Plenty of Wish Wash

I had heard the hype—women finding their husbands, men discovering their soul mates—about online dating sites. So last summer, fed up with what I was finding in the real world, I registered on a dating website.
An acquaintance of mine swore by cyber love, boasting about the wonderful man she scooped out of the net. But then again, another acquaintance was disgusted by the barrage of freaks that filled her inbox, and sternly warned me against signing up. I tried to go into this with an open mind.
After coming up with a non-sexual-yet-not-too-nerdy screen name, (attempting to put off those who may only contact me for sex or, at the other end of the spectrum, Dungeons and Dragons games), I filled out a form and was presented with the blank square that was my About me section. There was also one that followed where you could describe my perfect date. I skipped that one. No one needs to know of my need to sacrifice a yearling goat on a first date in order to set the mood.
But I did need to write a profile bio. I played it safe, mentioning my studies and hobbies, and avoiding any negative wording or sexual reference—I wasn’t just looking for a quick bang, yet I wasn’t disillusioning myself either—I wasn’t going to find my soul mate.
I completed my profile and it went live. Now, I waited. What wackos awaited me in the depths of this electronic abyss? But it wasn’t wackos that I heard from—it was the illiterate.
“Nice pics so who yer summer goin.” “I like movies an holdin hands you like 2?” “I
I am attracted to you in wayz that r diff cause of yer bootiful eyez.”
I perused the male options on the site and found little in the way of good choices. Anyone majorly gorgeous came off as extremely egotistical, and many others seemed too bland.
Evidently, I learned, there are a lot of single men in Surrey. The site was also full of what many would consider to be chauches (www.urbandictionary.com defines a chauch as “Pretty boys who are beefy, vain, do stripper dances at clubs and think it’s hot, wear tight shirts. Also possibly tan, use hair products, go to the gym to be looked at, have frosted tipped hair.”) Now, beefy doesn’t sound so bad. But many of these guys were the chauch without the beef, which I guess one could call chince.
I decided to take the plunge and allow some of these cyber-suitors to contact me via MSN Messenger. There was no way I was going to just meet dudes straight off the internet. So I got to know them better, and realized I really wasn’t interested in dating anyone at all.
When it comes to dating, whether it is electronic, phone or in-person, a person needs to go into it with not only an open mind, but an open heart. There are a lot of fish in the sea, but if I am not into it, there isn’t one for me.