Original cover art by the talented Jenn Guo

This is part 3 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!

I have to admit, signing up for an account and browsing the profiles for the first time was pretty exciting. It was like… how can I make a comparison? Let’s see, it was like I just discovered a bunch of new blogs, some of which were really cool, and some of the bloggers were hot, and there was the potential of hooking up with them! (Seriously, blog readers, don’t you wish you could hook up with all the interesting & hot bloggers out there? You know where to find me. )

Well, that was the feeling at first anyway.

But after a few days, it felt like… let’s find an appropriate simile. It felt like it was elementary school all over again, and we’re picking teams for the next game during recess, and I’m the last to get picked…. again. Except, instead of one team getting stuck with me, the meanies decide they should just play without me, and I’m left to cry silently by the wall while trying to hide my gushing river of tears. That’s exactly what it felt like.

No replies. After putting my heart and soul into those witty, brief, and charmingly written messages, I received nothing! Not even a “No thanks!” It was like sending messages into the void. Honestly, I think if I had built a radio transceiver out of toothpaste, pre-chewed gum, and a paperclip, MacGyver style, and tried to contact possible extra-terrestrial life forms in Alpha Centauri to get a date, I might have gotten more replies.

What’s the problem? Was I going at it all wrong?

I put some thought into it and came up with a possible explanation. All of the girls I contacted were extremely attractive. They all had well written profiles AND very good pictures. See, with online dating, it takes the same amount of effort to click on any profile and they’re all in front of you on the computer screen. So why click on Ms. Pretty Cute when you can set your cursor on Ms. Ultimate Perfection and Ms. Too Good To Be True (and since this is online dating, it very well may be too good to be true).

So what should I do? Should I lower my standards?

Well, before getting into a whole dilemma about that, I decided to find out something else. Just how attractive am I? I figured it’s a good idea to have a sense of the market value of the merchandise so I can fetch the best price, right? I mean, that’s just good business practise.

While I was pretty happy with my profile and felt that it aptly reflected my awesome personality, I didn’t really have an idea of how my looks rated. I knew I wasn’t hideously deranged. I mean, all the stuff that’s supposed to be there is there, and there are no extra protrusions, cavities, horns, or snakes instead of hair. But I needed a numerical assessment (being the engineer that I am). I needed a score from 1 to 10. Logically, I put my photos on hotornot.com. The result? I present you my hotornot.com badge*! Think it’s too high/low? You can go rate me!

*Actually, I put up a few photos and got a range of scores from 3.5 to almost 8, averaging around 7. This is one of the better photos.

So I wasn’t too surprised by my hotornot rating. It’s not an A score, but at least I’m not failing in the looks department. I was, however, starting to lose faith in the online dating thing. About the same time I was feeling all dejected from getting no love online, I found out my friend and his current girlfriend met over Lavalife. We will call them H&M, because they’re just that cool. Their story totally restored my faith in online dating. So, let’s save that story for next time, shall we? Go to Part 4 >>

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 9:57 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.