Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Efficiency in online dating

Thank you for your message, but due to the volume of applicants, I am unable to write you a deeply personal letter in response to your own. For your convenience in future dating endeavors, I have checked off the reasons why we will most likely not be getting a drink in the near future:

___ You're horribly disfigured.

___ You have made vaguely creepy comments about my body. I know. I'm tricksy. I include a picture with the boobs, but am then creeped out by your vocal appreciation of them. Oh, fickle woman!

___ Your sincerity and honest emotion, while sweet, are not really my thing. Honesty has no place in online dating.

___ I have an old-fashioned attitude toward body modification and your hair/tattoos/facial piercings/weird whatever cause me to judge you harshly. Oh, cruel societal norms!

___ You said that you're passionate or that you work hard and play hard or could go out on the town but are also happy to stay in to watch a movie or some other painful dating cliche I can't abide.

___ Your profile is a wonderland of typos and/or you don't know how to use commas and/or you don't spell out "you". For future reference, this makes you look stupid. Even if you're not. But you probably are.

___ You're a pescaterian/vegan/locovore/
whatever the kids are doing these days to prevent themselves from eating bacon.

___ You appear to be super political. While I'm not opposed to politics, you know, existing, people who consider themselves "political" tend to spit when they talk and make me tired.

___ You seem cool, but we're in a business of snap decisions here and, sadly, I'm just not thinking it's going to work. Sorry, dude.

___ Other:

Please keep in mind that this online dating thing is a cruel game of roulette based on random whims and miscommunication. You really do seem quite pleasant and I appreciate the fact that you made the effort to message me, but as the great Pat Benetar once sang as she aggressively danced with a troupe of quasi-hookers toward their quasi-pimp in order to break free of their gender roles and return to their suburban families who missed them and will never know they were maybe-hookers: love is a battlefield.

Best of luck!