Skip to main content

Fishing Online

The news story about the death of a Frenchman, described as an "avid online dater", under mysterious circumstances reads like a Pink Panther screenplay except this is no work of fiction. Though not suggested directly, the implication is that the death and "avid" online dating are somehow correlated. That could be worrisome news for lot of folks though the specifics of that phrase are not made clear.

Among other things It made me wonder if my buddy C could be classified as such as well. She has a very busy schedule and few opportunities to meet anyone in real life bouncing between work, graduate school and a mean fitness regimen. Her strategy is quite interesting. She logs on to instant messenger services that a lot of dating sites offer not to mention the likes of Gmail, Yahoo and the like and leaves to do whatever she has to get done.

She is most often not even at home, let alone around her computer when the prospects ping her. When she comes back she checks to see who bit bait while she was out. She then responds to the ones that interest her and casts her line out the following day. C tells me there is no way she could graduate even with a B average from business school if she really hung around chatting online. This works out a lot better for her.

I think of her as a remote angler putting her fishing rod out into the shark infested online dating pool. Her system allows her to look engaged in the online dating game quite "avidly" when really she is disengaged. I am sure C is not alone in employing such time and effort saving devices in finding a partner. I think there is a business case for an online dating service aggregator like they have Indeed for job boards.

This would be your one stop shop for all online dating needs. If the aggregator could charge customers a reasonable fee to tap into the different sites all from one place making C's life quite uncomplicated. The service model should have the aggregator paying the individual sites according to actual usage based on who and what the customer is searching for. That should be fair for everyone in the equation. In the meanwhile, I have forwarded this story on to C so she knows to tread carefully as she sets out her fishing rod each day.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques