Personal ads have evolved greatly from the back-page solicitations of yore, which often rivaled truck-stop bathrooms and adult bookstores for sleaziness. Now they mostly take the form of online dating sites, and are far classier. You can now not only ensure that your date is aesthetically pleasing, you can even scientifically match personalities to the letter, effectively ensuring no awkward first-date missteps.
The idea of being matched by equation or browsing through scores of profiles seems rather cold and clinical, however. It deprives dating of its spontaneity and almost resembles a job interview. Do your prospective dates come with talking points? Do they require at least three references and a full physical?
When using a dating service, you are bypassing the minor disasters that sometimes occur during the courting ritual. Watching a person grind and chew and click their way through a meal, for example, leaves you with the notion that they are in no way fit for breeding. Or you might find them to be intolerable braggarts who drone on about their high school days, yet don’t mention the fact that they’re 30 and still live with their parents. Or they turn out to be handsy perverts who think drunkenly groping at the bar is the height of romance.
Clearly, dating is not for the weak. It’s a veritable minefield of awkward social situations. Even if you find someone who suits you, you are still forced to keep up this orderly façade for years; and of course, loyally hunkering down with one person, either in marriage or long-term cohabitation, is work in and of itself. But it is a sight better than getting primped and preened like a peacock once a week in order to spray as many bars as possible with your female pheromones and attract the best mate at 25¢ margarita night, or whatever social catastrophe you find yourself immersed in. Many women starve themselves for a week in advance to ensure that the stomach is at optimum flatness, and concurrently shrink their appetites to that of a bird. Doing this sort of thing serves to shock a woman's partner years later, after he watches her inhale half a pizza in just under a minute.
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