Geek'd: online dating is hokum

So I'm currently attempting the trials and tribulations of the online dating world. Partially out of boredom, partially due to the fact that I work in a career that doesn't allow the luxury of going out at night very often, get a bit drunk and meet new people.

So the first thing that I learned when I got online is that I'm an utter idiot when it comes to online dating.

But I'm learning quickly.

For one thing, I learned that while it's a nice, somewhat considerate thing to send every guy that sends you a nice, well-thought out message a little message back, it's a bad idea. Guys treat responses to messages like bits of hope that maybe the girl actually is interested in him ... at the very least. And they cling to that belief until the girl shoots him down... in which he then becomes offended and sometimes nasty.

Better to hold your silence for guys that you believe may actually peak an interest in you. It saves you a lot of trouble and a lot of grief on both ends.

Also I learned that to treat a profile as if it can tell you everything you need to know is insanely retarded.

And so I take you to the story of a guy that turned out nothing like his profile. Instead he was every bit the kind of person that pisses me off the most.

So I met this guy, lets call him Jimmy (not his real name though). Now we've been talking for some time online and via text message. He seemed okay, but nothing inherently special from our conversation, but I didn't get any bad vibes off of him which was why I agreed to meet him at some point. Some people are just better to deal with in person after all.

But it was right after I agreed to meet him that he starting blowing up red flags.

For one, we were conversing on our favourite hockey teams and he happened to claim that he's a die-in-the-wool Leaf fan who happens to also cheer for the Montreal Canadiens.

For context, that's like claiming to be a Yankee AND a BoSox fan; it's just not done. You can be one or the other, but not both in this world. Otherwise, you're not a "true" anything.

So I asked him to justify being both and yet calling himself a "true Leaf fan". And either he misunderstood me or whatever but after nailing him to justify his stance he got really offended and upset over the line of questioning saying, "well I AM a die-hard Leaf fan and I'm insulted that you're saying I'm not."

I actually had to tell him to take a chill pill. First warning sign.

And then later that week, I revealed to him I have two male roommates, and his next text was "have you dated any of them??? lol"

Second warning sign.

Then after the whole "chill pill" incident he kept texting me something like every four hours asking if we're still on for our getting together thing right up until we meet.

Really I should have just ditched the guy after the second warning sign and cut my losses, but I'm a person of my word and I'm not about to leave a person hanging just because I was getting a bad feeling from text messages from him.

So we met.

Now I admit, I went into this with a rather negative opinion of him after the whole mess of text messages. By the time we said hello in person, I had in my head that he was an overly-sensitive and insecure individual. Not that I told him that, for those reasons.

And nothing he did in that meeting changed my mind about it. In fact, he continued to demonstrate his over-sensitivity to most things by taking way too much shit too personally and making excuses for just about everything.

And I felt pity for him.

And because he was an overly sensitive idiot, I couldn't bring myself to tell him anything close to the truth. That he was overly sensitive, that he took shit too seriously, that I worked in a male-dominated environment filled with men and all my best friends are guys. Shit like that.

And that also irritated me. To the point that even I knew I was becoming more and more bitchy the longer we talked. To the point that it made me feel bad for him, honest to goodness bad for him.

And I felt bad for him when I said I don't think we should see each other again, although I couldn't exactly tell him why in any honest fashion for fear of his hurt feelings, being that his attempt to hide his insecurity through terrible jokes and his takes-shit-too-personally attitude drove me utterly up the wall and brought out the absolute worst in me. The bitchy, impatient, want-to-slap-you-in-the-face-for-being-an-idiot side of me.

After it was all said and done, he showed his true colours. He sent me a nice little message, basically blaming me for how it went down. And there I realized. He was a guy that always blamed everyone else for his problems and never looks at himself as an issue in of itself.

So what'd I learn from that?

I'm more upfront with the fact that "I WORK IN A MALE-DOMINATED ENVIRONMENT" on online dating sites as a method of weeding out guys that frankly can't handle that. And for guys who seems to gloss over that fact because they see a pretty face, I've decided to be more brutally honest about my life before meeting people in person. Also, more brutally honest about whether things will work.

I'm still an idiot when it comes to online dating sites. But at least by doing that much, I can at the very least keep special guys like "Jimmy" from being that much of an issue in the future.

Still, I absolve to Sheldon Cooper's line of thinking when it comes to online dating. It really is a load of hokum.