[FuzzieAlum]

I used match, and I never paid to respond to anyone's ad ... even in this supposedly more enlightened age, we women can afford to wait for the men to respond to our ads!

Anyway, it did nada for me. I got so many emails (and some guys had clearly not even read my ad) but only a fraction of them were interesting. (Like I said my age limit was 21-40, so why is a 50-year-old writing?) I corresponded via email with a few, and met three or four in person. One guy I hung out with three or four times, but it was obviously going nowhere romantically, although we got along as friends. Then there was the date with the short little troll ... he kept winking and saying, "So, am I irresistable yet?"

Some things I learned:
- If some guy (or chick) has some annoying tic or a weird nose that you can't deal with, you can't figure it out until you see them in person.
- That really witty email took them five hours to write; in real life they are painfully dull.
- Pictures lie, even when they're not trying to.
- I can tell if I might be attracted to a person within a few minutes in real life, or I can spend days talking to them online and still have no idea.

The irony is, I know a lot of people who have met their honey online, but none of them met through a dating service.