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wired flesh and wild hearts?
This page considers other aspects of online matchmaking
and advice for the lovelorn.
It covers -
agents,
homepages and blogs
The unlovely advice
Attract Women With Your Online Personal Ad (on
a page littered with treats such as promises to "Relieve
hemorrhoid pain fast") claimed that
For
every 10 men who post a personal ad on a dating site,
only 3 get a response. In essence, only 30% of men will
get a response, while the other 70% stay home alone
snapping their radish. Why is the response rate so low?
Because most personal ads posted by men are boring,
redundant, and worse yet, plagued with grammatical errors.
Oh
dear, split infinitives and misplaced semi-colons as the
cause of achy breaky heart syndrome.
In practice printed tips about smiling, wearing clean
socks and carrying roses (or capsicum spray) don't appear
sufficient for some readers, who have instead turned to
commercial services that will lovingly craft the requisite
online profile and even handle initial email exchanges
to the inamorata.
These include solvedating.com, findtherightguyonline.com,
e-cyrano.com, cyberdatingguru.com and profiledoctor.com.
There has been surprisingly little academic attention
to the role of personal home pages and blogs
in underpinning online romance, given that web logs arguably
offer a fuller picture of the author than standard matchmaking
service profiles and short email or IM exchanges.
dumping
and denouncing
If you are squeamish about F2F in dumping a loved one
(or wannabe) - or merely have bad manners and a taste
for cruelty you can always rely on 'dear john' sites.
Papernapkin.net for example explains -
here's
the scenario: You're out at a bar, riding transit, or
even just walking down the street, and some bozo who
desperately wants into your pants starts up a conversation
with you. Rather than make a scene or make them upset,
you're polite and at least nod at the proper times.
Then, of course, they ask you for your number. Except
this is 2004, so maybe they ask for your email address
instead.
That's where Paper Napkin comes in. Give them anyname@papernapkin.net
(or paamail.com, to be less suspicious), tell them it's
your address, and when they write you, they'll automatically
get a response telling them how badly they've been rejected.
If they sound desperate enough, it may even get posted
and ridiculed. Yes, it's cruel, so use it wisely.
Sites such as DontDateHimGirl.com, ManHaters.com and TrueDater.com
offer opportunities to expose online fibbers (or merely
engage in defamation), typically allowing one party to
a relationship tro expose the other's shortcomings - whether
in offline interaction or in itemisation of the untruths
associated with an individual's online profile in venues
such as Match.com.
guides
for the lovelorn
Wired Not Weird (New York: Synergetic 2001) by Christy
Clement & Kay McLean asks
Why
sit at home alone when you can find interesting and
available men waiting to meet you?
It
is an example of a minor genre - often published by appropriately
minor presses (some which appear to be restricted to the
works of the particular author) - concerned with tips
on meeting and retaining Mr/Ms Right online ... a rose-coloured
version of the One Minute Internet Manager and
descendant of a long line of thin tomes on how to win
the person of your dreams.
Other guides for the digitally lovelorn include The
Rules for Online Dating: Capturing the Heart of Mr Right
in Cyberspace (New York: Pocket Books 2001) by Ellen
Fein, The Rules for Online Dating (New York:
Pocket Books 2002) by Sherrie Schneider, Cast Your
Net: A Step-By-Step Guide to Finding Your Soulmate on
the Internet (Boston: Harvard Common Press 2001)
by Eric Fagan, Cyberflirt: How to Attract Anyone,
Anywhere on the World Wide Web (New York: Plume 1999)
by Susan Rabin & Barbara Lagowski, Putting Your
Heart Online (New York: Variable Symbols 2001) by
Nancy Capulet, Virtual Foreplay: Making Your Online
Relationship a Real-Life Success (New York: Hunter
House 2001) by Eve Hogan, Men
Are from Cyberspace: The Single Women's Guide to Flirting,
Dating & Finding Love On-Line (New York: St Martins
2003) by Lisa Skriloff & Jodie Gould, Online
Dating Survival Guide (New York: E Solutions 2000)
by Karen Adams & Kate Crenshaw, Internet Dating:
Tips, Tricks & Tactics (Roman Griffen 2003) by
Roman Griffen, Complete Idiot's Guide to Online Dating
& Relating (New York: Alpha 1999) by Joe Schwartz
and Meeting, Mating & Cheating: Sex, Love, and
the New World of Online Dating (New York: Reuters
2003) by Andrea Orr.
A cautionary note is struck by Michele White's 'On the
Internet, Everybody Worries that You're a Dog: The Gender
Expectations & Beauty Ideals of Online Personals and
Text-Based Chat', a paper in Readings in Gender Communication
(Belmont: Wadsworth 2003) edited by Mary Rose Williams
& Phil Backlund, and Malin Sveningsson's 'Cyberlove:
Creating Romantic Relationships on the Net' in Digital
Borderlands: Cultural Studies of Identity & Interactivity
on the Internet (New York: Peter Lang 2002) edited
by Johan Fornas. They are complemented by the more upbeat
'Personal Relationships: On and Off the Internet' by
Jeffrey Boase & Barry Wellman in the Cambridge
Handbook of Personal Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge
Uni Press 2006) edited by Anita Vangelisti & Daniel
Perlman.
Scepticism about online personality tests will be reinforced
by works such as The Cult of Personality: How Personality
Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage
Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves (New York:
Free Press 2004) by Annie Paul.
Julia Turner attributes the 'breakup book' genre to the
increases in the age at which people in the US (and Australia)
marry: as the age at that age
has
been rising steadily for decades, so it stands to reason
that the average number of serious breakups they endure
is climbing
Advice
on dealing with unsuccessful romance - or merely getting
even with an online rat - features in mawkish primers
such as Learn How To Heal a Broken Heart in 30 Days
(New York: Broadway 2002) by Howard Bronson, It's
Not You, It's Him: The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Dating
(New York: Broadway 2006) by Georgia Witkin, Exorcising Your Ex: How to Get
Rid of the Demons of Relationships Past (New York:
Fireside 1996) by Elizabeth Kuster, It's Not Me, It's
You:The Ultimate Breakup Book (New York: Da Capo 2006) by Anna Grossman, How to
Heal the Hurt by Hating (New York: Ballantine 1998) by
Anita Liberty and Letting Go: A 12-Week Personal Action
Program To Overcome a Broken Heart (New York: Dell
1987) by Tracy Cabot. Alas, no Breakup Secrets of
Attila the Hun or Bluebeard's Guide to Ending
A Romance.
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