Online Dating Services: Dating Aids or Dating Disasters?

By Broadside Sex Columnist Billy Curtis

Dating has been facing a pandemic in recent years. With the world becoming more technologically advanced every day, it seems that it was only a matter of time until these advances reached the dating scene. Online dating has replaced the formal introduction, text messages have replaced love notes and first impressions are based on instant message conversations rather than face-to-face meetings. When relationships are started in the cyber world, it’s hard to imagine how well they transition into the real world.

Let’s face it people. We’re either too busy or just too lazy to go out and find someone face- to-face. But is it really that easy to find your digital dreamboat? Do relationships work better when they are started in cyberspace?

I decided to test my luck and try out one of these dating services to see if they could actually up my chance to find someone worth dating. Many of the dating sites were appealing, but when you’re a college student free is the best way to go. It’s also pretty depressing to think about paying to find a date. OkCupid.com is a free online dating service for everyone—homo and heterosexuals alike. Using a wide array of criteria and characteristics, the site matches you to other profiles with similar ideals and criterion. Apparently, sanity is not one of these aspects.

I agreed to meet Mac at an Apple store in Washington, D.C., as his Apple and iPhone obsession was a little too obvious. He was the first guy I met through the site. The date went well holistically and we agreed to see each other again. Dates continued to pass along with the month and little by little I noticed that Mac would make sarcastic comments about me as a joke—which only he found funny.

After only a month of dating, the comments he made towards me boiled to the point that made me break up with him; leaving his house in a slightly overdramatic fashion in the middle of the night. Two months later, after a night at the bar with my friends, I drove home and was shocked to find Mac sitting on my front porch at 2 a.m. He was drunk and drove to my house to talk to me. He explained how he missed me and that he wanted to get back together. I told him to go home and sleep off his drunken stupor. That was the last time I spoke to him.

While I was continuing the search for my binary beau, my friend Blake was having his own troubles with his technical trysts. Most of the men he met through the site were either too clingy or needy, or were just plain crazy to begin with. The most recent guy he talked to was so crazy that even after blocking him, said crazy created multiple names and continued to stalk Blake over the internet. Who does that? If someone doesn’t want to talk to you, it doesn’t help your case when you create new names in order to bother them more. It mostly just makes you look more crazy.

The medic was the most recent guy that I met through the site. He was a firefighter and paramedic for a county outside of Fairfax. He was very determined, driven and had a wide range of interestingly fun ideas for dates. Including, but not limited to, shooting army regulation assault rifles at the NRA gun range in Fairfax. We went on a couple of awesome dates, but after that, he just seemed to lose interest and stopped calling. Then, after two or three weeks, he decided that he wanted to make another date—or so I thought. We went to Town, a nightclub in D.C. and had a good time. He paid for my beer, though it seemed that we were just there as friends and not on a date, which left me confused about the situation. I think it’s safe to say now that we are just friends.

Do dating services really help us in our sometimes-overzealous efforts of finding a date on that lonely Friday night? Or is it just another useless tool that has become one of the main methods of date finding? Even with so many failed attempts and first meetings gone wrong, I found myself wondering if these sites were even worth continuing when my experiences were that bad.

But the truth is that not everyone is crazy, not everyone is going to break up with you and show up at your doorstep drunk at 2 a.m. I am sure that in the underbelly of the large amounts of people on these online dating services there may just be that diamond in the rough that is waiting to be found, or is searching for you. Despite going through the duds, and dealing with the crazies, you need to remember that giving up cannot be an option. The dating scene has always been competitive and you have to remember that it is much like a game where survival of the fittest is always in play and everyone’s a contender.