Last night Cazzer and Lady M came round for sushi. And by this, I mean we actually made sushi. Ourselves. And very professional it looked / tasted, too. It was very soothing to make, no wonder so many Japanese are skilled in the ways of Zen…I would like to think I could take it up full time though I’m not sure how many openings there would be for a journalist-turned sushi master.
Anyway, talk was mainly of Lady M’s recent successful foray into the world of internet dating. I, like her, tried it when I was 31, and found it to be highly entertaining. Mainly because I wasn’t expecting to find the man of my dreams that way, I just wanted a bit of fun and distraction. As a result, I enjoyed the experience, but I’d always told myself it wasn’t the way forward in the aftermath of the Relationship of Doom. Though, in a strange attempt to make myself ‘get back out there’ in a virtual capacity, I did join two sites three months after the break up just to see a) what kind of men were out there, and b) what kind of men would contact me.
Boy was I ever disappointed on both counts. Type of men out there: mainly after one thing, unless they are the world’s biggest losers who’ve been floating around on these sites for years, in which case they are after pretty much anything – an email, a ‘wink’, a hammering to their self esteem. Type of men who contacted me: aforementioned losers, mainly in the 48-58 year old age range, which had the main effect of immediately lowering my self esteem; as a result I viewed the sites infrequently, and never went beyond the odd ‘wink’ of my own which was, inevitably, never returned.
So after hearing about Lady M’s joyous experiences (3 dates in one week, one of whom she really fancied and is seeing again tomorrow!!) I was persuaded to try my experiment, which I had threatened to do for a while: put up a new profile, pretty much identical to my old one, but adjusting my age so that I was no longer excluded from searches by men in my own age range. Basically I’d discovered that men my age (30s) appear to have a cut off point of 35, which is highly irritating to someone like me who is, of course, older than that – but doesn’t look it! (or indeed act it). So now I am 31 on the site, and it will be interesting to see the average age of the men who contact me…
