Single Ladies: Fremont Wants YOU

October 18, 2011 Something Elsey 4 comments

After three weeks of trying Chemistry.com (the online dating site that specializes in Fremont, California from what I can tell), I have quit without going on any dates and before my three-month membership ended. The only nice thing I can say about Chemistry is that they gave me my money back without a hassle even though it is their policy not to give refunds for unused memberships. If you’re not familiar with the service, Chemistry is an eHarmony copycat owned by Match.com. So you take a quiz and they supposedly match you based on personality. However, they are cheaper, less controlling and more casual than eHarmony.

Here is why I quit that shit:

Most of my matches were outside my specified geographic area of no more than 50 miles away.

Ladies, if you’re looking to score with men ages 35-40, look no further than Fremont, California. Though it is about 70 miles away from me, a majority of my matches were from this large Silicon Valley suburb. Oh, and I wasn’t matched with people from there because we had anything in common. Fremont is the place for ladies looking for men whose hobbies include working out, fitness, going to the gym and physical activity. What they were not into was having hair or interests outside of exercise. For the record, I find all of these hobbies sexier than exercise: playing with model trains, collecting stamps, reading about milk and then drawing pictures of it, taking black-and-white photos of bridges, re-enacting the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 and whittling.

Out of about 90 people Chemistry “chose” for me over three weeks, only two were actually appealing to me both in personality and appearance if I was relaxed about my criteria. (They were both from San Francisco and were not interested in me, for whatever reason.) If I take appearance out of the equation, that number goes up to three. I am not including the nice man from Oregon. So I suppose one of us could have driven 8 hours to meet for coffee or we could have met half way in a forest.

The ones I was completely uninterested in (aka most of what they sent me) included two severely disabled men (“I have a traumatic brain injury and speech problems, and I live with my parents.”), four who barely knew English well enough to write a profile (“Look for love femily”) and a whole bunch whose only interests were working out and being employed. In fact, the only thing Chemistry seemed to get right was the ages. (I put 31-40, in case you’re curious, and mostly they were 36-40.)

The geographic spread:

  • 55% from Fremont, which is 70 miles away
  • 25% from other Bay Area cities that are 60 or more miles away
  • 15% from cities outside the Bay Area, 100 or more miles away (like Chico)
  • 2% from San Francisco, which is 40 miles away
  • 1% from Sonoma County, the county I live in
  • 1% from Marin County, the neighboring county
  • 1% from Oregon, which is 350 miles away

When I complained about the geography, the customer service rep said that was my fault for choosing “very important” on some of my match criteria and “not important at all” on some. Somehow this broke their ability to filter geography properly.

What I had to do to make their algorithm work, she said, was to have more preferences in the middle at “moderately important.” She adjusted all my preferences to the middle and promised that this would boost the importance of geography while still taking into account things that were important to me. You’ll just have to take my word that I was being reasonable. I don’t do well with algorithms. They are always wrong about me, and this was no exception.

What resulted were still mostly matches from Fremont and yet another from Oregon. The adjustment did add a handful of matches between 5-20 miles away. (Still no San Francisco, most likely because city people may not have cars and/or be willing to date people more than 5 miles away.) But almost 70% of these new matches in the right geography indeed had dealbreakers (aka the things I originally said were very important to me that my match NOT have, such as children who are still infants!). There was one guy who seemed promising and lived nearby. However, he mentioned at least four times how he doesn’t like reading or books. I don’t expect a bookworm, but that is just weird. Also, he probably would hate that I am a professional writer and editor. (I am not trying to date professional athletes, because I think what they do for a living is annoying.)

FAQ:

Why did you go with Chemistry instead of Match.com or e-Harmony?

I know it is my own neuroses, but to me Match.com feels like a giant bin of people who get picked through like a pile of sweaters on sale. (I deleted an extension of this sweater metaphor, so all you get to know is that I am a bright red cashmere cardigan.) I know several great people in happy marriages who met on Match, so this isn’t a dis about the quality of the people on there. It’s more about how being put in a searchable database makes me feel, which in a word is “bad.”

E-Harmony sounded appealing. I did their bazillion-hours-long test and got sent match previews. However, I didn’t check how much the cost was first. It’s expensive! Not only am I uncomfortable spending more than a negligible amount of money to meet people, but I also found that the price seemed to lead to an overwhelming number of users who were materialistic and too interested in money, based on the sample matches they provided me as a tease.

I will probably do Match now. Perhaps my profile headline should be: I hate money and exercise.

Abs! Abs!

October 3, 2011 Ranty One comment

These abs are for illustrative purposes only and are not the abs in question.

For the first time ever in the history of the universe, I have signed up for an online dating site. I am approaching it sincerely and kindly, but I have to voice some  “what is the deal with ___” thoughts about it:

1) A nice-sounding man with a nice profile ruined it by including several shirtless pictures of himself showing off his movie-star abs. Is that a thing educated people over 30 do? I thought I was done looking at these kinds of photos now that MySpace isn’t fashionable. I am suspicious of anyone who has that many shirtless photos of himself, particularly when they are not in a swimming pool or ocean setting. And by “that many” I mean “more than one.” I know where abs like that come from and they don’t come from watching TV, going out to eat, reading books, or ANYTHING ELSE I LIKE TO DO. I was all like “gross!” When he puts on a shirt and takes off the sunglasses, he is a pleasant-looking man. I thought maybe I was mistaken about how gross it was. Then I noticed in one of the shirtless photos there is a lady’s arm around him. She is cropped out. Classy!

2) Some men REALLY WANT YOU TO KNOW THEY ARE ASIAN. As if the race check box and oh, I don’t know, PHOTO weren’t enough to make it known that they were Asian, a fair number of men like to constantly mention it throughout their profile for no reason. Like six times and in every other sentence. “I am an Asian man who enjoys golf” or “As an Asian man, I am looking for a good woman.” Is this code for something?

3) You know what else some people like to constantly mention? Exercise! I am not against exercise. But it is boring, so why would you mention it seven times in a 2,000 character paragraph. (OK, I kind of am against exercise.) I’m not talking about people saying they enjoy biking, canoeing, hiking or other exercisey things that are actual activities. I am talking about people who say their hobby is “fitness.” It is weird to constantly mention anything, but to me exercise is like pooping. You do it because it’s part of being a healthy person, and then you keep it to yourself. This one is a code I think I understand, and the message is: “Hey, potential date! Please don’t be fat. I’m not”

4) Hypothetically speaking, if you have a major disability and want to be upfront about that … good for you! However, here’s a tip: also talk about other things in your little paragraph besides the ways in which you are injured or impaired. I am kind of paranoid, so the following thoughts would occur to me upon seeing this profile (had I actually seen it, which I may not have since this is hypothetical): a) this is not a real profile (there are some silly photos that seemed like a joke) b) this is a real profile and this is some secret fetishist code I am not understanding c) I need to not tell anyone any of these thoughts ever.

Just to be fair, I will give myself the same treatment:

Hey, Marcia! Why are you looking sideways and up in 90% of your photos? It appears that you only have two facial expressions, and one of them is kind of smug. I noticed that you are also wearing the same shirt and necklace in three different photos yet they appear to be taken in different places. What is up with that? Also, you smell.

Swamp!

July 28, 2011 Something Elsey One comment

I was in New Orleans last week for Tales of the Cocktail and promoted the book and blah blah blah whatever … I SAW ALLIGATORS IN THE SWAMP!! That is the exciting part! I ended my week of super fun times in New Orleans with a swamp tour. (If you are annoyed by exclaiming or capital letters, stop reading now.)

A shuttle bus came and shuttled my butt from the French Quarter into the swamp land near New Orleans. The tour people can’t guarantee you’ll see a gator out there, so they have one in cage just so you can go home and be all like “yeah, I saw a gator in Louisiana” even if the alligators all hide from you out in the swamp.

I wanted to ride an airboat out there and not a giant tour boat. I picked the small one so I could go really fast and shout things like “Gator up ahead!” without anyone hearing me because the fan is really loud and everyone wears headphones to protect themselves from the noise.

Well, I actually could not wear a headset because it was too big and kept slipping off. When we weren’t going slow to look at swamp things, the boat went 45-50 mph. That is not fast for a car. But it is very fast for a small open boat.

It was raining pretty hard for most of the ride, so a lot of my pictures of swamp land are blurry and crooked. But if you want to know what the swamp looks like, it looks like this. There are also orchids out there. When you try to take pictures of them, it rains even harder and you end up getting foggy pictures of green blurs. So take my word for it, swamp orchids are pretty.

Then I am sitting there and the guide is telling me about Spanish moss and the Lafitte family arguing about a fortune and I see an ALLIGATOR! So I yell “Look, there is an alligator. Everyone look! LOOOOOOK!” because I am five. The grown-ups all look and are impressed by it.

And then, and then! The guide throws a marshmallow in the water to tempt the alligator to come closer to us.

And the alligator eats the marshmallow … just like on “True Blood.” This is the only similarity I found between the show and Lousiana, in my experience. I did not see werewolves, fairies, vampires, panther people, dog people or witches. No one was magical. In fact, very few people even had an accent.

Just in case you think I was zooming to make it look like I was close to the gator, here is the next gator I saw with a bit of the boat in the picture.

They have really long bodies!

Even though they are big and scary, they start out as little babies. The tour company wants to keep the gator population high, because people like me pay them to ride on a boat and go “gator! gator!” and get all excited. So they take the ones under 4 feet and raise them until they’re big enough not to get eaten by the other gators. AND THEY LET YOU HOLD THE LITTLE ONES!Oh, did I not mention that I wore a plastic bag the whole time because it was raining really hard? I did. I don’t care if this is an unflattering photo of a soggy me after a week of staying up late and waking up early. I AM HOLDING AN ALLIGATOR. The End. Or is it? Yes, it is.

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