who needs a marriage certificate when you’ve got facebook?

How is facebook going to change relationships in the next millennium? When you sign up, you get choices… single, in a relationship, married and ‘it’s complicated’ – which is probably the best choice for any of the aforementioned options. Or at least the most realistic.

Of course, when your friends hook up – or break up, you get a nice little news feed to let you know what’s going on. Convenient, for those of us who want to keep tabs on the singleness of our friends, or the friends we’re secretly facebook-stalking.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a facebook addict too, but I wonder how relationships will look in the facebook friendly future. It seems just a simple post to facebook confirms marriage vows:

{ you } and { I } said their vows and made it clear on Facebook. They’re married.

That’s simpler than a visit to city hall and getting a marriage certificate, and sounds so official. Just let everyone on facebook know… Is that the way of the future? If a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s listening did it really fall? Are you really married if you didn’t announce it on facebook? Where does reality end and facebook begin?

And there’s the people whose boy/girl/man/woman friend gets their knickers in a knot because s/he didn’t change his/her status to ‘in a relationship’ fast enough. In the often intricate dance we do as part of dating rituals, we skip precariously through the steps when we move from casual dating into a ‘relationship’. Will facebook complicate this delicate dance? Will relationships break from stress placed on them by a too slow or too quick relationship status update?

And the break up. It used to be much simpler to keep those details under wraps. Call a few girlfriends and go out and drown the sorrows with a few cosmopolitans. Now all friends are instantly aware of your updates. As a single woman, I am relationship status free. That way, hopefully I can keep any messy future breakups out of the facebook news feeds.

online personals & the dating pool. Or is it poo?

So, my latest rant in life is the dating pool (which is one l away from poo). Some people seem to have luck with online personals, so I decided to try one. First of all, I did one around a year ago with limited success and then deleted it. A month or two ago I went and did another.

So, this time, it’s working out so bad that it’s almost comical.

What I have observed is that the vast majority of people cannot spell.
“u r hawt”
“u r a qt. msn me @ XXXX”
Lest I sound like a spelling snob, I’m not all that concerned about the odd spelling mistake, but come on. Form a sentence, people.

Along with that, many people who send me messages seem to just want to have an MSN relationship. I can see that meeting people first online can be ‘convenient’ (although it has not been in my experiences so far). But the point isn’t to date online… is it? I’ll date my computer instead. It’s pretty open-minded, talks and likes to play chess.

I also don’t care what kind of car they drive. Ugh. Yes, countless people like to tell me. I don’t care, really.

And when curiosity prompts me to check out their profile, if they have no interests or profile description, then I assume they are pretty boring. Judgmental of me? Probably. Even if they are ‘hawt’ it would be nice to know something about them and what makes them tick….

“I like nerds” isn’t a good opening line either. I’ll admit that I am a bit intellectually inclined and have some unconventional interests, but being called a nerd isn’t a good pick-up line.

My next – and more serious- observation is that the majority of men on the site (or at least those who message me) are married. Married. While I have married friends who happen to be men, I didn’t meet them on dating sites. I’m not sure why married people would use a dating site to meet ‘friends.’ Thus, I assume they are looking for something else… and my answer to that is…. NO. In fairness to them, the vast majority have at least admitted they are married.

I’m not sure i’m sending out ‘looking for married men’ vibes… I think my profile is pretty ‘me’, as do friends who have reviewed it. I’d like to know what about me attracts the married men? And it kind of creeps me out that so many of them are out there looking. So my faith in online dating has not been redeemed. Where are the single men who have brains? Maybe I should start hanging out in libraries…. Is it too much to want to find someone who is smart, a little weird, fun, active and has a good sense of humor? Also preferably not a neat freak either and can handle chaos and disorder? Maybe I’ll write my name in Love in the Time of Cholera, leave it at a used bookstore and hope for a Serendipity type of experience?

So for now… I’m trying to avoid the poo… Anyone got an l?