When I started working at EDS, one of the thing I was kind of amazed at was how many people were using this website to try to meet people. The site was OKCupid.com. A dating site which completely bucks the match.com trend and allows people to use the site free of charge. I think it is working too because the number of people on the site seems to be quite large.
I actually like the site quite a bit. They seem to have done everything right. The interface is slick and easy to use and very Web 2.0. They allow users to create and answer questions and tests that other users then can take and compare to each other to decide whether you are compatible. There are all sorts of tools to figure out your “perfect mate.”
Like your typical anti-establishment type person, I did a search under enemy percent. Looking through all the various enemies was kind of fun. Some of them certainly belonged there, some I questioned more. I thought it wasn’t a bad idea to look at enemies because honestly it is a good idea to find a complement rather than a clone. So I found someone who wasn’t entirely the worst enemy but was still down there that showed a lot of promise and I “saved” her.
Saving people is like bookmarking them. It saves them to your list so that you can later go look at them. Except that you can also let the other person know that you are saving them to your list. In the few other girls that I had saved, most of them I had chosen not to let them know that I was saving them. This time, I was in a bit of a hurry however and I wasn’t thinking so I saved her and let her know that I had saved her.
Well sure enough, she messaged me. This I found surprising because she wasn’t the first person I had let know but none had made a remark to me before. I was planning on sitting down and making a proper message when I had time, but she actually beat me to it. In fact, it was so out of nowhere, for a little while I thought that she somehow serendipitously noticed me and decided to message me as well.
It has been a few weeks of messaging back and forth and I think it is getting to the point of meeting. I gave her my phone number earlier in the week and still am waiting for her to call. Yeah, it is kind of a weak move on my part, but I grew on-line with the theory that you don’t ask for people’s personal info, you give yours freely and hope they return it when they are ready so that is what I did.
But the question now for me is what to do following the talk on the phone. I am wanting to take an opportunity to ask her out on a date for next weekend after we talk on the phone (or during). But the question becomes what to do? She asked me kind of casually to go to a show tonight which she is going to with some friends. This has its pluses. It is comfortable for her to meet some random guy on the internet so it is a safe haven and there is alcohol which can make it easier to open up and let loose. But then the further you take me out of *my* comfort zone and the more people you add to the group that I feel that I need to impress, the worse I think I do in general. On top of that, said alcohol actually tends to make me shut up rather than talk which is the opposite of what you want to do.
It has been awhile since I’ve had a serious interest in someone and given the format of this type of matching this could go really wrong. But it is still exciting and unnerving to be trying to go through this process. It takes so much thought and it really is one thing I’d rather not think about, I don’t think it helps.