Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Getting personal

The tricky part about looking at some sites is that you have to enter details. And dating sites get just a bit too personal - for me. Guess if wasn’t a sixty-plus-year-old grandfather of seven I wouldn’t mind, but with a wife of 33 years in tow, I don’t think this is the time to go on a dating site, even one like JustSayHi.com, which is different because it’s free – unlike Yahoo Personals, as it notes in a slightly superior tone. And no need for a credit card, which might be a good thing for JustSayHi.com as well as the participants.

A friend of mine used to get involved in online dating, and had some interesting experiences. For him, he felt he only met up with slightly wacky solo mothers who couldn’t get out and about otherwise. And he wasn’t that fussed about having a toddler tack along on the dates.

I did check out a bit of JustSayHi.com. There are a number of boxes to fill in before you submit your application, so I had a bit of fun giving myself the username of anatsyha (it has an unpronounceable ring to it) and being 25; discovering that by default I live in Barrington, Illinois (though I would have preferred it to be Boise, Idaho, really); finding I was going to be thought of as five foot tall with black hair (at first I thought I was going to be black), and that I was interested in travel, music, riding horses, cooking, art. Pretty good for a short-stop. I told them I was looking for my south seas belle – the default of a ‘San Francisco prince charming’ didn’t quite cut the mustard, since nowhere had I indicated I was gay. On reaching the last page, just before I might have submitted all this, McAfee told me that on the basis of their research I was likely to receive up to 189 spammy-type emails a week. Well, I guess that’s what I’d want really, if I were going in for this wholeheartedly!

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