After I got divorced back in 1988, I figured it would be nice to get married again. I really didn\u2019t mind the marital lifestyle so much; the problem was mostly with the person that I married. She turned out to be, well, less than an ideal companion for such a lifestyle (with me, anyway). So I decided to get back out there and try again. <\/p>\n
Unfortunately, I don\u2019t have a truckload of good looks and smooth manners about me. And I was working in a place where there weren\u2019t a whole lot of eligible women my age (as in my former job, where I had met my ex-wife; darn, I had my choice and I picked the wrong one!). Furthermore, I don\u2019t possess a very common mix of interests, values and temperaments; finding another \u201cbird of a feather\u201d wouldn\u2019t be easy. So I decided to turn to the personal ads. It seemed like a good way to jump-start my romantic life.<\/p>\n
By 1995 or so, it was pretty apparent that the personal ad thing just wasn\u2019t working for me (and neither was real-life, i.e. meeting someone at a job or at a volunteer activity or at church — back when I was involved with such things). I felt kind-of bad about it. I figured that perhaps I\u2019m just a freak, maybe I\u2019m just not meant to find romantic involvement.<\/p>\n
Well, I\u2019m still rather pessimistic about the whole romantic fulfillment thing. But as to being a freak just because I bombed out with the personal ads, I\u2019ve since learned that bombing out is quite common. So I guess that I\u2019m not such a freak after all. A recent article in Scientific American Mind<\/a> about on-line dating indicates that dating-via-advertising is NOT a highly successful means of establishing long-term relationships. I myself did most of my personal ad dating via newspapers or newsletters; I only dabbled in internet dating towards the end. But there really isn\u2019t much difference. In fact, you\u2019d think that the ease of communication via e-mail would be an advantage over the old method of answering printed ads and exchanging letters and then talking on the phone. With e-mail, you can easily and quickly exchange photos to see if the all-important \u201cbody chemistry\u201d factor works out. (But, as the SciAm article points out, a whole lot of people send pictures that mis-represent what they currently look like.)<\/p>\n However, recent studies show that internet dating has a terrible track record. The Scientific American article cites a professional analysis of some statistics released by eHarmony.com, which indicates that if a person dated 1 new person every 3 weeks via the site, it would take 19 years of effort to raise their chance of getting married to the 50-50 level. A phone survey of users of other popular dating sites showed that only about 1 in 4 users were satisfied with the site. <\/p>\n