Last fall, while visiting my best friend of a thousand years in New Orleans, tipsy on wine and togetherness, we decided to create an online dating profile for me on OkCupid. Like lots of young people used to being surrounded in college by thousands of our datebale, fuckable peers, I struggled to find someone to date once I was released into the Real World. Plenty of people to just bone, since that's kinda all the bar scene offers, but I wanted something more substantial than that. OkCupid seemed like a reasonable and fun way to meet my needs.
First of all, no one warned me for how addicting it would be. OkCupid allows you to see who looks at you, when, and obviously, as a moderately attractive female with interest in men, I received a TON of attention. Within the first ten minutes of creating a profile, I had three messages. All of them turned out to be duds, but still! Attention is addicting, and so is harmless flirting.
Drawbacks of OkCupid include: MEAT MARKET. Wow. I got many messages from people seeking strictly sex, and because I was listed as bi, I also got a lot of messages from couples looking for the third wheel in their bedroom experiences. Additionally, I saw/received messages from many people I knew in real life, and some of whom I'd even dated! But this was kind of nice and humanizing: I wasn't the only person who, despite being wholly awesome, couldn't manage to meet people in the traditional way.
People, of course, also present themselves differently online. I had one date with a man who turned out to be a helluva lot older looking in person than I'd anticipated, and it was just awkward. It was like Liz Lemon on the date with the hot coffee guy who turned out to be 19 and she was 40 (sidebar: enjoy this. And this), where he kept making dated cultural references. I know I'll be there in a few years, but hey, I'm young and hot now, so I can say these things.
But it did make things easier in some sense: I could weed a person out if they said something like, "my biggest pet peeve is def angry feminists" or "I don't really read books." It can be harder to get people to say those things out loud when they're actively trying to impress you. Also, it's free and open to people who like their same gender, which is not true of all dating sites by a long shot.
Overall? I'd say it's worth a shot. Dating as a feminist is always hard because the whole world is dedicated to maintaining traditional gender norms and oppression and all that other crap. Online dating makes it a bit easier to weed out those people who you fundamentally disagree with. And I did wind up meeting someone wonderful, with whom I had a four hour conversation on our first date, and who I enjoyed talking to and boning long after that.
Have you given online dating a shot? Any luck with it?
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