The 15 Minute Dating Blog

by Ron Bishow

I realized after seeing a commercial for Match.com during the Super Bowl that online dating had definitely hit the mainstream.

There is certainly no shortage of places to try your luck on the information superhighway either. Udate, PerfectMatch, AmericanSingles, Yahoo even J-Date for those who want to narrow the field a little. The only preventative issue with these sites is cost. Match.com for instance costs $39.99 a month for the privilege of finding the love of your life, which may not sound like a whole lot but as a guy remember you are also paying for the dates.

Then one day I learned Craigslist, the site where people sell their old couches and find cheap Yankees tickets, also had a personals section! And to top it all off, it was free to post, so there are literally hundreds of girls putting up ads every hour. I better not sell that two-person love seat.

After a week of toying with Craigslist it became apparent that there were some negatives. Since it was free girls received hundreds of responses to their postings, meaning it was very hard to get them to answer you back, and since it was free their requirements were even more specific. For instance, “I am looking for a 29-year-old who is 6-3 with blonde hair and blue eyes who can recite Macbeth from memory and whose farts smell like sunshine.”

You would think this would be the most frustrating part, but I am here to tell you about something much worse. Something that will make you wish the girl never responded to you. I call these people “online ghosts.” These are girls that post ads on Craigslist because they are free but have no actual intention of meeting anyone from the internet. Either they are not into online dating, or just like pulling peoples chains.

I encountered such a female last October around Halloween. I read her posting and she sounded cool and normal (no mention of a sugar daddy or looking for cocaine). We were also the same age and had some other things in common, so I wrote her, and to my surprise she wrote back.

We emailed back and forth a bunch during our work days and she asked for a photo. I send one, and she responded with one herself. Her photo was a tight close up of her face, which showed none of her body and come to think of it didn’t really represent her at all. Why would a girl send such a bad photo of herself? This should have been my first warning since she refused to send another, even when I asked to see one of her Halloween costume she was raving about.

So about a month passes, we are now text messaging and talking on the phone frequently, and we decide we should get together. She had the entire next week off which should work out perfectly, but suddenly she becomes busy Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. She finally says we should meet up on Friday. I say fine, come to work dressed up ready to go out, but never hear from her during the day. I finally text her around 3:00 to see what is going on. She writes back that she has gone home to her parents for the weekend. Not only did she blow me off but she didn’t even tell me she couldn’t make it. If I hadn’t text messaged her I would have been standing there for an hour!

What kind of person would do such a thing? Well, what I came to realize was that I didn’t really exist to her. I was just an email address she wrote too to escape the boredom of the day. So I had wasted months talking to a girl I would never meet in person, she was a ghost, a figment of my imagination. Sure, she could have turned out to be horrible in person, or looked like wilder beast, but at least I would have known for sure.

You will never encounter the “Online Ghost” at Match.com or any other pay site because nobody in their right mind would pay $40 a month just to find someone to email during work. So what you are paying for is not just the chance to find love, but the promise that you will at least meet the person you have been flirting with for weeks.

As they say, when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

About the author: Ron is a 2000 graduate of the University of Hartford. He works as a freelance writer for various publications and websites. He was formerly an editor at “CO-ED Magazine” and had been published work for American Online and Metromix.com, among others. He loves playing poker, good Scotch, and women in glasses. Ron lives in New Jersey, where he continues to search for the girl that will allow him to stop gathering fodder for these stories.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 4:30 am and is filed under Horror Stories, Dating and Relationships Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.