Most nights, my roommates and I find ways to fill our time without doing homework. Our flights of fancy range from buying a vintage leather jacket online to watching “Next,” learning the “Cupid Shuffle,” to playing Scrabulous in French.
About two weeks ago, we pioneered a new source of online procrastination. Giggling and patting our snarky selves on the back, we decided to create online dating profiles.
Initially, we thought it would be fun to play around on eHarmony.com, the ubiquitous dating site that claims it might be responsible for about 2 percent of last year’s marriages. After all, with its cheesy television ads, which seem to equate a peck on the lips with a weekend of steamy sex, how funny would it be to see what sort of guys were on the site looking for love? Unfortunately, after completing the exhaustive survey we realized there wasn’t much to be done without becoming a paid subscriber. Undeterred, we switched gears and logged onto Match.com, a dating site that lately has been running ads that look like indie rock music videos.
Filling out Match’s preliminary information was much speeder than eHarmony, and we soon found ourselves face-to-profile-picture with a few dozen potential mates. To my horror, all of my bitter, ironic sentiments toward online dating flew out the window. I found myself commenting on nice smiles and almost squealing when I found commonalities like favorite books. I’d been sucked in.
We live in an age when we post on one another’s Facebook walls instead of mailing birthday cards, text each other from across the room and keep tabs on one another on MySpace.com. Yet even among members of our tech-addled generation, online dating still seems strangely taboo. Meeting a handsome stranger at a bar is in some ways quite similar to e-mailing a man with an alluring profile, but it’s much easier to tell your friends that you gave your number to a cute guy at the club than it is to say you’re taking an online courtship to the next level.
“People don’t want to admit they have to go out and pay for a service,” says Stephanie H. Blake, an assistant professor in the Communication Department of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. For her dissertation, the 33-year-old researched the ways in which gender norms play out in online dating. She also met her current boyfriend of five months on Match. “People your age, in college, are surrounded by people you can meet. Some people see it as a failure, like ‘I couldn’t meet people the traditional way, so I had to go online.'”
Unlike most single 22-year-olds, though, I had a convenient face-saver: I’m a journalist. So in the name of researching an article, I buckled down to become the hottest commodity I could (and hey, now I could expense the one-month, $34.99 subscription). I meticulously selected photos and revised even the most trivial “about me” lines. After creating my profile, which eventually included a disclaimer that I was writing an article about online dating, I was presented with my list of mutual matches. This first batch met basic requirements like height (5’6″-6’1″), hair (anything but bald, grey or salt and pepper), and religion (Jewish or spiritual, but not religious). As I perused my options, I flagged certain men as my favorites so that I could return to them later. This act is weirdly reminiscent of adding DIY jewelry to my etsy.com shopping cart. And like Amazon.com, which typically recommends to me books about the European Union and the American Revolution thanks to my textbook purchases, Match had some if-you-like-him-you’ll-love-the-next-one listings. Unlike my initial mutual matches, some of these men were older than my desired age range (21-28), but many of them seemed promising. I began to favorite some of these men as well, and then went on a winking bonanza that would put an inebriated Facebook poker to shame.
I had briefly envisioned myself playing the traditional female role and waiting to be pursued. Obviously my characteristic forwardness won out. But later on, I found out from Blake that my concerns about hewing to traditional gender roles mirrored a disturbing trend that emerged during her study of 30 female Match users.
“I got a real sense from these women that they did find online dating to be very empowering … in that they did feel more comfortable contacting men than they would going up to a man in a bar,” Blake says. “However, a lot of the women … said they felt that the men they did ask out found that a turn-off.”
Not only is waiting not my thing, but I also came to the realization that if I didn’t draw attention to myself, my profile might never be opened. And as I searched on, I found many of my secondary finds seemed particularly enticing. Why hadn’t Match shown me these guys right off the bat?
Then I saw it. I was too short for their taste. Now, I typically keep my inner angsty short girl locked inside my 5’1″ frame. But not this time. I became livid. As far as I know, no man has ever seen a girl in a bar and been able to gauge her height exactly, thanks to the twin miracles of high bar stools and towering heels. Nor could I imagine a man who would otherwise be attracted to me naming my height as a deal breaker. I immediately reworked my preferences, widening my height range to 5’3″ to 6’4″ and removing the limitations on religion. If a 5’4″ Buddhist was right for me, I wanted to see his profile.
Militant online dater that I am, I decided to ignore the preferences of men who specified that they liked their women taller than my height. But I did pass over the profile of a handsome 26-year-old engineer – let’s call him Ray – who wanted his date to be taller than 5’3″, either athletic and toned or slender (my Match profile called me about average) and a social drinker (I decided to be honest and mark “regularly” – after all, I’m in college). Besides not meeting these specifications, Ray also wrote that he wanted a partner with whom he could dance. I knew he meant merengue and salsa, and since it took me several tries to master the basics of the “Superman” dance, I decided to leave Ray for a more rhythm-oriented individual.
To my surprise, my apparent match shortcomings didn’t seem to bother Ray, and I soon found an e-mail from him in my Match inbox. Paul Eastwick, a fifth-year psychology Ph.D student at Northwestern and Professor Eli Finkel’s speed dating research partner, says most people don’t know what they actually want in a mate. “In reality (Ray’s specificity) is kind of a pipe dream,” he says.
After exchanging a couple e-mails, Ray and I set up a date. Not bad for less than a week.
