Online Dating Sets Back Women By 50 Years

Impact

Who’s less than 5 foot 3 inches, likes tennis, wants to go to culinary school and is hoping to get together soon? Your ideal mate — that’s who!

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, where a female writer created male archetypes and scanned the responses of women in order to improve her own profile, these are statistics that got results. Further advice included: Don’t be funny because this can appear sarcastic and callous. Don’t be overly verbose; keep your description of yourself under 500 words. Don’t appear too well educated, as degrees in law and medicine can seem intimidating. And of course, everyone’s favorite dating game, play hard to get, by allowing 23 hours to respond to e-mails. (This does not include instant messages when it is acceptable to keep it light with a “Hey there” thrown in your target’s direction.)

It’s also best to keep the information you provide, including photos and personal descriptions, limited. The ideal number of photos is between three to five. Any more and you risk appearing desperate, or posting an unflattering picture.

From a feminist perspective, online dating sets back women about 50 years. Women must not appear to be too intimidating by being too tall, overly educated or too advanced in sport. But they also must be open to trying new experiences to appear fun, young and lighthearted. The author describes that many popular profiles included women who actually referred to themselves as “girls” despite being well past the point of preciousness.

Despite the fact that some of these sites are tailored to specific religions, such as Jdate.com or Christian Mingle, vagueness in beliefs and values seems to win out in garnering the most responses. Once the writer had garnered all the information from the groups of women she saw responding to her archetype male profiles, she reworked her own, and immediately had 60 responses.

Besides individualism and spontaneity, there are bigger risks involved with the dating numbers game. Primarily, the largest risk is attracting liars.

For example, it is statistically unfeasible that 100% of female respondents are under 5 foot 3 when the average woman is 5 foot 4. If people are willing to lie about their height just how far else will they go to attract a date? Furthermore, disregarding someone for their physical attributes alone could lead you to miss out on a diamond in the rough.

If you and your partner are unwilling to compromise on each other’s stats, what’s to say that you won’t apply the same militant regimes to dating? No to rom coms, no to cilantro, no to PDA — where does it end? And does this mean that your children too will bear the brunt of your pickiness? No girls, no twins, no lefties? Just how far will these online and digital daters go to perfect their ideal human specimen?

If this is getting too far-fetched, lets bring it down to earth.

Meet Jane. She’s friendly, kind, open hearted. She comes from your same background and same ethnic makeup. You talk to her every day. She sends you pictures. She’s reached out to your family. And she supports you in your every move. You’ve told all your friends about her and they can’t wait to meet her.

Only they can’t, because she’s not real. She’s an amalgamation of all your projected fantasies of your dream woman. Whether it’s someone else’s sick practical joke or your own way of covering up something darker, this perfect person can only exist in the imperfect universe of online dating.

So whether you’re a lonely loner, or a world famous runner-up to the Heisman trophy, remember this: Nothing beats old-fashioned face time.