Meeting Mr or Miss Right isn’t easy. Silly little details – shyness, extreme body odour, dressing like a security guard from Star Trek or carrying bits of your murdered ex-partner around with you in a bin bag – often prevent people from getting to know the real you. If only they could look beyond that and see your sparkling personality! Thanks to online dating, they can.
Online dating is easy: just sign up and then lie, lie, lie. You may spend your days watching Star Trek re-runs and pretending to be Captain Kirk while stuffing your face with Wotsits, but online you’ll say you love long romantic walks, trips to the theatre and teaching cats to play the banjo. Inches – and in some cases, several feet – are magically added to your height, multiple zeroes appear on the end of your salary, and your occupation becomes the job you’d like to do rather than the one you actually do.
And none of this matters, because the people you meet are all lying too – but one thing you can’t really fake is your personality, and that really is something special. Before long you’re chatting with someone who seems to be a soulmate – smart, funny, available, and as interested in you as you are in them. So why not meet?
And you do, and that’s when the wheels fall off the love bus. They’re shy. They’re wearing a red Lycra jumper. There’s a definite whiff of cheese. And they’re carrying something in a bin bag.
[Originally published in Official Windows Vista magazine. Their budget didn’t stretch to the real Guy Browning, heh]
Comments
0 responses to “From the archives: Everything you need to know about online dating”
Haven’t read any Guy Browning in ages. Where does he ply his trade these days? Are his books any good?
He’s still doing the Guardian on a saturday, and I’m sure there’s another book out – last one I got was Office Politics, which was great. I think he does a fair bit of media work too (ie, visiting and talking).
If you haven’t read him, George Saunders – Browning’s fellow Saturday headcase – is a fantastic writer. Civilwarland in Bad Decline (stories) and The Brain Dead Megaphone (journalism) are both superb. Which reminds me, I keep meaning to order everything else he’s ever written. Off to Amazon I go…
Cheers :)