I don’t get it

I went on this date with a really cool guy last Friday, and he hasn’t called me since. I’m usually not wrong about these things, I can tell when someone is interested in me, or at least enough to call me and see if I want to go on another date. (It’s after that, that I usually get messed up.) We stayed out talking till 2am in the morning. The conversation was really interesting, not like the typical garbage I usually get on a first date.

I wish this was like a test and someone told me the results right after the date. Instead I sit around and I wait for someone to call me, because I feel like an idiot for calling 5 days after a date. I make up excuses for him, like it’s the holidays so maybe he’s busy with family or something. Then I start thinking about the book “He’s Just Not That Into You’, and I get more depressed. He doesn’t like you if he’s too busy to call.

I feel guilty for not returning the calls of people that wanted a second date from me.

Online Dating Sites Accused of Deception

I have to say this is pretty fucked up. Makes sense why I've been having so much trouble with the whole online dating thing.

By Paul Chavez, Associated Press Writer
Lawsuits Accuse Online Dating Sites of Engaging in Deceptive Practices

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- After looking for love on the Internet and failing to find it, frustrated lonely hearts are heading to court, accusing online dating sites of engaging in deceptive practices.

A recent lawsuit against Match.com charged the matchmaking service with sending a female employee out on a date with a male subscriber as "date bait" to keep him signed up. Another lawsuit against a personals service offered by Yahoo Inc. accused the Internet portal giant of creating fake profiles to entice subscribers.

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Match.com denied the allegations and obtained an affidavit from the woman in question, who declared she never worked for the company. Yahoo refused to comment.

The federal fraud lawsuits, which seek class-action status, have roiled the lucrative online dating industry. A 2004 report by Jupiter Research estimated the U.S. Internet personals market had revenues of $473 million that year -- the largest moneymaker for online content.

In the Match.com lawsuit, filed Nov. 10 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, plaintiff Matthew Evans made the "date bait" allegation against Autumn Marzec. He also accused the site of using fake profiles and sham e-mail "winks" from potential matches to keep him subscribed. Match.com, which claims more than 15 million members, offers a basic subscription for $29.99 a month.

Marzec said in a signed affidavit that she has never been employed by Match.com or its parent company, InterActive Corp., and has not worked for them as a contractor. On Monday, Match.com demanded that Evans dismiss the lawsuit, which it called a "totally baseless attack."

Evans' attorney, Mike Arias, said Wednesday he has no intention of dropping the suit.

The lawsuit against Yahoo was filed in October in U.S. District Court in San Jose by plaintiff Robert Anthony of Broward County, Fla.

The suit says Yahoo posts fake profiles on its personals site "to generate interest, public trust and give the site a much more attractive and functional appearance." Yahoo charges $19.95 a month for a dating service and $34.95 a month for a service geared for people looking for more serious relationships.

Anthony alleged that Yahoo also sent him fake "new match" messages when his monthly subscription was up for renewal. After months of failing to meet a potential match, he became suspicious and discovered the same picture of a woman being posted for different cities under different names, according to his attorney, Randy Rosenblum.

"He wants to expose what he believes to be illegitimate conduct on the part of Yahoo and stop it from happening," Rosenblum said. "Because people are signing up for a service and are paying for it and they are not getting what they are paying for. They are being misled into thinking there are people out there who are interested."

Trish McDermott, chief matchmaker at Engage.com and a member of Match.com's startup team, said she never saw any type of consumer fraud during her decade at Match.com

"The true enticement of these services are the real people who like you for who you are," McDermott said.

But she added that the majority of personals sites, including Yahoo and Match.com, employ a business model she believes fails consumers.

It's not clear who is a member and who isn't in the pay-to-respond model, in which a user must join a service to respond to an e-mail sent by a potential match but cannot post a profile, McDermott said.

If someone e-mails 100 people and gets only one response, he or she could conclude that most of the profiles are fake when they actually show non-subscribers who can't respond to e-mail, she said.

Jupiter Research found in a consumer survey that 35 percent of online dating users at three major sites -- Match.com, Yahoo Personals and Spark Networks -- were dissatisfied.

"Their expectation is to find an authentic person and to fall madly and truly in love, yet the experience can be very demoralizing for these people," McDermott said.

Wife Work

I came across a book that basically said the divorce rate is high because woman do too much around the home, and the job description of a wife needs to be rewritten. I never gave much thought to housework until I started living on my own. I have a tiny studio, and I hate cleaning it. I hate washing the floors, I hate doing dishes, the place always look like a mess even though I only spend a few hours there a day. My mother had to clean a four bedroom, three level, 3 bathroom home, and things always seemed clean. My father never lifted a finger. My sister and I barely ever helped. Now I feel really bad for not helping. She would spend an entire day just cleaning.

I see why no one actually wants to be a ‘wife’. Sure we want to be asked and we want to plan the wedding, but it’s after the wedding that all of us want to forget about. As George Carlin says it a ‘wife is no more than an unpaid domestic servant.’ She cooks, cleans, delivers a baby, takes care of the baby, and the husband. She does the laundry 85% of the time.

Woman see living alone as independent, men see it as lonely, because it’s usually woman that take care of the men, so they also do more of the socializing. There isn’t anything romantic at all about being married and having to do more household chores than your ‘equal’ partner. I thought it was really interesting that woman initiate 75% of the divorces in this country. That basically means woman are much more discontent in marriage than men.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder why woman really want to have children. It’s fine being married, but to have to get fat, pain, and have to baby sit for several years doesn’t hold any appeal to me.

The benefits of being single

I think people date because they don’t want to be single. Being part of a couple is safe, there is always someone to have dinner with and life is predictable. You don’t have to go on blind dates, wait for phone calls or hang your heart on your sleeve whenever you go out.

So is the grass really greener on the other side? If you are single you get to:

1.Do whatever you want, whenever you want.
2.Have lots of friends of the opposite sex.
3.Have time to do the things that really interest you, like take a weekend cooking class.
4.Be more socially active.
5.Meet people of the opposite sex and flirt to your hearts content.
6.Be CRAZY
7.Sleep around
8.Talk smack about the guys/girls you are currently dating
9.Travel with friends or by yourself

Of course not everyone wants all the things on the list, but when you’re with someone, you do lose some things.

If you are part of a couple very often you are:

1.Waiting by the phone for him/her to call.
2.Complaining to friends about him/her.
3.Thinking/worrying about him/her
4.Fighting with him/her

Let’s all celebrate being single!

How to Catch a Man

I’m not a fan of Maureen Dowd, but I think she really hit the nail on the head when she wrote “The Modern Woman”, a recent article in the NY Times.

I love the section that she wrote about woman and courtship. It seems that woman now have to do more work to get a man. It’s not enough that we are more educated and more independent, now we also have to do more of the work in hunting for a guy. Women also have to stroke men’s egos, if she makes too much money, she can be seen as a threat.

Living in NYC I see everyday how many single, well education, older woman now exist. They complain that it’s difficult to date. If you make more than $100,000 a year, you’ll pay the price by not having children.

I wish I lived in simpler times. There are way too many books on dating for anyone to get the ‘rules’ straight. At the same time I am not willing to give up being able to work, be education, and live on my own.

Signs that he or she doesn’t like you

I’m not sure how you fill up an entire book about this topic, like with He’s Just Not That into You, but here are the signs that I look for when someone is just not that into me.

• He doesn’t call more than once a week.


• You don’t see him for more than once a week, even though you have been dating for over 2 months.


• He never makes plans. I have to decide what we should do.


• All he wants is sex.


• He calls me at the last minute to hang out expecting me to say yes.


• He doesn’t care if I’m uncomfortable.

More or less, I know if a guy isn’t interested in about 2 hours. If I want to be really long winded about this, because I’m being delusional I can usually lie to myself for about a month. Then I get fed up, and I delete their cell phone number from my phone.

If he doesn’t like me from the start, it’s probably not going to change.

What Teen Dramas Have Thought Me About Dating

I grew up watching way too much TV, 90210, Save by the Bell, all the crappy teen dramas. No wonder I grew up with the assumption that I was supposed to be dating all the time. All the TV shows were just one big incest pool, where the ugly guy/girl somehow managed to get the hottest person at their high school.

Sure, I use to day dream about stuff like that. No one at my high school was all that cute or popular, so I use to day dream about dating Luke Perry. I am really glad that phase of my life is over - what the hell was I thinking, he has side burns?

I was wrong all along, only on TV do people date all the time. I’m not sure that I want to date all the time, after awhile it starts to feel like a checklist. What happen to dating someone because you really, really like them?

I think everyone that has done the online thing knows what it’s like to fit 3 or 4 people into a calendar week, and by the end of the week it turns out you aren’t interested in any of them. It takes so much effort just to find someone that you are remotely attracted to, so it kind of makes sense that people just don’t date all that often.

I wish I could feel the same way about someone I actually knew, compared to way I felt about Luke Perry when I was 14. The good old days.