Chicken Soup for Your Hole

Just met up with AB briefly. Can't decide what she's thinking... are we friends with some benefits are is she trying for more? And if I say anything about it, does it create some kind of Heisenberg-ian warping, that by talking, I mess it up. Sometimes people like not facing things, and letting them be. Sometimes a good policy, sometimes not.

It's strange, I get friendly on email pretty fast--I figure that by the time we've emailed a few times, there is some kind of interest in meeting. I mean, if the goal is just chatting and not meeting someone, join a chatroom. These are dating sites! The goal is to date, not to get people's email addresses. Am I nuts for thinking that? I can understand one or two emails, but meeting for a cup of coffee or a beer is pretty easy and safe--not much of a commitment or a cost, financially or chronologically.

I think if you look at the cost/utility ratio, just emailing eventually drops off pretty quickly as a means of screening a potential date. The cost of email (in terms of some kind of objective utility) is minimal, and the gain is very high in that you can get the preliminaries out of the way. But eventually, email doesn't give you what's most important--chemistry. And so I feel like email is more of a negative checkoff than a positive.

Let's take this from the top, looking at it as a negative checkoff system, as opposed to a positive selection system (and I believe that's what Match is--a process of getting a list of people and slowly narrowing them down).

First, you go in, put in your criteria, and do a search. That eliminates whatever percent of the original population. Wants kids, doesn't want kids, too short, won't share heroin, whatever. You eliminate the others, or the system essentially does it for you.

Then, presumably, you go through the list that Match gives you. At this point, I, at least, go through the list and eliminate those who slipped through or are obviously not a possibility... for me, those generally include people who want a partner who has never been married, or are ultra-conservative, or misspell basic words. So that gets rid of maybe 10-25% of the original list...which is less than half the population on Match to being with.

Ok, having eliminated the No-Ways, I think you go through and select the "favorites," a list of those who you presumably wouldn't mind sending email to. This is sort of a positive checkoff, I suppose. But I have many more favorites than people I've emailed. Some seemed appealing, but now aren't and I have taken them off. Others just sort of sit there. I email a few at a time.

Then they go through the same process using the emails they've received: kill, maybe, respond.

I think the big problem is that Match doesn't allow for any kind of maybe.

More later