... how did i miss four-eyed monsters for three whole years?....

This is the best thing....

From now on it will be the only way I date on the internet... These people decided that, rather than send back and forth lame messages, or meet (she was too shy) they would communicate artistically.

Super fun, right?

I have never gone in for the whole online dating thing... Not that I don't think it works. I just don't think it works for me. I used to make fun of it outright... no go... I did an internship after my first year of university at a PR Firm that was working on the rebranding campaign of webpersonals to lavalife.com. Webpersonals was the Worldwide Interweb extension to the company that runs those party chat line dating things.... you know, the ones with the really lame commercials... yeah, they own lavalife... or they did then. So everyone in the office had to sign up... This was back in 2000. Y2K was still fresh in everyone's mind, People still knew what compuserve was, and dating/meeting people through the internet was just not done.

Suffice it to say, I met some real losers.... but it was for work, so it didn't really count.

Since then I have just said i don't like internet dating... and yes, I make fun of it... So much so that my sister called me on it, told me I couldn't really have a say unless I tried it... so I did.

And it wasn't that bad... It wasn't that great either. Look, its not that internet dating is inherently a bad thing. But you are definitely going to find people looking for relationships... thats the point. But here's the thing. I am not looking for a relationship. The relationship should be the by-product of the person I meet, not the other way around... and that's completely a personal preference. Online daters are looking for the person best suited to the relationship they want to be in....

So you end up dating people's profiles. They have slotted themselves into categories... nice, neat, clean, friendly categories... and there is no context. You know what they like, who they are, before you are ever attracted to them... and that seems backwards to me.

Arin & Susan managed to get themselves out of those boxes... have a little context before they met up... they managed to get a sense of eachother through the quirks and preferences without actually saying flat out "these are my quirks and preferences"

I like it....