Original cover art by the talented Jenn Guo

This is part 2 of a 6 part series about my personal experience with online dating. Click here to see other parts to this series. Stay tuned for more!

When I started this online dating adventure, I ran the idea over with a few of my friends and got a mix of reactions.

There was “Oh, I think this will be a very interesting scientific experiment. You should try to separate the variables and see how each one affects the success rate. For example, change your profile picture around or alter your height and tally the ratio of messages sent to messages received.” (Did I tell you all my friends are engineers?)

Of course, there was also “Ugh, I don’t know man… think about it: how many hot, intelligent, attractive, non-serial-killer chicks do you know who are single? Do you think they need to resort to online dating to find a date? You’re going to meet lots of ugly chick and freaks.” (Yeah, thanks a lot dude. Let’s see, if I did know a ton of hot, intelligent, attractive, non-serial-killer chicks who are single, we wouldn’t be having this unfortunate conversation right now. I’d be on a date.)

Actually, what my friend said above got me a little worried. I had no idea of what kind of people were on online dating, so I turned to Google, my go to guy when I “just need to know”. I looked up some blogs on online dating, to get the inside story, the personal account. I didn’t find much, but I did find this golden nugget of insight on Quigley’s Online Dating Blog (reproduced below, with full credit to Quigley):

Online dating body type translation table:

What the ad says	Translation
Thin	Could be anything from sickly anorexic to average.
Athletic	Could mean the girl is a female bodybuilder, or it could mean she used a Stairmaster for all of ten minutes last month. Who knows.
Average	A few extra pounds
A few extra pounds	At least fifty extra pounds
Large	Too big to fit in a Honda Civic. Only date if you own a full-sized car.
Rubenesque	Imagine a chick in a Peter Paul Rubens painting, and then imagine what she’d look like if she gained at least fifty pounds.

I must admit, when putting down personal details in a profile, there’s a strong temptation to… err on the side of flattery, if you will. This Scientific American Mind article cites a study that found “online height is exaggerated by only an inch or so for both men and women but women appear to understate their weight more and more as they get older: by five pounds when they are in their 20s, 17 pounds in their 30s and 19 pounds in their 40s.” Well, I wasn’t really looking to date women in their 30s or 40s, so I figured I’d manage the 5 pound handicap somehow.

Off I went to browse the list of profiles. And much to my surprise, there were quite a few really great profiles. Take a look for yourself: pretty girl in short hair (I think women who look great in short hair are extra attractive), just plain gorgeous, great profile,
great opening line “I’ll steal your heart like I stole this internet connection!”. (sorry, I think you have to be logged in for the Lavalife links to work)

So, using my sentence construction skillz and my keyboarding skillz, I proceeded to hit on these eligible members of the fairer sex with my most magnificent messages. See below:

To: MISHA1121

Hi there odd girl

Your profile is really quaint and charming. Did you throw it together in a few minutes, or did it take careful contemplation to achieve such simplicity?

It definitely caught my interest and I’d love to hear more from you.

Either way, gorgeously written profile! It has eccentric literary charm down to a T.

Just my 3 cents. =)

To: STOLENCONNECTION

Hands above your heads

=) wicked witty opening line.

“I’ll steal your heart like I stole this internet connection!”

… and I’ll catch you like I caught that terrible cold last week.

I think it’s really cool that you’re in school to become a professional chef. Sometimes, I seriously contemplate the possibility of becoming a chef (chef or architect, actually). Hm… I’m curious, are there exams at school? If so, what are they like? (are they cook-offs a la iron chef?)

Your brief profile definitely caught my interest. I’d love to know more.

And the result of my smooth online macking? Find out next week on iDate! Go to Part 3 >>

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under iDate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.