For some reason, a lot of you are asking me “where is the best place to meet girls?”. Well according to google, not bars and clubs, but online! That got me wondering, is internet dating actually something that people of generation Y could use as a real medium of finding love?

Even though i’ve been together with my boyfriend for over 4 years, it soon became a scary thought to know that eventually we could break up and i’ll be back on the meat market. How would I ever meet someone else? Could internet dating be the thing for me too? After all, I did meet my ex on a UT Rocket Arena server.

Signing up to dating sites to look for men wasn’t my intention. In a stroke of marketing genius I thought I could use it to connect directly with people  who would like to visit the Philippines as we have a property there that could be developed. The good ol’ bait ‘n switch. To be fair, I did set up my profiles saying that I wasn’t looking for romance and pitched a business idea instead. Anyway, this is pretty irrelevant to how I discovered that dating sites would start to destroy my self esteem.

In the first 12 hours of my profile going live i’d already had around 20 new messages and about 70 people “interested”. Most of them of course didn’t bother to read my profile and probably just liked my picture. “Nice” I thought, “i’ve still got it”.

Or do I?

During this accidental online dating experience, I learned 5 important lessons.

Lesson 1: Nobody reads your profile

Reading through the messages, it was obvious that no one bothered to read my profile. All I got were generic messages which these guys were copy-pasting to every girl they thought was pretty. Or perhaps simply every girl. What if i’d spent a lot of time on my profile, stating what I was looking for in a man and pouring out my personality in 300 words or less?

Lesson 2: It’s rare that you will get personalised messages

These guys didn’t even bother to get creative. At least when I was receiving fan mail and marriage proposals during my CGS days, the guys would say something somewhat interesting or personal. But on dating sites all i’d get is “you have a wonderful smile”, “you have beautiful eyes” or the increasingly common “I’m looking for a wife to be a housewife. One that is submissive”.

Lesson 3: It’s a great place for antique shopping

As i’m sure we all know, anything goes on the internet. That includes men as old as my father (and my dad is an old dude) trying to find girls in their early 20s to marry them. I never got a message from anyone less than 20 years my senior! While to guys it’s totally ballin’ to get such a young girl, from a girls point of view it sucks that the only men who are interested in me are getting ready to receive their pension.

So for those of you who think your parents and grandparents don’t know how to use the internet – think again. They DO know and they’re all over these sites.

Furthermore, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me for all these men who would like to find a wife. If they would marry a woman in their young 20s, you can assume that this woman would like to have a family. But how many women really want to have a family with someone who statistically is going to have kicked the bucket by the time their children start high school? As cruel as it may be, I sure would like my husband to be alive to see our kids graduate.

Lesson 4: Conversation? What’s that?

Dating sites are awkward, there’s no way around that. I guess it’s the same as “real life”, where starting a conversation with randoms can be difficult. But usually online people have big balls since they’re “faceless”. But on dating sites, these guys don’t really grasp that concept and conversations via chat will go like this:

Suitor: Hello, how are you?
Liefje: Fine thanks and you?
Suitor: You have a beautiful smile
Liefje: Thanks

Sometimes it would go one step further:

Suitor: Where are you?
Liefje: At home
Suitor: Are you alone?
*Silence*
Suitor: What are you wearing?

At this point you’re probably thinking that these kind of messages would boost my ego (hey, a guy actually cares about what i’m wearing!) but they don’t because I know that they’re sending the same messages to every woman they see. I can also assume that when i’m in my 60s, any guy in their 20s is going to be looking good compared to the guys in my age group.

Anyway, I didn’t chat a lot since when I would log in, my messanger would start buzzing like crazy. It’s best to ignore it. Granted I wasn’t the most welcoming of recipients and I could have given these poor guys a break but what about if I wasn’t good at conversations anyway? What if I was a shy girl? What do those girls do? What would Susan Boyle do?

Lesson 5: Remeber that it’s just online!

While the above points was sending some crushing blows to my already tiny ego, the main thing I had to remember was that it was just online. Hopefully if I have to go back to the dating scene, my pickings would be slightly better than the guys that were approaching me online.

Although, time is not on my side and I can guess that the older I get, so will the guys that find me attractive. If I find myself single and 30, the only guys that are going to be interested will be well into their 70s. FML.

I am not looking down at those who are using online dating as a means of meeting people. Don’t take it so seriously.