No, it doesn’t make you pathetic. Please. Even at our worst, Sexerati is just not that judgy.
But seriously, I cannot describe my identity (hint, actually, that can be a hard question) & desire with a series of pulldown menus:
And nor can I find satisfying answers even after a never-ending flood of questions. Scientific sluttery dictates that I will still try, but I will be secretly wishing for a better way.
Is the future of dating really going to be the online equivalent of a sidelong glance on the subway, whether or not it turns into lurv?
Until the day comes that you can fuck a textbox, what do we modern lovers do? (It’s the weekend. Go work it out in the comments.)
2 Comments
I think you are missing the point of online dating. Online dating is not and I cannot forsee it ever being a replacement for dating in real life.
What online dating is however is a way to produce a short list of potential partners in who to contemplate dating with. Second it allows you in one evening to sort out losers from the list.
Within in a week to a month you have sufficient information available to determine which of those you initially choose you are actually going to date.
This is one of my pet peeves as well, but I’m net to find a truly good solution. For playfulbent.com, I went with “Male/Female/Other” for gender, where other brought up a text input field for people to define their own gender. Instead of an orientation dropdown, I’ve just put checkboxes for “plays well with girls” and “plays well with boys”.
I’m not 100% happy with this. The more semantic information collected about users, the more they can search for the sort of thing they are after, but also the more they tend to get shoehorned into little boxes. I’ve deliberately steered very clear of things like “ethnicity” dropdowns, they make me quite mad, but a lot of people seem to like them.