Help??!! As if eHarmony, SeniorMeetPeople and Match weren't enough, I decided to checkout Chemistry.com. They correlate personality types...explorer, negotiator, builder, director to brain chemicals...dopamine, estrogen, serotonin, testosterone. I'm an Explorer/Negotiator. I'm spontaneous and compassionate with high levels of serotonin aka the happiness hormone.
They're owned by Match which already has my money so I refuse to pay. My inbox is flooded with Explorer/Negotiator types...they're begging me to upload my photo. I'll let them use their keen imaginations, another trait of explorers.
Did you know the fastest growing demographic of people using online dating is the over 50 crowd? One 76 year old woman started the online thing 20 years ago after two divorces and her last kid had left home. She's had her share of successes and comedy of errors. She's got a Ph.D., which she doesn't share since if tends to scare off men. I hate that!!!
She recently met a man on Match who showed up wearing a woman's sun hat and carrying three purses. He wanted her to come with him to Sweden to meet the queen. Her advice? Forget the emails. meet them right away. Do the vetting ASAP up close and personal. She says, "The profiles you read, they're like bathtubs. There's no variation." They all have an incredible sense of humor, work out every day, are looking for the love of their lives and are doubles for Brad Pitt.
Of course, there are lots of awkward even excruciating first dates. One woman compared them to airplane crashes...the worst moments are taking off and landing. Taking off? I can tell you in five minutes if I want to spend any time with the guy...generally, for me, he's boring. Then, there's the ending...remember the Big Kahuna, who exhibited way too much PDA on the street at the end of our first date. Really, I wasn't ready for that sloppy kiss.
Last week, The New Yorker published a piece by Nick Paumgarten entitled "Looking for Someone: Sex, Love and Loneliness on the Internet." Did you know finding your match was inspired by the World's Fair in 1964? Evidently, some giant computer selected your ideal pen pal and this got a 25 year old accountant to adapt this approach to matches closer to home.
The first computer dating service served only New York's Upper East Side then expanded to singles parties all over the city. Cosmo sent a reporter to find a match and she ended up with a gym teacher who told her his favorite sport was indoor wrestling with girls! He stood her up saying he had a backache...uh, yeah.
It's all about the mathematics..algorithms, actually, that perform computational feats way beyond the capacity of the human brain and add a layer of interpretation to find your best matches. The pool of possibilities is huge! There's literally a herd for everyone and the norm is to choose someone then 'trade up' when someone better comes along. Fits right in with the Love in 90 Days dating and rating program of 3, dropping the lowest on the scale and adding another until you find Mr. Right!
Match.com went live in 1995. It is the biggest dating site in the entire world and has acquired 30 other dating sites. It ranks third for meeting someone behind work and friends or family. Well...my school principal colleagues were way too conservative and my friends had 15 years to bring Mr. Wonderful to me. They tried, just wasn't right...too much testosterone or dopamine, as I remember. Definitely not enough serotonin.
There are some rather peculiar if not downright hilarious sites. ScientificMatch supposedly matches people according to their DNA and claims this leads to a higher rate of female orgasms. WHAT?? Then, there's the Ashley Madison site that connects cheating spouses. There's the Born Again site of AdultFriendFinder (don't ask). There's a site that claims the best matches are based on how much the couple looks alike. No math required there.
But, I'm teasing you here. I told you I was in love. He was introduced to our duplicate singles bridge group five years ago by a woman who met him on a DATING SITE!!!
There was chemistry.
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