On why I let my online dating subscription lapse…for now
Today my online dating subscription is officially over, and I’ve decided not to renew. I have nothing against that particular site. In fact, I think a lot of good things have come out of it. I met my last boyfriend on that site. And he and I had some great times…until the night I had to call my doorman to forcibly remove him from the premises. (We had broken up by that point.)
But, I digress.
Certainly there are some well-known pitfalls to online dating. Like this. Or this. Unfortunately, these types of annoyances are prevalent. Even worse, many people fabricate their entire lives on these sites from their appearance to their marital status to their jobs (as if, in the event you decide to meet up IRL, you won’t notice they aren’t even remotely who they portrayed themselves to be). Yet these negatives aren’t enough to make me just give up on finding love.
What is enough to make me take a break for now is how the whole process made me feel about myself. I became too emotionally involved. At first it was a lot of fun. But then I started feeling deeply rejected when cute guys wouldn’t pay me any attention. Or, instead of feeling flattered, I would feel genuinely upset when guys I didn’t find attractive showed interest in me. I was taking it all too seriously, too personally, and it stopped being fun.
The reason I decided to try online dating was that I believed (and still do) that I would find better quality relationships than those I had with the men boys I met through more conventional means, e.g. bars and parties. One person I met IRL dumped me at my friend’s wedding. Another cheated on me on Valentine’s Day. A third just stopped calling and then randomly sent me unsolicited pictures of his erect penis. True story.
So in the end I am back in the same place where I started. Alone, but still hopeful that I will find love someday (either online or not). And that’s not a bad place to be.
