexy ;)
2. Oh :) hello there
3. Strictly based on the picture, you look pretty snazzy. Hopefully, the remote controlled car is yours?
4. Nice car. You don't have anything written about you, but we seem to match. I'd like to learn more about you, feel free to send a message my way.

Some others came in a bit later:

5. Hey, what's up? Just checked your profile out and you seem like a fun and cool person to hang out with. So if you're interested, I'd like to talk some more. Hope to hear from you soon! [Name and phone number omitted]
6. Hi there. How are you doing?? Did u have a good monday?? I'm randy by the way ans new to the area. I wouild love to talk sometime.

It seems that being a woman is kind of like an endless walk through a perfume shop where all the guys are more than eager to unload their perfume over every square inch of naked skin. The first spray from the first guy might be pleasant. He thinks I’m lovely and deserving of the finest French aromas! But pretty soon you start to smell like an unsavory collection of male eurostink.

Even if you manage to keep the happy delusion that these guys really think you’re great, I have to believe most women enter a sort of male attention coma. It took only about 15 minutes of me being a woman for me to decide to filter the messages so they stopped showing up as new in my inbox. All the praise very quickly became inane. “You just want my vagina,” I thought. It’s amazing how quickly I became jaded, not even having a vagina.

If most women are, as I suspect, jaded and in a male attention coma walking through a metaphorical perfume shop, then probably every message they receive, no matter how clever the delivery or sincere the intent, looks like just another desperate grab for poontang. This leaves me with a couple of conclusions and a question:

-- The women most likely to respond to your dating site solicitations are probably excessively bored and/or horny, and not terribly impressed by your cleverness.
-- The problem with dating sites is not that the matching algorithms aren’t good enough but that given the almost unfilterable level of online male attention, women are forced to pick out eligible males in the field, where the guys are not at first trying to win their affection but are nonetheless demonstrating a certain intellectual or social or athletic prowess. Only then, once deemed eligible by the female and her friends, is the male safe to move in. (I feel like I’m narrating a Nat Geo episode.)
-- Finally, the question: Why do women put words in their profiles?

I’m going to give this online dating thing at least 5 more days, and if it ends miserably as I suspect, then I have back-up options: (1) graduate school (that’s what all the tuition is for, right?), (2) mail order, or (3) another dog.