Adventures in Online Dating

[thepeopleseason]

Any and all fans of both Firefly and Harry Potter should go read musesfool's A Million Light Years From Home, wherein the crew of our favorite smuggling ship meets up with a certain animagus. Takes place post-Order of the Phoenix and post-Serenity.

And now I present, what will hopefully not become a regular column, Adventures in Online Dating: (a.k.a. Psycho or Spam?)

As most of you who have read my incessant whining over the past few weeks already know, I'm on the lookout for new women to introduce to my life (and my bed). Here are some particularly odd ones:

• On one popular online dating site, under the section labelled "You should message me if:" I have the following text:

  You've gotten this far down in my profile and still give a shit.
  
  P.S. Call me old-fashioned, but spelling counts. Neither "u" nor "ur" are actual words.

  Now imagine the cognitive disjoint I experience when I open the following message:

  my name is [redacted] ,am a new member of ok cupid ,ur profile caugth my attension as i was browsing thruogh the profiles here ..i dont know if u would not mind chatting with me ..have a good day
  bye

• I got this message the other day:

  hi dear,
  
  I was so fascinated by your id that i was left with no choice than to contact you at once.I like to enter into a relationship with a man like you. What do you think? Pls. let me know. looking for ward to hear from you soon .i am in love with you ok [emphasis mine].
  thank you and God bless
  [redacted]
  you contat me here; ([redacted])

  "i am in love with you ok"??!? Those of you who actually know me well will probably laugh at the slight irony of my even mentioning this, but umm, in the highly unlikely event that you're not a spammer trolling for e-mail addresses, then falling in love with someone based solely on their online dating profile? Psycho.

Comments

[musesfool.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for the rec!

[thepeopleseason.livejournal.com]

My pleasure. It's a spectacular story, stirring and in-character...

[musesfool.livejournal.com]

Well, thank you again. *g*

[fyrdrakken]

On message #1, I think it's proof that a substantial number of people on those dating sites A) work based on the photo and give only a cursory glance to the profile, if they check it at all, or B) may read the profile but figure that any little incompatibilities "can be worked out if the chemistry's right" rather than being the warning signs that they may in fact be. On message #2, I don't know -- was it a really good photo you had in your profile? (I'm inclined to partly blame culture on that one, as telling women and girls repeatedly that they shouldn't go to bed with a man they don't love, leading too many of them to develop an extremely low threshold for claiming to feel love...)

[thepeopleseason.livejournal.com]

I'm partially convinced that both messages were trolling for e-mail messages, although less so with the former. Both messages were from newly-created accounts and from locales significantly far from Atlanta, GA.

The second message indicated that I should write the sender at a specific yahoo-based address. I've grown accustomed to these sorts of trolling schemes (although not so much on that particular site) to the point that I started adding the following message on Friendster:

If you didn't know, there's a bunch of jackasses using Friendster personal messages to try to snag spammable e-mail addresses from unsuspecting users.

Which means I get a message a week from "attractive women" who can only talk via e-mail and/or want to show me their panties via a webcam. Right, like I was born fucking yesterday.

So if you are genuinely interested in talking to me (yeah, right), send me a message via Friendster. Do not include your e-mail address or web address. Include the words "To The Devil His Due" in either the body of the message or the subject line, and I'll try to get back to you in a timely fashion.

If you've already sent me a message of genuine interest, my apologies for questioning your intent...

[fyrdrakken]

Had you heard about the scam on some dating sites where employees send messages to people who may be about to let their memberships lapse, pretending to be other members, in the hopes of coaxing them to re-up? I heard that not long after I let the paid membership I had on Match.com for a bit expire, and in retrospect it explained getting several Winks or messages days after cancellation (while still getting "not to late to renew!" messages from the site) after months of nothing.

[(Anonymous)]

I believe it!