“Hey hottie” No. “Hey beautiful whats up” Please use punctuation. “You’re perfect…” And you’re 85 miles away…
When I was in high school, I dabbled in those “Hot or Not?” type games on Facebook, just because. Little did I know, those would become the foundation for today’s online dating scene. Like most young adults, and especially college students, I am constantly busy. I have very little free time and when I do find it, I spend it with close friends that I don’t usually get to see, watching Netflix in my room, or sleeping. Unfortunately, this means I really don’t have that many opportunities to meet new people, let alone find anyone to date.
A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about Grouper, the online-blind-group-dating service that my friends and I tried over the summer. I thought I’d step it up a notch and try some dating services on my own.
I’ve seen several posters for DateMySchool on campus, and thought I’d start there. It presents itself as an ideal platform for college students and alumni to meet and date. It even won about.com’s Best College Dating site in 2012. However, it’s proven to be more hilarious than anything else. First, I was somehow under the assumption that it would be a site where I could, oh I don’t know, meet guys at my school. Instead, it defaults your profile as visible to everyone, and you have to actually go in and block groups of people by age, location, and university in order to narrow it down. But once I narrowed it down to Notre Dame guys aged 21-30, there weren’t that many profiles left. So I left it on the default setting, and watched the weirdness roll in. Literally. Weirdness. Hilarity.
Really, the only redeeming factor for datemyschool was its entertainment value. I can’t imagine actually meeting anyone that I could date on this site. I’m also not a fan of the fact that the user’s names are not displayed, only screennames. I’m sure this is for privacy reasons, but it’s very hard to take seriously someone who’s messaging me when their name is ‘gummybear’. Also, DMS is one of many sites that charge a monthly membership fee, which varies depending on how long you plan to use the site.
Then, at the suggestion of my fellow staff writer, Sara Spittler, I downloaded the free mobile app Tinder. Tinder uses a binary rating system that prompts you to ‘like’ or ‘pass’ people in a designated radius from you. If you ‘like’ someone who also clicks ‘like’ on your profile, you have a match and then have the option to message one another. Tinder also links to Facebook and shows the first name and the first few profile pictures of each user, so you don’t have to worry about talking to anyone named ‘gummybear’. However, users tend to be on here for fun, and not actually looking to date. Which means the messages I get don’t really spark deep conversation (see above examples).
Online dating is a pretty strange thing. When you reduce attraction to first glaces of photos and short snippets of descriptions, it kind of takes the fun out of dating. It’s a game of logic and decisions based on limited information. It’s calculating and formulaic. I know these services really exist so that you can meet people, and then hopefully set up dates in person, so maybe I’ll have more luck after a while. But for the time being, maybe I’ll just stick with Netflix.
