I had thought that the online dating curiosity was out of my system. Apparently, not.

Having a valid account already established made it irresistible to not check in occasionally.  I was confronted at every log-in with a statement from the company that I had emails waiting and needed to sign up to be a paying member to see them.  There was one profile I found myself looking at over and over again, and sometimes wondered if one of my eight waiting emails might be from him.

Still unwilling to consider myself an actual online prospective dater, I wouldn’t go that step of being an actual paying member.  No way, not me!  So I did the next best thing and signed up for another site where people can communicate for free.  Maybe he would be there too and we could casually connect there?  He wasn’t there.  I lasted there about a week.  Creeps galore and such rude messages I would never have dreamed that people would write to total strangers!  Within hours of joining, I had a message from a married man in a nearby town who offered “a threesome with his wife, or anything else I might have in mind”.  I didn’t respond of course, but at least he was polite about it.  Most of them weren’t.

I received so many crude messages that week; some offering sex, others demanding to know just how fat I really am.  One guy told me that “only very unattractive or larger than the average beast women” don’t post a picture.  How poetic.  One message was from a guy with no photo who supposedly lives in a small town five miles from the small town where I live.  He wrote, “Want to hang out?  I have an 11 inch cock.”  Charming.  Okay, so what do we know about that fellow?  #1  He’s a liar.  11 inch?  Right.  #2  He’s a creep.  By most anyone’s standards I would think, anyone who would write that to a total stranger is a total creeper.  #3  Even if he had posted a photo, there’s no way to know whether the photo is actually of him.  But if I would have posted a photo, then he would know what I look like.  It’s very possible that I could run into him at the grocery store and not even know it.  He could possibly follow me home.  No thanks!!  My not posting a photo has been vindicated over and over again.  I think that any woman who does post a photo visible to the general public on these dating sites is crazy, or at the very least, careless.

I tried another site for older folks, thinking surely I would find the fellow I was hoping to find on there.  He wasn’t on there either.  The site was awful to navigate and I checked back one more time before scrapping that one.  Those eight messages continued to nag at my curiosity and I finally bought a prepaid Visa card and signed on for one month.  None of the messages were from him, but I will say that most of the messages were very nice.  A couple of the messages were from fellow widowers and were very kind and encouraging.  I wrote back and thanked them.  One message was from a guy who said, “It never ceases to amaze me that anyone would think they could get a response from anyone without a picture!”  I guess it was lost on him that he had written me, not the other way around.  I did end up in a two day messaging marathon with a really nice guy.  He lives way too far away though and we are destined to just be friends.  I do hope he finds what he’s looking for one day soon.  He has reminded me that not all guys are creeps, and I was beginning to wonder about that.

Mr. Intriguing has never returned to the original site and it says that he’s been gone over three weeks.  I have since learned that over three weeks can mean three years or more on that site.  Apparently the profiles of everyone who leave the site remain on it to lure in new customers.  (Been there, done that.)  If people join and want to reach a previous member, then the site hounds that person to rejoin and check their messages.  Not cool.  Not cool at all.

Last night I joined my final free dating site.  He wasn’t there either.  It’s just not in the cards, I guess.  For all I know, he’s been off the dating sites for years now and is either remarried or dead.  I don’t know what I would have done if I had found him anyway.  That’s another whole story to contemplate.

I did check into the new site this morning.  I was met with a message from the site telling me that I have 31 men wanting to “meet me” and if I pay to sign up for their extra features, I can find out who they are.  There is no photo of me on there and very little information.  I’ve been a member less than 24 hours and already 31 men want to meet me?  I can’t imagine why.  And I’m sincerely not interested in knowing.  I have received numerous messages already as well, and sent back a brief polite note to the ones who were polite to me.  One fellow started out nice, but within five minutes demanded to see a photo of me.  I explained why I am not comfortable with that, even told him about the aforementioned 11 inch guy.  He responded back that he isn’t a creep and I could just send a photo to his personal email and then he will decide whether to continue chatting with me.  He signed off saying, “I don’t have time to waste.”  Evidently not.  I politely declined, and then he wrote me back again, telling me that it is a dating site and I need to either take risks like everyone else or get off the site.

Actually, I agree with that.  I really don’t belong there.  I’m not sorry that I have explored the world of online dating because I have learned a lot.  But I think I’ll just go back to leaving things to fate and an old-fashioned face to face encounter, should there be any at all.  At the risk of sounding cliche, you can take the girl out of the old-fashioned, but you can’t take the old-fashioned out of the girl.

Best of luck to all you online daters out there…. It’s brutal!