In hindsight, I shouldn't have started with eHarmony.com.
eHarmony is specifically designed for older people looking for marriage, although one could make the argument I'm awfully close to that point at 26. If one is looking for college students closer to his age and not marriage at this point, Match.com is the way to go.
You win, Dr. Phil. You always do.
Filling out the Match.com profile was considerably easier and offered a lot of flexibility in what you could write. The best part is you can show your personality a lot more in talking about what piques your interest in the opposite sex. It's more subjective, and your true voice is heard based on what you say in the "In My Own Words..." and "About me and what I'm looking for" sections. I wondered whether I should put in my profile that I write for The Ball State Daily News knowing I was going to analyze what happened for this column. I decided if there was going to be someone for me on Match.com, I needed to be myself and not lie.
I will admit to being superficial in the sense that I'm looking for somebody I'm physically attracted to in addition to someone who shares similar interests.
Feel free to call me superficial, but secretly, we all feel the same way.
First impressions mean a lot. Girls I've fallen for never seem to like me back, and the ones who do like me, do not interest me for whatever reason. It's not the whole "challenge" thing. You know what you want. There's no reason to settle. Sometimes I feel like I'm overestimating my market value in the single world, but there is someone for everyone out there.
The key to attracting attention was to create a good headline to catch people's attention. The one I went with, though, was probably not it. I wanted something witty, so I went with a line from my favorite sportswriter, Bill Simmons of ESPN.com. It said, "I've always believed closers are like girlfriends: You remember the great ones, you remember the awful ones and you vaguely remember everyone in between."
After uploading six pictures and fine-tuning my profile, it was time to see what was out there.
After a few minutes of sorting through the profiles, I found someone I knew. It was an acquaintance of mine from my undergraduate days here at Ball State University. She's 26 and single as well. So I decided to e-mail her.
I didn't say too much, just 'How's it going?" and things like that. She wrote me back saying similar things. She also challenged me to a game of Trivial Pursuit. She clearly didn't know what she was in for.
I hadn't talked to her in about four years, so I figured, what the hell, I'll ask her if she wants to go out sometime.
It has been nearly a month and I'm still waiting for a response. Considering she checks her profile daily, yeah, that was not well played on my part. No big deal. Some will win. Some will lose. Some are born to sing the blues.
The tricky thing about Match.com is you don't have to pay money to create a profile. You do have to pay money to email people though. And most college kids aren't going to pony up $30 a month. So in the e-mails I was sure to include my e-mail address and AOL Instant Messenger screen name.
Another function of Match.com is that you can "wink" at somebody. It basically lets someone know you are interested in him or her, but are too lazy to write an email. About a day after signing up I received a wink from "Brittany", a junior here at Ball State. Well, I took a look at her profile and wrote her back, which was followed up with a few more e-mails and some conversations on AIM.
At this point, we decided to meet in person. It wasn't very formal, no date involved. She just came over to my apartment and we watched "John Tucker Must Die."
It wasn't a bad first experience for Match.com, but I didn't feel like there was any sort of connection between us. It's one of those things where you usually know right away if you're interested or not.
I had very little success with Match.com after that; it was time to change some things on my profile and re-evaluate my message-sending strategy.
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