Not Okay, Cupid

Dating has a hell of a lot in common with job hunting. Especially nowadays, when your online dating profile functions as your resume.

Back when I was out of work,  I was sending out reams of resumes and not hearing anything back. This was incredibly disheartening; I was writing and editing resumes and cover letters that worked back in grade five.
I swallowed my pride (bitter taste that was) and went in to Employment Ontario, where I learned that the art of resume writing, not to mention job hunting in general, has evolved considerably. My resume was utterly shredded and then rebuilt from the ground up; the finished product immediately yielded me three interviews.

Which I also bombed. Luckily, EO has seminars on interview skills as well, also very helpful. But in the end, none of those aids are going to do a damned thing for you if you don't have confidence in yourself. And that's a third thing they really try hard to instil in you there. My caseworker, Eleanor Given, always made me feel better about myself after each meeting. It took some doing.

I wish there was some equivalent to Employment Ontario in the dating sphere. Because my "resume" (and no doubt "interview") skills need some burnishing there, too.

This is even more disheartening to me, because in a dating profile my writing ability (and I know I have that) should speak for itself. It hasn't. Vestiges of the supremely unattractive person I was (not coincidentally, right around the same time I was job hunting) insist that since I know I can write, what must be sabotaging me is the really important part of the dating profile, to wit, my pictures.

This, by the way, probably isn't true. Poly people skew nerdy and many have a professed attraction to nerds, so unless I'm actually a really ugly specimen of nerd -- something I can't...quite...discount -- the reason I'm not having any success is probably something else.

No, it's not the fact I'm poly. I have a Chrome plug-in that filters for non-monogamy, and most of my interactions on OKCupid have been with fellow non-monogamists. There are a surprising number of them, locally. But messages to them have either gone unreturned or been met with polite rejections. ("We will keep your application on file for future consideration"...what they never tell you is that the file is circular and has a shredder attached.)

Honestly? I think it's my lack of a (meaningful) job, coupled with the fact I don't drive. The two together fairly scream poor, and it takes a special breed to overlook that. I do have qualities to compensate -- I haven't lost sight of those -- but in order to discover those, you need to interact with me a while, and preferably in person at least once.

I indulged in a month's worth of OKCupid's paid service, called "A-List", primarily to discover who 'liked' me. At the time, the site claimed I had five 'likes'. Four of them turned out to be the same person: OKCupid 'recycles' likes, so after you've acknowledged one, it disappears only to reappear later and make you think you're more popular than you are.

That woman has become a friend, so I can't claim total failure. But I think I'm going to throw in the towel.

I've had four additional 'likes' since. One was from Sweden, by which I mean she lives in Jönköping, which would make dating slightly problematic as I don't own a car, much less a plane. One was from someone who clearly didn't read my profile (or who did and clearly didn't think I was serious about the whole 'polyamory' part of it). I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt and claim the former. The latter type do exist and it's one of the reasons polyamorous folks are leery of dating outside their species; they're called 'cowboys' because they try to rope you off from your herd and secure you all to themselves.
The other two likes came from other poly people. One hurdle cleared. My followup message, though, was not returned by either of them.

It wasn't forward at all, that followup message. Perhaps that's the problem: I'm tentative. I also don't feel as if I should be doing all the work, even though, as a man on a dating site, it's obviously all my work to do. I don't know where to go from here: send another message and risk looking pushy? Was I supposed to actually ask to meet these people right off the hop? I'd like a few 'getting to know you' chat sessions before I take that step--isn't that how this works?

I never would have said this two years ago, but I think I might do better in person, now. Problem, though: My experience two years ago at the poly dating equivalent of a job fair was absolutely wretched. But even then I said I was going to have to brush that aside somehow.

I have since become aware of other occasional local get-togethers. That have, alas, always conflicted with my damned work schedule. Now I'm on days, albeit early ones...hopefully I can get out there and interact.

But as for that dating profile? I think I'm going to kill it.