Meaningless

After the long string of hilarious events that have transpired for me over the past several months, up to and including my job as the ass of the bottom critter of America's cultural totem-pole, there was really only one indignity left for me to suffer... so I created an online dating profile.

Man oh man do I have no idea what I'm doing. I figured, "Hey, this way I can start off right by only talking to people I already know I share common interests with and I'm already physically attracted to." Instead, I find that all of the stupid rules of real-world pursuit are amplified into some sort of digital joke.

First, there's the profile. Being no stranger to social networking sites, I was already fully aware that one cannot adequately represent in a few paragraphs what has taken a couple of decades to create. But I'm finding more and more that an online dating profile is a mixture of a personal biography, a creative writing sample, and a job resume. You have to sell yourself and you have to do it quickly, because people are impatient and the market is flooded, so no one has time to waste on bad products. It also has elements of effective speech writing; you have information that you want to convey but it has to be done in an entertaining fashion and you need to get your audience's attention right away.

It's still taking me a while to catch on to some of the finer intricacies. I consider myself to be both funny and creative, but simply saying that is neither. Like any effective writer you can't say, you have to show. This means that I'm now staring at my (what I once considered to be good) profile and thinking how awful it is in every meaningful way. It also means that a simple descriptive paragraph which should take three minutes to write takes 20 minutes, and then another 10 to edit and refine. Therefore a total rewrite would take hours and hours of time, for the end result of possibly catching the eye of someone you may possibly be interested in.

That's right. You have to know how the people you would be interested in think, so that you can lure them into your well-spun self-descriptive web. At the same time, you want to subtly exclude those you have no interest in wasting your time and effort on, especially since those updates are so time costly. This shouldn't be a problem, so long as you're an experienced multi-faceted writer with a background in human psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology - as well as anything you might actually be interested in (and anything the people you might be interested in would be interested in).

After thinking way too hard about all of this, I came to a realization. If I knew enough about who I wanted to be with to accomplish all of this, I'd already have her. I've dated girls who shared my tastes in music, movies, and literature... we've broken up every time. I've dated girls who were my ideal physical type, again, it obviously didn't last. I've dated girls who were honest, caring, open, intelligent, funny, quirky, kinky, artistic, talented, and all of the other things I would think I should be looking for - all dead ends.

The whole thing is meaningless - I can't know what I'm looking for until I've found it and I can't find it until I know what I'm looking for. Screw you online dating! Not that I'm going to use you any less or anything or get less excited when someone I ultimately won't care about sends me a message, but screw you and your circular logic nonetheless!