Am I Really This Picky About Men? And What's Wrong With Me?

So around the New Year, I signed up for an online dating service. I'm been reluctant to blog about it before because I don't really want to have my dating life become the subject of conversation a lot. As I mentioned in one blog entry, dating is like looking for a job. You spend a lot of time blindly trying to find the right connection. And you don't necessarily want to talk about every bad path with every one you meet. When you find the right one, you'll tell everyone. But in the meantime, it's hard to talk about what can be a very ego-crushing experience.

That being said, I signed up for this service. 6-month membership. I figure it usually takes six months to find a good job at my level. So finding a man should take at least that long, right? Seemed logical to me at the time.

This particular site includes a personality test. I have to admit they did a pretty good job of getting my personality right. Close enough at any rate. Then you set up some search criteria - age, weight, interests, locality, etc. One of the interesting thing this site does is let you not only pick the criteria but then pick how important having a good match in each area is to you. For example, how important is it that he be a nonsmoker? That kind of thing.

So you'd think that most of the matches that I would get would be pretty close to what I'd be interested in, right?

Interestingly, not so much. The site doesn't include political leanings as a criteria for matching, though you do answer the question. And so I've seen quite a few guys who are conservative. I think middle of the road and left would work for me, but I don't think conservative would be a good fit. Pass.

While you do get to indicate what level of education you'd like your match to have (I said at least some college), you don't get to choose when it comes to type of job or salary level. It's possible that a guy who works as a truck dispatcher would be a good match for me, but I have to admit that I passed on the one of those that came up. And a guy who makes considerably less money than me - again, probably not. In my experience, although it's changing, most men still like to make more than their sig others. Or at least the same or close. Since I make a more than decent living these days, that can get a little dicey. Almost all the men mention camping. Really? Can't you do that with the guys? A fair number have been into serious downhill skiing (bad knees) or flying (afraid of heights).

Now I have found about 20 guys that I thought it would be worth taking the next step with - the next step being more compatibility questions. And I have gotten exactly ONE response. One. Only one.

And now you know why I don't want to tell everyone that I'm doing this? How embarrassing is that? One response out of 20. One.