Online Dating Research Paper

Words: 1052
Pages: 5

I have given up on dating, or perhaps dating has given up on me. Either way, I haven’t had a date in a while, and I’m fine with that (then why are you writing this, Al?). Good question. I am writing this to figure out why I haven’t had a date in a while. Of course, there are a couple of good reasons for that. One, I don’t care if I don’t date. I have resigned myself to the fact that if I die alone (not totally alone; I do have family and friends), in an empty bed, I can live (die?) with that. Reason one: apathy. Also, dating is hard. It’s not ‘lugging wet bags of cement up to the roof of my house’ hard, but anyone who has ever been in my position knows what I mean. When I first was separated (then divorced) I went on a lot of dates. …show more content…
That’s where I felt I had a little advantage; I could always write well. I could get people to laugh online (before they had a chance to laugh in my face). But I came to find this could also be a determent. This first occurred very early on in my online dating experience.
Very early on during an ongoing email dialogue with a woman, while we handed out bits and pieces of our lives to each other, she mentioned that she was a Sagittarius. I innocently wrote back, “Oh, that’s too bad because I could never date anyone who is a Sagittarius because my ex-wife is a Sagittarius and I’m afraid it simply wouldn’t work out.”
I laughed, and hit send.
What I received in return was a scathing two-page email addressing that specific comment. Let me summarize those two pages for you. She said, “You’re an asshole”.
It was a joke. I was not, and am not, in a position to exclude any potential women from dating me. I was being sarcastic.
And that was the problem; sarcasm does not translate to the written page. Especially not with someone I had not officially met and who had no idea that I was not, in fact, an asshole (in my opinion, at