What? I was bored.

Got the idea from reading an article that mentioned being able to get fake girlfriends for 5 bucks on Fiverr.com, so rather than get my usual hot chocolate from Starbucks, I decided I was really in the mood for some fake wubsies.

Yeah I got scammed.

Well, semi-scammed. She/He/It did send post a note on my wall, liked up some of my stuff and…. that was it, for like, the next 13 days after that.

I wonder what it says about me as a person when I can’t even get a girl to give me any kind of attention even when I’m PAYING them to give me attention?

Sigh.

You’ll have to forgive me, these days I’m trying to fend off all the perfectly good reasons why I should go take a nap on the train tracks during peak times, so I’m not really in the best of moods here. Especially after spending $120 to get back on Match.com and Christian Mingle for 3 months so I can try to at least get a coffee date with someone, and have now already run through the gamut of all the local girls available without getting a response from any of them.

It’s a depressing feeling, casting such a wide net and still being unable to come across a nice girl who thinks you’re worth getting to know. Feelings I have to bury deep down and put a happy face over, because women do NOT want a guy who is prone to depression (or shorter than 6 feet, or makes less than $100,000, or etc., etc.) Thus my profile is positive and upbeat, my messages are positive and upbeat, and yet… nothing.

I mean, I just want a coffee date, is all. I’m not asking for your hand in marriage or to boinky boinky boink on Friday nights. I’m only asking for a few minutes of sipping coffee together to see if we have some chemistry. I guess I’m just looking for someone to give me a chance.

But after a while, after so many rejections, I start to wonder if the reason nobody will give me a chance is because ultimately, I don’t deserve one.

So I’m sifting through the dating profiles on Match.com and I’m starting to notice a pattern. Namely that an awful lot of women seem to be living totally awesome lives filled with sugary awesomeness where the awesome sauce just spills all over the awesomeness that is their awesome lives.

Take this example:

I have a great life, great friends, a great job, and an amazing family. I love adventures and traveling to exotic/different places and there is nothing i won’t try. Bungi jumping, skydiving, camping… i can do it all! I have a great life and i am looking for someone who can complement it!

Um, thanks?

Are they even aware of how intimidating this sounds? The perception that you’re living such a perfect life that’s so utterly perfect that just by virtue of me entering this life it would no longer be perfect?

Does this really exemplify the kind of girl I should be chasing after? One who apparently never suffered a day in her life?

I really find it disconcerting to sift through so many profiles that tend to read like this. I’m not suggesting that women should be emo creatures of agony and despair, but this eternally sunny disposition is just as equally off-putting, and it makes me self conscious in the sense that my own life isn’t going to measure up to the uptown world they live in.

I guess what I’d like to see is a woman who writes about how she endured adversity and affliction, BUT found a way to persevere through it. The fact that she experienced hardship in her life, AND that she overcame it as well would tell me something positive about her character, just in the way that overcoming the loss of my home to eventually become debt free would tell people something positive about me (I hope.)

I also don’t like this idea that I would merely complement someone’s life either. Again, not that I should BE someone’s whole life, which itself would be a recipe for disaster, but could I be a little bit more than someone’s part time boy-toy that they play with for a little while, until they quickly get bored and toss me back into the closet, never to be remembered again?

Or is that what I’m supposed to believe is what passes for a HEALTHY relationship these days?

Maybe I’m an uber-romantic, but I’d like to think that if I meet… THE ONE, she won’t be someone whose life I would merely complement, but someone I would eventually be able to bond with on a deeply physical and spiritual level.

But going through these profiles, I just don’t see women who share that sentiment. They’d rather go bungee jumping than experience the spiritual enlightenment that comes with emotionally bonding with someone they are truly and, dare I say, hopelessly, in love with.

What a sucky world I live in.

There doesn’t seem to be a better time to brave the dating world than just before Valentine’s Day, in which case a horde of single women become so desperate not to be alone on Valentine’s that for an ever so brief moment, they will lower their usual criteria that a man be 7 feet tall and make 6 digit salaries before they’ll consider dating him. For a guy like me, this time of year is magic hour. ;-)

Despite the horrific experiences I’ve had with it before, I don’t think I ever went all in on internet dating. Maybe I took it somewhat seriously, but not to the point that I thought to just keep maintaining the 30 plus dollars a month I paid to stay on Match.com until I finally saw some success. Eventually I would be so disgusted as to simply give up and move on.

But there really is no other recourse, other than to troll the bar scene and hit on drunk women. Forget church, forget book clubs, forget anything else. the only women I meet there are married, have kids, or have such crazy baggage that to date them is akin to using a canister of the Ebola virus as a football. I know I’ve been told if I just live my life then magic, wonderful fairy tale things will eventually happen, but I’m 35 now. When is it supposed to happen again? When I’m 40? 45? 50? At that point I won’t care anymore, as I have no interest in dating shriveled up secondhand divorcees whose looks have long abandoned them.

Because of my personality type (INFJ), I’ve always been an idealist when it came to romance. I believed in the concept of soulmates, to connect with someone on such a profoundly intimate level that it could be perceived as a psychic link by some.

But then I read articles like this, and I wonder what would even be the point. Is it even possible dig through the compost heap of humanity and eventually find a diamond in the rough amongst all the opportunistic, neurotic and amoral women that exist out there?

I doubt it.

I mean I’d like to believe it’s possible, and not only possible but that I could pull off such a feat. The obstacles I’d have to overcome are enormous though, and probably insurmountable. Because it’s not merely enough to find such a girl, she’d also have to LIKE me in return. And let’s face it, I’m just not a likable guy. I might have been, once upon a time, before the cruelty of life reduced me to a bitter shell of my former self, but not anymore. Whatever hand I extend in friendship has always been slapped away. Whatever opportunity I’ve had to show affection had always been turned back.

I guess the truth is I don’t have anything to offer women, else it would be far easier for me to attract them. I guess that’s for the best though, as I could have just as easily wound up in a bad marriage that would have ruined my life. It’s one thing to be alone and single, it’s quite another to be alone and MARRIED. Then you’re really screwed.

I think a lot of people can manage to date and get married not because it’s so easy for them to meet people and finally meet the ONE, but because they settled and married out of convenience.

I’m lucky in that I never had an overwhelming desire to have kids, else I fear I would have done exactly the same thing, crippled by the fear that time was running out and that I needed to find someone, ANYONE soon or I would be deprived a rewarding and long life as a parent.

But as miserable as I am now, the life I currently lead is eminently preferable to enduring the consequences of a bad marriage borne out of the reality that neither of us married out of true love.

I wonder though, if this is how it’s always going to be. That the world has become so evil that there just aren’t enough decent people to go around, such that finding a soulmate has now literally become a mathematical impossibility.

Or do I make one more try, convince myself to burn a hole in my wallet every month, if only to leave the door open for the possibility that I might be proved wrong one day?