Community: How I Made Online Dating Fun Again

I used to love online dating. I could find people outside my network of friends and family, and take charge. As I went along looking at profiles and working on my own, I was also busy with emailing interesting guys and having fun.

What soon became obvious was it was just as much work, possibly more, than offline dating. I don't think one replaces the other; it's just another way to meet people.

But as the online dating cycle repeated itself over and over, I grew tired of searching, writing and replying. I'm not the hottest thing but had more than enough offers to go for coffee. And at first I jumped at it. But it not only did it take too much time to meet every guy, it was a long shot. I didn't really know these guys and found most of my first meets were underwhelming and oh so not the right match for me. So I started trying to get to know the men a little better before agreeing to meet.

That's when it became like a second job. Seems like almost every night I was trying to keep up with correspondence and spending over an hour trying to know who these guys were that wanted to meet me for that cup of coffee. At one point I figure I had close to ten conversations on the go.

It takes one or two emails just to get things started. Sure they're short, but they get a little longer as you go. Some of these online dating "pros" fire off a single short message, but I find you'll never learn anything about them at that rate. That's fine for text messaging with people you know, but not if you hope to get to know them!

Mid last year I tried a different approach and made a bogus account so I could try chatting with an instant messenger tool. I thought this would still protect my anonymity. That didn't work so well, although a bit better than messaging within the online dating site. I'd never give out my cell number to someone I wasn't completely comfortable with, and it wouldn't solve the problem anyway since I'd be limited to 160 characters. And there's no way I'd give out my home phone number.

Just when I had lost all hope for online dating and any chance of finding my prince, I heard about Weopia, and my desperation overcame my reluctance. It seemed odd at first, but I promised myself to give it a couple tries since my friends that also use online dating were raving about it at our weekly lunch/bitch session.

It seemed almost too weird. It's virtual dating, and you invite someone you met through online dating. It's not to replace a date, but more to add a step in the dating process. I figured why not since I had nothing to lose.

So I invited "Patrick82" from the fishy site (you know the one) since he was the one that was the most interesting so far. After we both arranged a time and met in the virtual world, we wandered a bit and started chatting. It was interesting how different it felt with an avatar, and how communicating and getting an instant reply went. We spent maybe 45 minutes on our virtual date and it was great. It felt like I had actually gotten to know him better than weeks of online dating messages.