Guardian Soulmates and the Ruin of My Love-life.

The Internet is a funny old thing. There is something about the protection of a computer screen, that superficial removal from reality, that thin, eyeball-ache inducing veneer of distance, that can make people a little reckless. Bolder perhaps. Possibly even slightly crazy. I don’t think that, as a species, we have quite got our heads around it yet – this phenomenon of it being possible to be completely alone, yet simultaneously interacting with potentially hundreds, even thousands of others. You and me baby aint nothin’ but mammals, and the internet is seriously fucking with our perceptions of what’s what.

You can see it everywhere; in the fine art of trolling, in the occasional spats that crop up on Twitter and Facebook, in… ahem… anonymous blogging… and particularly in online dating.

Which is why I declare that dating online has ruined me for real life romance. I mean seriously. You put a bunch of people looking for love and sex behind a computer screen and suddenly… POW! The gloves are off and every bass human instinct is laid bare for the entire wireless world to see.

Now allow me – for the sake of ease – to make some outrageously sweeping generalisations here, by saying that in women this tends to manifest in some deeply inappropriate public expressions of desperate longing. Perhaps Juliet might be “frantically seeking her Romeo” (gak) or someone else “May as well state clearly now that she wants to have kids. So there. That should separate the sheep from the goats.” Well indeed. But in all seriousness, who would expect to be able to say these things out loud in front of a bunch of strangers, in a real public place, and not have people back away furiously, their features contorted into perfectly justifiable expressions of acute alarm? Yet put a screen between you and the world, and suddenly anything goes.

The male online dater, on the other hand, tends often to fall into one of two distinct categories: The Poet, or The Horndog. I can’t quite decide which I prefer; each have their own unique merits, as I will go on to demonstrate…

The Poet likes to try to capitalize on all that untapped female longing by sending gushing, flowery e-mails that would have you believe that based on the viewing of a few photographs and the reading of a few paragraphs of profile, you are already the love of his life. With Guardian Soulmates there is a distinct lack of options for italicisation or any rendering of boldness, so The Poet must instead resort to using CAPITALS for EMPHASIS, which gives the impression of yelling and leads to all sorts of comedy e-mails, such as the one from my most recent poetic type who took it upon himself to declare that my body must have been “sculpted by an exquisite GOD.” It struck me that there was something mildly confused about the construction of this sentence. Did he mean to say that the god was exquisite? And if so, what might an exquisite god, as opposed to an ordinary bog-standard sort of god, sculpt like? In the end I decided to let it slide, although the temptation to reply with “Er… TA!” made my poor fingers itch.

The Horndog on the other hand is far less Machiavellian in his approach. This man just wants to know if you would like some COCK! Don’t ever make the same mistake I once did and humour him out of curiosity, because if you do he will send you a picture. That picture will then be branded indelibly onto your brain forever more and will insist on popping up, unbidden, at the most inconvenient of times, such as when you are attempting to eat your brussels sprouts during Christmas dinner with your parents (sigh.) Ah yes, that newest and most innovative of cultural phenomena, that virtual equivalent of olden day, dirty raincoated flashing – The Cock Pic. Really it warrants an entire post all of its own if we are to do it justice.

I do have actually have a point to make, believe it or not. And it is that ordinary men, in the real world, just don’t behave like this. They jam their hands awkwardly in their pockets and look at the floor whilst – if you’re lucky – mumbling something incoherent along the lines of, “So… you fancy going out for a drink sometime… maybe?”

And it is for this reason I fear online dating may well be the ruin of me. In that I see a nightmarish vision of a future in which vague invitations mumbled at the floor will Never Again cut it. A future in which I insist that unless a man begins either to recite vomit inducing love poetry or starts spontaneously masturbating at the mere sight of me, I’m just not playing. “Er.. excuse me Mr Non-Virtual Man”, I imagine myself saying, “but if you really want to capture my interest, I’ll be expecting a little more bang for my buck – know what I mean?”

Ruined I tell you, ruined.