It has come to the attention of the present author that September is now upon us. What this means is many things to many people, but what it means to the author is that, among other things, over 18 months have been spent on two online dating sites, and a year has been spent on Tinder. The results of these experiments so far, are null; that is, no new friends, dates, or anything in between, but the experiment has still been an educational one. It has come to the present author's attention, that, wading through people's profiles, messages, texts, and everything else people spill onto these sites, a lot of people are, fundamentally, terribly lonely. Of course, this is a supremely pressing health concern, given that those who have no social connections and live alone suffer increased mortality at a rate comparable to obesity or substance abuse, but fundamentally, it is also somewhat of a revelation. To wit, the present author and a close friend have deduced a theory; that is, that the vast majority of people fulfill two or more of the following criteria during their day-to-day existence:
1) They are lonely
2) They are bored
3) They are horny
This seems an immature deduction on the face of it, to suggest that people are simply bored, or looking for love or lust, but given job dissatisfaction rates, rates of feeling lonely, and rates of sexual dissatisfaction, and, in the author's personal experience of the readiness of people on dating sites to spill out medical conditions, sexual proclivity, and wants and desires to people they barely know, it is probably a fairly accurate one. It is no revelation that people want to be loved. Some people want to be fucked. Some people want more out of life. What is perhaps, a revelation, is how many people, cross-gender, cross-ethnicity, cross-class, cross-anything, really, appear to be falling short of these needs and desires. Spend a year or two on a dating site occasionally swapping messages and texts, and you'll see how quickly some people, many people, just jump headfirst, share everything, and desperately reach out for contact, either purely platonically or more intimately. It's a sad revelation, ultimately, that so many people just want to feel desired, but we're too busy desiring stuff to desire each other.
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I don't think those three types of people are accurate. You're pulling from only people "pushed" to do online dating. Plenty of other types of people out there that never get funneled into that.
ReplyDeleteThat's a fair response, and one I kind of hesitated on making this post because of. My interactions outside of the dating sites, too, are with some rather... jaded co-workers, for lack of a better word, who I think also fulfill the criteria. I fully expect that if I worked at a more sociable and kinder work place, this post might not have come about.
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