Plenty of Fish in the Sea

The quest for love, we are always told, is never an easy one. So in the interest of finding a soul mate as a single student in this very real media age of twitter, grinder and tinder, I dove head first into the world of online dating, using a very popular website I began to set up my profile.

Email address, password, DOB, the usual, all completed with little effort but then came the first hurdle, the username. Obviously I didn’t want to use my real name, you hear about online stalkers and identity thieves out to target the unsuspecting all the time, so perhaps being over cautious, I turned to a shorter version of my proper name that I had never really cared for in the real world, added a few numbers and I was ready to go.

Next was the ‘tagline’. With no clue where to start I googled a few possibilities to no real avail. Some of the more humorous suggestions included:’ Up for a challenge?’ or ‘Psychos need not apply’.  Though to be fair, respect for anyone who uses the latter, he/she isn’t messing about. Clear opinions from those ‘ask’ web forums suggested I stay well clear of using any phrase with the words ‘baby’ or ‘gurl’ in it or in fact the numerical suffix ‘69’ because that was ‘just asking for it’ apparently. I had no intention of giving off any blurred lines, so fair enough. In the end I decided on something neutral, nothing too desperate but nothing too cold.

Result!

After the basics of my profile were assembled, including some of my favourite Facebook profile pictures, it was time for the personality quiz. Friends and I had drunkenly done some of these before and I wasn’t expecting anything that taxing, but 200 questions later I felt like my personality, sexual preferences and attitudes to commitment had been well and truly dissected.

My favourite section of the personality test had to be the sex questions. The answer system was not dissimilar to those tutor reviews we have to do after a term of tutorials, do you ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree’, ‘not applicable’, ‘disagree’ or ‘strongly disagree’ with this statement. In this case however, the questions weren’t exactly ‘did you find the reading list for this course satisfactory’, no, question 62 asked me do you agree that ‘As a sexual partner, I try to be neat’. Neat?! What does that even mean?! Possible interpretations: Yes, I always change my sheets after a one night stand or Yes, I won’t let a sexual partner cum on my chest because I hate the clean up afterwards.

I won’t tell you my answer to that question, it’s only week 1 after all, but I wasn’t exactly sure what this quiz was trying to get at and how exactly this was going to help me find my true love.  If any of you are interested though, they kindly emailed me the results of my personality test informing me that essentially I had issues with commitment, open attitudes to sexuality and intimacy and was sometimes too independent for quick conflict resolution. I’d say I’m a keeper.

So after the quiz was complete, and I was seriously questioning some of my answers, my profile went live. Within 5 minutes I had 20 new messages in my inbox. I’m guessing New Years must be a lonely time for some.  Many of these messages were just the mundane ‘Hey, How R U?’, but still I had a little stalk of their profile just in case they turned out to be something more special than their first message. My favourite though so far (only 30mintues in to my profile being live on the web) was an email I got, subject box: Kebabpizza wants to meet you! Now that sounds like my kind of guy.

Stay tuned for the next weeks instalment of my trials and tribulations in the online dating world.