No Chance

I stumbled across this interesting article on the German news site, Die Welt, about online dating. Those fortunate enough to understand the German language can read the article directly here:

Dating Site Deletes Member Profile

For those of you who don't speak German, I will paraphrase the article here:
A young German woman decided to join the dating site ElitePartner.de, the German equivalent of Match.com. They described how single life can be difficult listening to couples talk about kids, spending too many Sundays alone hanging around the apartment, awkwardly standing around with the Champagne glass on New Year's Eve while everyone else kisses and last but not least, going on countless dates with guys you wouldn't even have to look at in better times.

First of all, they make it sound like all single people are boring and have no friends. None of those scenarios apply to me at all, except for perhaps the last one, but I digress...

The young woman filled out her profile, put up a picture and the next morning she had a few messages. She sent some responses and then decided to go out with a friend. When she returned to the site to add more pictures, her profile had been deleted. The site sent her a message saying they took the liberty of deleting her profile because she would have too few matches and they wanted to spare her the disappointment. She was upset because she would have liked to make that decision herself. Sure, dating sites might be filled with a ton of losers, but shouldn't she be able to wade through them? Maybe she actually would click with someone.

The site suggested she try another site called FriendScout24. How should the young woman take this? You're not a relationship type, we suggest you try to make new friends or perhaps hook up with someone for the night. Ouch.

ElitePartner is supposed to be a cut above - a site for academics and high quality singles. The young woman definitely fit that criteria. She went to 2 elite universities, has no kids, isn't married and doesn't have any crazy views of the world. She is also apparently above average in appearance as well. So we scratch our heads further.

A phrase the German site quotes is "die Einsamkeit der klugen Frauen"which translate to "the loneliness of intelligent women". Strangely enough the author of this very blog post seems to relate. Men don't always want women who are more successful than they are. Perhaps the woman was too picky? Not really. She had an age range and a few relatively normal criteria for a potential date. So what was she to do? Lie on her profile?

The website says it deletes about a quarter of the member profiles for various reasons. Members are of course welcome to ask why. The young woman decided to give up and fell in love. Offline.

That is the decision I have learned to make, although no one had to delete my profile. You obviously can gauge people so much better when you meet them in person right off the bat. It's not always easy to strike up a conversation with someone, but if you do and you think there's potential, it's much easier than basing your decisions off of pictures and a few e-mails (and if you're lucky maybe a telephone call or two). I gave the online dating world a shot a few times and definitely had some laughs, but also got fed up with all the crap. I'm awesome, I'll find someone awesome out there in the real world someday!