Talking to myself

I hating dating websites. Not that I'd have much of a love life without them. But I still despise them. Internet dating should be my forte. My writing is my trump card. He may not look like an Adonis in his thumbnail profile picture, but his emails are entertaining, so let's give him a go. Alas, it doesn't seem to work like that.

My subscription to Dating Direct runs out tomorrow. So having had an e-conversation with only one woman during my month on the site, I decided to try to get my money's worth. So I emailed four women last night. They all live in London and I was what they were looking for in terms of age, education, background (even height, which is usually the deal-breaker). Two of the four emails were pretty good, because their profiles provided things to pick up on (one said she was looking for a literate explorer' - as a journalist who has been to nearly 50 countries, I think I fit the bill). The other two profiles were pretty bland, and so, consequently, were my emails.

Twenty hours later, three of the women have read my emails. Not one of them has deemed my profile worthy of a visit. They've just seen my message and my profile picture - and decided they are not interested. So with the woman last week (again she didn't check out my profile), that's a 100% failure rate.

I find rejection far harder online. If you meet someone in a bar, you don't know anything about them when they turn you down. They might have a boyfriend. They might be famous or a multi-millionaire and uninterested in 'nobodies'. But online, you know that they are single and what sort of bloke they are seeking. So when you fulfil all of their criteria, it is really infuriating that not only do they not have the courtesy to reply, but they can't even be bothered to click on to your profile and give you the once over.

In the meantime, I received an email from a woman in Essex. I wasn't too optimistic when I saw that the subject line was 'hello'. Can't you think of anything more original? That's what all the women from Russia looking for a British passport put. When I read the first line of the email, I was heading for the bathroom to look for the razor blades: 'I no (sic) Epping Forest like the back of my hand.' Know you don't!! But by the time I had calmed down, I started seeing things in a different light. She may not be particularly literate, and I certainly wasn't attracted towards her, but at least she had clearly read my profile. So I emailed her back and told her that in my 18 months on the site, she was only the second woman who had bothered to read my profile before emailing me (she's probably only the 10th woman in the UK to have emailed rather than winked). I thanked her for her message, but told her we were incompatible. An hour later, she emailed me back and thanked me for bothering to reply. At last, a woman with manners. I almost had a rethink and asked her out. But then I remembered that she was a dog lover.

So that's it. If the last woman who I emailed doesn't reply in the next hour, I've no more irons in the online fire. Still, I've got that 'is-it-a-date-or-just-two-friends-going-out-for-dinner-although-we've-met-
only-once-but-banter-continually-by-text-and-on-Facebook' evening tomorrow night. Watch this space.