OkCupid: Love's Elephant Graveyard

It was just after the New Year I signed-up. It’s a common thing that 20-somethings start looking for something more after graduation. Something more meaningful in their lives. Yes, there comes a point when a young, yearning heart must find a release. And with a lack of a smartphone meaning I was unable to access better alternatives, I made do with the best resource available…

Image courtesy of James Longhorn

OkCupid.

It’s easy to take the piss out of online dating sites, there’s nothing more cringeworthy than people earnestly ‘looking for love’- the sort of people who spend evenings listening to Back To Bedlam, weeping gently because they can’t ‘find the one.’ But the basic premise of OkCupid actually makes a lot of sense: everyone’s fucking lonely, so why not answer a load of questions and  get matched with people similar to yourself?

Sadly, for all the algorithm determined matching, it still comes across as a less subtle version of MySpace (and remember the subtlety of ‘pc4pc?’). With boobshots, dickshots, dogshots, catshots, hi-res, low-res, and all the other shit that results from internet anonymity. My profile pic choice was b&w selfie: opting to cast myself as a brooding byronic-hero amongst the rabble of social-recluses and wannabe pornstars. 

I got a start on my profile, hitting the brick wall of how to present my drug, alcohol and cigarette intake (does anyone in their 20’s not dabble?)- ultimately deciding that as I don’t drink bottles of Smirnoff in bed I was ‘social drinker’ and as I don’t smoke when I can’t afford to I was a ‘social smoker.’ It also asks you about religion, your love of animals, and a other questions designed to turn the best of us into the untruthful cretin beneath.

"I'm a poet, do you want me?"

Searching through the dating profiles (and writing my own) I got the sense that nobody has any idea what they’re doing. The process of consciously selling yourself to members of the opposite sex is so foreign to us that nobody could be good at it. Not that it’s that important. Online dating is essentially the process of trying to convince stranger you’re not a serial killer: I figured pretty much anything is fine as long as it isn’t creepy.  Still, there were a lot of 500-word ‘about me’ diatribes, I suppose it's hard to know how to sell yourself to other people faced with questions like 'what are you really good at?' and 'what's a secret you wouldn't tell anybody?'

The strangest part of distilling yourself into a paragraph is that it forces you to genre-ise yourself, so that everyone becomes a certain type. Based on matches my top types were (primarily determined by the fact I’m quite into politics and not against abortion): raging socialists and feminists; tea-gin-cats-cake feminists; and art students. It took about an hour until I realised the algorithm matching wasn’t that important anyway, and that for most people, everything was pretty much redundant besides whether or not they were fit. If they were called Coco and used bake sales to smash the capitalist-patriarchy I guess it would be an algorithm assisted bonus.