Well my Match.com account expired today. About a month earlier I plopped 30 greens to subscribe to the service because I came across a profile that really interested me. She hit on all the right notes: pretty, ultra-conservative, clearly expressing devout Christian beliefs, and was an intellectual at heart. I’ve scoured hundreds of different profiles and this was the ONLY one that came even close to what I was looking for. Only downside: at 26, she was already divorced with a kid.

Well alrighty then. Given the scarcity of morally upright, conservative Christian women out there, I decided to give this one a shot. So I signed up and emailed her. She sent me a note a few days later to let me know she received my email and found it charming. She was busy with work and with issues between her ex and son, but she expressed a desire to get to know me better once she had more free time. I wrote back and told her she was in my prayers, and I looked forward to getting to know her better as well.

1 week goes by. I send her another friendly note to let her know I hope she’s doing fine, etc., etc., and again that I looked forward to hearing from her.

Another 2 weeks go by. I think it’s safe to say now that she blew me off. 30 bucks I spent to email this woman and I don’t even get the friggin’ courtesy of a response, even if it’s just to tell me she’s no longer interested?

Love it.

When Hell vomited forth its presence onto the Internet, the net result was the creation of Myspace.

I’m no stranger to online social networking, but what goes on at Myspace can only be adequately described as some drug induced psychotic nightmare that even the marginally sane among us would do best to avoid. At one time I had actually thought this might be a good place for networking and meeting reasonably intelligent, morally upright women. Good God, what the hell was I thinking?

But what truly irks me is not so much the neon green text on a yellow background layout that some brain damaged Myspacer thought would look cool, or the auto-streaming of some lame urban rap song AND a music video all at once (?!?!?!), or the appalling mass of bloated crap Myspacers upload to their pages that could cause even IBM’s Deep Blue to grind to a screeching halt. Instead, it’s the utterly obnoxious, completely unhinged, whacked out to the freaking gills mentality these Myspacers exhibit. Having all the grace of parentless teenagers on crack, the contents of the Myspace universe are often lewd, obscene, vulgar, and at times downright disturbing.

The only redeeming quality I could see in using Myspace is if you want to look up people from your college or high school days. There were about 400 people in my graduating class in high school, but I found less than 30 of them were on Myspace. I pretty much didn’t recognize any of them either. Either the rest of my classmates hadn’t caught on, or they turned out to be very smart people. So much for me connecting with my old high school buddies.

I have to admit, scouting sites like Myspace can be a very depressing experience, especially when my only desire here is to find a network of likeminded people who I could truly connect with. That and of course, finding the girl of my dreams. It’s not just Myspace though, it’s also the many other networking and matchmaking sites that turn out to be utter crap. My personal favorite out of this bunch has to be eHarmony though, of which I filled out three personality tests at various times in the past and got back three different results. Either I have multiple personalities, or eHarmony’s questionaire isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit. For this they charge 50+ dollars a month?

Apparently though, I’m not the only one who’s been getting frustrated over this. A recent article indicated that social isolation has been steadily increasing for quite a while, in spite of the rapid rise of online social networking. Even with the Internet, people are more disconnected from each other today than they ever were before.

This quote by the way from a Slashdot commentator was quite telling:

I agree and I face this situation on a daily basis. Every potential social outlet has been closed off in the face of shopping malls and such and it seems like the only place to meet anyone is at the bar where you have the choice between the girl with tatoos or one of the girls… {uhh, no more need be said about these sort}. It’s getting quite desperate. It’s actually getting me to think about going back to school or joining some type of community service organization just to meet people. The world has turned into a lonely, lonely place. Online socializing isn’t the solution though, I’ve learned that much. But it is the symptom of a larger problem that will probably not be going away anytime soon.

In spite of the declining number of social outlets that could possibly suit me, the sobering reality is that I’m going to have to put myself out there more often and as much as possible, even though it requires far more work… and far more risks as well. It’s so easy for me to just plop down in front of a computer and try to network that way, but I can’t help but feel it’s an ass backwards way of developing a genuine social network of friends. It seems more ideal that I meet and connect with people first in real life and then continue that correspondence online, as so many others have successfully done.

Instead of expecting it all to be handed to me on a silver platter, it looks like I’m gonna have to actually put some muscle and effort into this. I may even have to, God help me, start talking to people as well. Oh the depths to which I must now sink in order to find my true love! Will there be no end to this atrocity???