PUNK'D

I think I mentioned to you recently that I signed back up at JDate and after only one month, I decided to cancel my subscription. Reasons why? Simple, really. One, the women I seem to be interested in ignore me, and two, the women I have absolutely no interest in bombard me with emails. Overachieving. I think most of us onliners are guilty of it. We try to talk to people that are probably younger and better looking than what we can give in return. I’m guilty. I’m friggin’ 43 with a receding hair line. It’s not likely a 31 year-old woman is going to respond to me because she sees ‘43’ and it’s all over even before she opens the email. It doesn’t matter how young I am inside, a number is a number. For me, I’m not looking for ugly women in their 40s. Can I put it more plainly than that? Yes, you can sing it Carly, “You’re so vain...” Women I try to contact probably think the same thing about me. And so goes the life of us online daters, and I’ve had enough. Vacation time, I as I said in a previous post. But on my way out the door, I’ve got two very different stories for you that represent what’s wrong with online dating.

Story one. A couple of months ago, I was searching JDate to see if anyone had viewed me lately. I’d deactivated my membership so it had been a while since I last checked. There were 10 or so views. Nine were the typical 40+ers trying to overachieve, but one of them caught my eye. She was 38, divorced, had a three-year old boy and she was quite attractive. She had a very down-to-earth profile and I became intrigued. I decided to gamble the $35 monthly fee for a chance to talk to her. So I signed back up and emailed her. I didn’t honestly expect to hear back from her, but she wrote back that same day.

She seemed very sweet and we got along quite well. We emailed daily or every other day. The only downside was the fact that her listed location wasn’t accurate in the fact that she intended to move locally toward the end of the year. Still, she was only two hours away. She was to be in town on business one weekend so we agreed to meet. That weekend came and went and I never heard from her. It turned out her mother was ill so she couldn’t make it. OK, fair enough. I continued emailing her, but as usual, it was always me doing the initiating. Her replies were reduced to only once a week. And then her once-a-weekers were reduced to quickies like, “Thanks for the email. Hope you had a nice weekend.” Ouch. That last email hurt. I suck at email interpretation, but it seemed to me something or someone else had grabbed her attention. So I wrote her one last email telling her that I didn’t want my emails to be a burden, and if she didn’t feel like responding to just flat out tell me. Well, I never heard from her again. I went basically from the penthouse to the outhouse for no apparent reason. POOF, she was gone. No explanation or anything. Punk’d.

Story two. My JDate cancellation hasn’t taken effect yet. Someone emailed me, and she said she liked my profile. She was actually attractive which again is quite a change from the normal dregs I usually get. So I was writing her back Sunday when she IM'd me. We IM'd for an hour or so. During the hour some red flags went up on my end. She was misspelling a lot of words. I asked her what she did and she told me she was a hairdresser (not that there's anything wrong with that). The biggest red flag of all was that she surprised me by giving me her phone number. I think she's like the third or fourth woman to give me her number upon first communication and it has always turned into a disaster. And this was no exception. She told me to call her tomorrow (Monday) so I did on my way home.

We talked for maybe 15 minutes or so. It wasn’t going well. I usually suck anyway when it comes to the phone. I'm usually 'well established' by plenty of emails by the time the stage two phone conversation takes place. Well anyway, it took about 5 minutes for me to know that this girl wasn't it for me. She came off as being very Jappy. Being the Jewish guy that I am, you would think I could handle that, but it’s a total turn-off for me. I knew I wasn't going to ask her out. So we're talking and then out of the blue she says, "Can you hold, I have another call." It surprised me at first because you usually hear that little click when someone has call waiting, but I didn't hear anything. I said ‘yes,’ and she came right back and said she had to take the call and that she'd call me right back. I never heard from her again! I was actually laughing to myself because that's a helluva move. I hadn't ever thought of that one so I give her style points for her creativity. Punk’d. I wonder if the online dating guru has experienced this move before?