Why Internet Dating

by Richard Kostelanetz (June 2013)

Later lovers, after an early divorce, were met in graduate school classes, in art museums, at concerts, and in offices publishing me. Though perhaps shyer then, especially about introducing myself to strangers, I do recall meeting significant others on the NYC subway and in stores.

So I checked again into dating services, returning to The Right Stuff, which was again the best for me, but also sampling others. Some such as E-Harmony were so needlessly complicated and digressive that I doubt if anyone ever met anyone significant through them. Others asked for preferences so trivial that I doubted their intelligence about heterosexual relationships, even if their founder(s) claimed a doctorate (in Lord knows what).

IvyDate.com persistently offered women a generation younger than I. If that move was meant to flatter me, it didn’t work. I checked out okcupid.com, which asked me so many questions, many of them dumb, that I gave up after providing eighty answers—enough already. It also provided me repeatedly with thumbnail photographs of men, even though I defined myself as a straight male at the beginning; and I couldn’t find any way to correct this error. Even though I asked Lavalife.com to find me women residing within twenty miles of me in NYC, it offered me several only in Canada. As Zoosk thinks I reside in Ridgewood, New Jersey, rather than the less familiar Ridgewood in Queens, New York, it offers me only New Jersey woman who are too far away; and I can’t seem to recircuit their offerings for me. Were some of these inept websites really fronts for other kinds of biz?

The new reality addressed by Facebook is also true for me.

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