Dating Daze

Used correctly, My Space can be a girl’s best friend.

Well, I guess I should clarify this and say that it can be a girl’s best friend when dealing with men under 35. Men over 35 should NOT have a My Space page. EVER. If they do, there’s a problem. Run and don’t look back. Save yourself. The guy is either one of two things. A Momma’s boy who still lives at home and will talk incessantly about the “glory days”, much like Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite, or a DOM a.k.a Dirty Old Man who is trying to “connect” with 16 year olds who don’t know any better than to post inappropriate pictures of themselves because it makes them feel grown and sexy.

My Space sure did save me last month though. I met this Jewish doctor at a holiday party who I hit it off with. We “connected.” We were having a great time talking and made plans to go out soon. His last name came up somewhere in the conversation, and I dutifully recorded it for future Googling purposes. Little did I know however that My Spacing him was going to prove even more fruitful.

A few days later my roommate and I went on My Space for the first time and began furiously looking up anyone we could think of. I put in his name, and sure enough, up came his page. Bingo. Jackpot.

It’s in your best interest to do this as well. Trust me. First of all, you get to see the guy’s My Space friends. This particular guy seemed to think it was pretty cool to have about 250 female “friends” who could double as “hoes”. You also get to see the guy’s profile, pictures & comments.

Now this guy really WAS a nice guy, and maybe I’m just being a mean, mean girl, but why did his page have to be SO corny? Corny with a capital C. He had about 15 pictures, all of him cheesing away with a huge-ass grin on his face and a terrible caption underneath. “Here’s me throwing back a brew in Boston! Beer, it does a body good!”, found underneath a picture of him smiling ear to ear with a beer in his hand. “Here I am at Hollyween! Look at those muscles if I do say so myself!”, with a too-tight S.W.A.T. team outfit on. You get the picture. I was instantaneously turned off. It didn’t help that he was a big exclamation point user. Those should be used pretty sparingly by guys. Girls can get away with smiley faces and being expressive and it’s cute, but for the boys, not so much.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t get past the cheesy smiles in literally EVERY photo. I kept imagining our wedding pictures. Introducing Cherie Amour and her new husband Corny. Corny would have on his huge smile, and I would just look scared. It didn’t work. It would have been like subjecting myself to a life of bad comedy.

My friend Jazmin did make a good point that people’s writing voices can be very different from who they are. She may have been right, but nonetheless, I had to end it right then & there. When there’s that instant deal-breaker, there’s not much you can do about it. It’s over. Finito.

But back to My Space. Don’t sleep on this valuable resource girls, especially if you’re lazy like I am and don’t like to waste your time. Use it as a weeder outer if nothing else. You should be using all the tools in your toolbox actually, and Googling, My Spacing, LinkedIn-ing and Yahoo Personaling every guy beforehand. Leave no stone unturned. Those five minutes you spend are SO worth it.

This entry was posted Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Online Dating. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.