About Me
Since I got divorced a dozen years ago, I’ve arranged over two hundred and fifty dates online, primarily on popular sites like Match.com, Plenty of Fish and OKCupid, and lately on the “swipe sites” Tinder and Bumble, Tinder's "ladies-in-control" clone, Bumble.
I’ve gotten come-ons from China, Russia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and even Texas. I’ve dated unemployed artists and billionaire’s daughters. I’ve had some amazingly hot dates and met fascinating people. I’ve dated two Miss America contestants, CEOs and other executives, and even an FBI agent. I’ve met Doctors, Lawyers, and an Undertaker.
I’ve driven four hours to Montauk from Connecticut for a date, hoping not to have to camp out in a tent for the night, and had a woman come all the way up from Philadelphia just to meet me for lunch. I even inadvertently dated the mistress of a former girlfriend’s new husband, with disastrous results. I’ve had makeup sex on a first date, and no sex at all for long, lonely months.
In the early days, like many men I’ve spoken to, I would get online and stack dates up three- or four-deep on an extended weekend, from Thursday to Sunday night, with a lunch or coffee or two in between. With the ardent desire of a love-starved divorcee, it’s not hard to do.
I’ve also pined over women who flirted with me briefly and then disappeared, and endured awkward reunions with ladies whom I met once and thought I would never see again, only to have them pop up years later, oblivious to our earlier meeting.
I don’t claim to have seen it all, but nothing really surprises me anymore. After a while, it’s just variations on a theme. And that theme is that online dating is both the best and worst of romantic venues.
On the positive side, it provides unprecedented access to a vast array of romantic possibilities, all from the cozy confines of your computer or smartphone, with numerous choices within five or ten miles of home. But the sad truth is that the vast majority of people you meet online are mis-matches – undesirable for one or many reasons. (I’ve heard the same assessment from quite a few women). So, ultimately the search for a partner comes down to a simple numbers game: how many bad dates can you endure in order to find someone whose personality, looks and situation works for you?
As it turns out, a lot. I haven’t kept the exact score, but I think my ratio of second dates to first ones is about 10:1. That ratio has resulted in a meaningful relationship with perhaps six or seven women over the years who came from online dating. Ironically, I’ve met the few women whom I’ve seen for more extended periods of time the old-fashioned way, in the real world. And this is despite a level of effort that could be measured literally in months, perhaps even man-years -- I’ve spent a so much time in online dating sites. It’s easy when you’re divorced and bereft of single, personable friends – aka “wingmen” – who are good company but just a little less attractive and engaging than you are, giving you the best shot at any eligible women you might encounter.
Like camping, the stories that come out of online dating are typically much more fun than the actual experience. Once you get over the disappointment of a date who is not destined to be a match, disengagement can be something of a sport. You can tell them stories – true ones, even! – that disqualify you instantly from any potential relationship, just as an easy way to let them down. They get to make the decision themselves.
Sometimes, in return, they will tell hair-raising stories of troubled pasts and psychotic ex-husbands that would have you running for the door, if you weren’t already through it yourself. It’s fascinating, in a perverse way. But it’s often the only way to keep your sanity when you’re meeting the fifth person in a month who lacks even a whisper of long-term potential.
Despite the hook-up reputation of Tinder, and to a lesser extent Match, I really am looking for the holy grail of online dating – the Long Term Relationship, known in the game as an LTR. After a couple years of electronic hunting with the success ratios I’ve mentioned, you get tired of the misses (or the ma’ams, as the case may be) and yearn for a steady, dependable, “normal” (slightly boring?) relationship. When my married friends get a bit jealous of my adventures, I reassure them that a stable long-term relationship is vastly under-rated.
As for my own LTRs, at some point they often start feeling like a sour marriage and I’m back in the online hunt, however flawed it may be. It’s incredibly easy to get re-engaged – under $100/month for three or four online dating services, and an afternoon of perusing and email approaches. Like the proverbial moth to the flame, or perhaps more appropriately, addict to the drug.
Another fundamental flaw with online dating is that the underlying modus operandi of most users is badly skewed to failure. This is the case because you end up spending much of your time chasing beautiful people who are not really interested in you, while avoiding less attractive people who are. In other words, most people invariably attempt to “date up” – find someone a little more attractive, smart, adventurous, athletic, worldly or moneyed than they might be able to attract in the real world. And hey, why not? It’s easy to try – just a couple clicks of the mouse. But the result is usually disappointment.
But not every time – at least not right away. Sometimes the stunning lady smiling provocatively from my cellphone responds to my calculated note, and my mind reels with the possibilities. Perhaps we even meet for a drink. But then the fatal flaw appears, as it must with almost every knockout on Match. Because if they are that attractive, sane and well-adjusted, living in a densely populated section of the richest country on Earth, why in the world do they need Match or Tinder to meet someone? (And yes, I do realize what that says about me...)
To be clear, it’s not woman-hood’s fault that I’ve had such a tangled relationship with them online. I would speculate that anyone – man or woman – operating in the world of online dating today could not help but come away from it somewhat jaded, if not downright cynical. The lack of social fabric online permits behaviors like duplicity, rudeness, a lack of respect and occasional ruthlessness that would not go unpunished in real, physically-connected life. And yet these behaviors are tolerated online in the name of expediency – the headlong rush to meet a romantic partner. I’ve been both a victim and – to a much lesser extent, I would hope – a perpetrator of online indecency, which I mean in the sense of a lack of civility, not sexual depravity. It just seems to be part of the game.
So, before proceeding, I'll apologize to the women who might read this website and think it’s all just a misogynist screed. I hope that it’s not. But it is necessarily a man’s view of the online dating scene. While all of the situations and people are real and actually happened, the commentary is colored in many places by my own frustration and disappointment. And of course, the names are changed.
So these are a sample of the stories from my online dating experience, ranging from spectacularly exciting encounters to heroically bad dates.
Start with “As Good as it Gets?” for one of the worst.
I'm also very interested in what you think of these stories. To drop me a note, just click on the "Reach Out" button below, or "Contact" in the website header. You can call me LK.