My brief experience with Match.com.

As an experiment, last night I created an account on Match.com. I know, I know. Why the hell would I do that in this day and age? Dating apps have gone the way of the dodo bird and all. Well, I like to think of myself as a sexy rogue scientist. I don’t have any credentials, degrees, or research papers to show for it. But so what? Edgar Allan Poe dreamt up black holes and the Big Bang theory (the theory itself, not that stupid show) while scribbling drunk off his ass decades before so-called “real scientists” confirmed them. If he can theorize things, I can too.

I says to myself, there’s just no way all these reports I hear of the shockingly low number of quality female matches on these apps can be correct. It has to be Red Pill Propaganda. Fake news designed to demoralize men so they don’t even bother trying in the first place. Disinformation to help juice the search algo for all those Andrew Tate “woman-hating” clones out there. I refused to believe any of that. I will remain an eternal optimist.

Anyway, I create my profile. It’s easy, and only takes a few minutes. I even uploaded a few hot pics of myself. I mean, all pics of me are hot, but just to clarify. After inputing all the necessary info, Match then confronted me with some criteria questions. Would you date a woman with kids? Since there’s not a “Fuck no, I’m not a step-sucker,” option, I had to contend with just clicking the box for “No.” Then there’s a tab you can click that says “must-have.” That means single mommies will be EXCLUDED from your results. Good riddance, says I. I’m not into funding some other man’s sperm bank. I mean, when you go into Mcdonald’s, do you start digging into the trash can for a leftover half-eaten Big Mac? No. You walk up to that counter and order a brand new one. Only degenerates, beggars, and the mentally ill eat out of trash cans. So, why would you treat your dating life any different?

Next came the age criteria. I’m 42 so I usually set the age between 27–35, but I was feeling magnanimous so I upped it to 37. I know super old Bill Belichick, 70s, is dating some hot chick in her 20s these days. But since I haven’t won any Super Bowls (yet) and I’m not worth $100 million+ (yet) I have to try to be realistic. It is what it is.

I live in the upper midwest, which is basically like living on Mars at a giant truck stop. So, usually on ANY dating app I have to expand the search zone out as far as reasonable in order to get any matches whatsoever. This time I set it to 350 miles. Though honestly, 345 miles of that is just me humoring the site. I don’t think I’d make the effort to even cross the street these days for a date, much less travel across an entire state. But you can’t just put five miles where I live, and even 50 miles wouldn’t be enough. Tree fiddy felt like a happy medium.

Then, it was off to the races. If by races, you mean a pitiful rogues gallery of candidates. Like, I’m pretty sure Batman fought some of the freaks I saw. Match doesn’t let you search by grid unless you have an upgraded account, so I was forced to inspect each profile one by one “swipe-’em” style. It took about as long to get through them as it does to read this paragraph.

How did I do, overall? It was absolutely awful, to be blunt. I ran into the same issue I had with speed dating, which I talk about in this article here. Out of about 20 or so candidates, realistically I’m left with only about 2–3 that are legit potentials. Meaning women who aren’t too old, aren’t fat, don’t exhibit a bad attitude toward men or have “trauma,” aren’t covered in sleeve tattoos, don’t have a list a mile long of necessary atttributes for the perfect man, and haven’t done the ol’ slut-to-born-again-Christian routine so many post-30 year-old ladies like to do these days.

Match has the gall to beg for pricey upgrades. Like I’m going to pay $40 for a meager 2–3 above average profiles that are most likely months old and long forgotten by their users, or are getting spammed by a hundred other dickheads on the daily.

Sometimes, Match would get clever and try to sneak one in from my reject list. I’d be swiping along and then suddenly see a half-decent female, click on their profile, only to see she had two kids at home, or see that she was 48 years old, or see some other disqualifying bullshit. LOL, nice catfish, Match, but this guy has standards.

It’s hard to understate how atrocious these results are. This is Match.com, which is basically the Wal-Mart of dating apps. The Match Group owns like half the online dating sites. I think Match itself is the biggest dating site on the planet. Yet by simply tweaking a few parameters over a massive region and adjusting for women in the PRIME dating/marriage range, I was met with nothing but slim pickens, though ironically few were actually slim. If Match results are total shit, I can’t even imagine what lesser sites might produce. Probably something from the Garbage Pail Kids. Gross.

It’s not really Match’s fault, I guess. They only show you whoever signs up. Dating apps aren’t as popular as they once were. The best people are typically not on or in need of dating apps. Or maybe they’re using Facebook, Instagram, or other sites.

Then it hit me. My eureka moment. What if I were to lower my standards? Or abandon them altogether? What if I tried removing ALL my previously set parameters. Surely that would open the floodgates of opportunity. Surely, by some chance, I’d happen across a nugget of gold in this landfill. Right?

Nah, fuck that, I thought, and deleted my account less than an hour after opening it. So long, Match. Burn in hell.

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Years ago, when I was a little kid, I had this sudden weird urge to dig a hole in my backyard one day. Why? Hell if I know. It made sense at the time. So, I grabbed a shovel and started digging out behind a giant bush in the corner of the property. I dug and I dug and I dug until it was past nine o’clock. The sun was still out as it was summer. I had probably reached maybe three feet and had a nice heap of dirt beside me. My step-dad came out and asked me why I was digging the hole. I didn’t have an answer. What kid has a rational explanation for anything he does? I just kind of stood there, shrugged, and then went back to digging. He was wearing shorts and tube socks pulled all the way up. He was the kind of guy who needed his tube socks always pulled up past his calves. He stands there a bit. I keep shoveling with his stupid step-dad tube-socked feet in the corner of my eye. Finally, I hear him sigh and then walk away from me, leaving me in peace at last. Not long after my hole has become the shape of an upside-down tear drop as I couldn’t flatten the sides anymore. And that’s when I see something at the bottom.

A little piece of blue something. I reached down to pick it up, straining my shoulders against the top of the hole, until I am able to pinch it between my fingers. It’s a piece of plastic. Maybe from a shopping bag. Or perhaps the coating of a pipe that peeled away. Except there’s no pipe in my hole. It’s just this random tidbit that somehow got down in the dirt and stayed there until I rescued it from oblivion. I take this little blue “treasure” inside with me and store it away. I’ve since lost it. But it became a haunting metaphor for life about chance, timing, opportunity, and such, that I’ve thought about from time to time. I’ve applied the metaphor to job searches, school applications, business ideas, stories, and now of course dating websites. Dig and dig only to end up with a piece of trash. But who knows. Maybe if I’d dug just six feet to the right where my step-dad’s tube-socked feet were standing I might have dug up a wheat penny. Or maybe hit an electrical line and shocked myself to death.