Adventures in Online Dating

Memphis has been an experience for me. It’s a new city with lots of new people, but I’m usually around the same people every day. I love hanging out with people who have similar interests and experience, but I wanted to branch out and have some more diversity. I just wasn’t really sure how to do it, since I’m not really involved with any social activities outside of grad school.

So, I signed up for online dating. It’s actually pretty addicting. Going through people’s profiles, watching the visitor count on your own profile keep climbing, fielding an absurd amount of messages…it’s a lot. I really think someone could write a dissertation on the whole experience of online dating, or even just one specific interaction on one of these websites! People are so very interesting. What I found to be intriguing was the variety of initial messages I received. They ranged from massive explanations of why I should be interested in this interesting/exciting/attractive individual, to extravagant compliments about my eyes (which weren’t entirely visible in the photos), to “how u doin.” 

So I’m thinking about starting a blog series on this whole experience! I’m not sure if anybody would be interested in reading about it, and I’ll probably change names because nobody wants their stupidity broadcasted across the internet (or maybe they do?). I probably won’t publish it on Facebook just to avoid awkwardness, but obviously, this is the internet. And I don’t hide who I am on this blog. So we’ll see! I’ll start with some pretty basic stories and see how those go, then I’ll move on to real life dates. Because hey, what’s life if you can’t get a good laugh out of it?