I went shopping on Saturday in Watertown, and came home with um, unhealthy things. I had a great time with Rich, Ves and their adorable son.

While we were driving home, I put my life on the table for examination, specifically my desire to enter the dating world. It has already been established that online dating is a little explored but potentially promising way to meet someone special; the next step is to move out of my comfort zone and actually put a profile up on a site, which I did yesterday.

When it comes to putting up profile pictures, ideally I would display a picture that gives a good representation of my size. The best way for people to see this is to see me beside my slender friends. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture that meets my other criteria so I went with a picture of me, alone: one of my face and one full length picture. And I made a point to mention that I am not slender in my profile. We’ll see how that goes. Writing a profile that captures who you are yet doesn’t make someone reading it want to run for the hills is hard. Obviously I don’t see myself the same way my friends see me, and I didn’t want to put “my friends describe me as…” because that seems cheesy to me, so I described myself and hopefully I’m not misrepresenting myself. I like the idea of being clear about what I’m looking for so the challenge was to not be too specific about what I am looking for. The internet is full of great men (and many more of their not so great counterparts), and I don’t need to have a guy who is exactly 5’11 and a half with a penchant for The Sound of Music, right?

(I’m kidding, I promise)

While I was waiting for my application to be processed, I scanned some profiles and some funny (to me) things came up that I cannot avoid commenting on:

• If your status is “separated”, shouldn’t getting out of your current marriage be your first priority before looking for marriage? (I will give him points for honesty).
• Reading “I like to help people with mental problems” (and it’s not under “occupation”) makes me wonder if he’s looking for a significant other or a “case”.
• Why on earth is it difficult for people to post CLEAR and RECENT pictures of themselves on the internet, especially if they live in North America and Europe? If you are going to put a profile up, go and get a picture taken (by a friend, a neighbour, anyone!!!). Most places will put your film pictures on a cd now for a nominal fee. What a potential significant other sees is their first impression of you! And please, the picture of you in your wife beater is not appropriate. Five or six years ago, I wouldn’t have cared whether someone posted a picture or not but now it’s a must.
• On that same note: please proofread your profile. Although you can’t tell, I actually proofread my entries before posting them, despite the fact that many of the readers of my wordy blogs only skim them (except for you, right? Right??). I can’t imagine posting something online that I haven’t read over to make sure it makes SENSE. Even if you like to engage in online conversations in lower case letters, your online profile deserves to be written using proper capitalization and punctuation, lest judgments (on education or grasp of the English language) be made based on what you have posted.
• Kudos to the men whose profile pictures include children. It saves a lot of questions. If it happens that the child they are pictured with is not their child, I’d highly recommend that they select another picture as their profile picture.
• A couple of the young guys (23 years and below) made me consider messaging them, just to ask if they have an older brother.
• And what’s with the guys who are looking for women from age 18-80? Did they forget to change that portion of the profile or are they really that open minded?

When I finished signing up on this site, I discovered another site for big women and the men interested in them! I shudder to think of joining such a site but based on the profiles of some of the people who have expressed interest in my profile, perhaps I should keep working on keeping all options open.

Filed under: Love? by jummy