Creating My Online Dating Profile

In this post, I briefly mentioned that my faithful friends forced encouraged me to actually follow through on my vow to give online dating a try, and held me accountable to at least creating a profile.*

And while I hinted at how obnoxious difficult this process was, I feel I must be fully honest with you all and admit that getting me to actually sit down long enough to answer questions/upload pictures was somewhat similar to attempting to herd salamanders or put an overstimulated child to bed. I was, for lack of a better term, slippery. I came up with just about every excuse in the book to procrastinate (also noted in my other post: I am an excellent procrastinator). I was thirsty. I was hungry. I had to go potty. I had to go check something in the other room. My tummy hurt. My head hurt. My heart hurt. 

It's not easy putting yourself out there, guys.

So since I still have no experienced online dating advice to offer just yet**, I can at least say this much: creating an online dating profile is not for the faint of heart.

I strongly recommend the team-lift approach here.

Not only did I apparently require a babysitter (as evidenced by my aforementioned distraction tactics) but my best friends' input was invaluable as I attempted to somehow encapsulate my entire personality and dating preferences into a website that my hypothetical suitors would one day use as a means of determining whether or not I was worthy of pursuit.

I answered somewhere just shy of eleventy-billion questions during my initial profile creation stage, the majority of which are now nothing more than a blurry intentionally repressed memory, but a few in particular stood out to me:

What are four words your best friends would use to describe you?

Joelle and I decided to make a game out of this one. We silently squinted at the list of twenty-or-so adjectives and made our selections in secret. Then, when we had both narrowed down our top four choices, we swapped answers. This was super affirming for me, as I was blessedly only off by one word (which means 3/4 of the time I see myself the same way my best friends others see me…right?).

What ethnicities would you be willing to accept as matches?

Insert record-screeching noise here. I'm sorry, are you kidding me? How is this even a real question? My social-worker heart was fuming and I nearly slammed my laptop closed and gave up on the whole thing (as well as my faith in humanity), but Joelle tenderly pushed through the smoke and fury and pointed out that I had the option to say "no preference." God save the person who marks a preference on here. (Seriously, I'm praying. This is not acceptable.)

How far should we search for your matches?

Ummm, to the ends of the earth? I'm not shelling out all this money*** for nothing. Then I realized this was just a creative way of asking whether or not I'm willing to be in a long-distance relationship. The answer? I'm not. Distance sucks. But I did stretch myself and at least agree to a 60 mile radius - mainly because my best friends got me all freaked out that there might not be any potential matches within the "limited confines" of the 600,000+ inhabitants of the greater Portland-metro area. (Just typing that sentence reinforces how ridiculous this theory is. I think secretly it was just a ploy for my best friends to try and get me to meet someone from Salem and move back home…#notgonnahappen.)

And finally: I would like my matches to be between the ages of ___ to ___

I probably got the most pushback from my friends on this one. Call me old-fashioned, but I've always envisioned my future husband as someone older than me. Determining an acceptable age-range was even more difficult than determining an acceptable distance. Logically, I knew I needed to open my standards a little here and admit that there just might be some decent, mature, single men out there who are (slightly) younger than 27. But how much younger? After more than a few desperate phone calls (I say "desperate" because I was desperately trying - in vain, I might add -  to convince my friends that my expectations aren't completely unreasonable in this regard), I selected my "preferred age-range" and moved on (and then secretly prayed God would bring me someone on the upper end).

I'm still chipping away at the approximately 4,000 additional questions eHarmony insists on asking (though I'm not exactly sure why my favorite condiment would be relevant in securing a date), but for the most part my profile is ready to be activated…whenever I can afford to do so. Stay tuned...

*never-mind the fact that it's still not active…I'm working with limited resources, here, folks. 
**seriously, eHarmony, hook a broke sister up over here!
***future tense