Lookin' for love . . . or whatever

So I did a search on Amazon.com/books for “internet dating” and got back 39,331 results. One of the features I’ve always liked about Amazon is the ability to “search inside” even though it’s a misnomer since you can only browse the covers, table of contents, and one page of text provided by the publisher. Still, this is sometimes enough to glean appropriate information (although I do favour browsing in my local indy bookstore before purchase). I didn’t bother going through all of the pages of hits, you won’t be surprised, but I wonder if anyone really reads them. Actually, I wonder if a man would ever read them. A man looking for a woman, that is.

I knew there are more and more internet dating sites, not because I belong (2 was enough, thank you) but because I have a hotmail account I use for e-mail at work, and they are always presented as banner ads along the side and top of my page every time I refresh my in-box, along with better mortgage rates, weight loss plans, and cell phone companies (all related, don’t you think?). So which to join? My initial findings suggested that you can find lots of hip, adorable, bright people in any urban center, and none in SE Connecticut. It doesn’t matter which dating site you join. But I already knew that. Regionally, we seem to have an unusually high proportion of misspellings and typos.

It also doesn’t matter which site you join, because you will find many of the same people on each of them (which gets expensive, btw). I investigated the major ones: Match, eHarmony, True, Nerve, Lavalife, and Yahoo personals (and J-date for a little ethnic flava). Each one tries to come up with their own thang. Nerve is a little hipper. Lavalife lets you search for relationships OR just sex (with pretty detailed description checkboxes (fewer profile pics for the folks just looking for sex)). Then I found this link: http://internetdating.net/ and got a little overwhelmed. Between personals posting sites, same-sex sites, swinging sites, just looking for sex but not dates sites you’d think the market would be flooded, and everybody would have found their match. Wouldn’t you? Well, wouldn’t you?