A little more than three weeks ago I announced Operation Brute Force.  It was my plan to wade through the dozens of pages of profiles on Match.com for different search criteria.  I am here to provide a progress report.

Let’s save some time and put the summary right up front.  There has been no progress.

Now I will go into some detail.  There are four queries that I pay attention to on Match.  The first two are the Mutual Match and the Reverse Match.  In a nutshell, the Mutual Match results are women who the computer thinks would appeal to me and vice versa.  The Reverse Match results are women who are looking for someone with my qualities, but I may not necessarily like them.  One query I put together is for women who do not drink.  I’d prefer to be with someone who does not drink because I don’t drink either.  The other query I made is called “Wide Net” because it basically casts a wide net.  In that query I am pretty ambivalent about most criteria except for religion, ethnicity, and smoking, so a wide variety of results are returned.

Now for some numbers.  My profile has been viewed 45 times.  You can see the women who have viewed you.  In my case, only six women are shown as having viewed me.  That makes me wonder if these women have viewed me multiple times or if Match just isn’t reporting everyone who has viewed me.  Most are OK-looking to kinda nice-looking.  Some were definitely bow-wows and I chose to remove their profiles from view.  No real hotties either.

I did get one wink.  I wrote the girl back and she took a while to get back to me.  I then wrote her back and it took another week to hear back.  I got a nice message and she turned out to be an interesting girl.  However, she was an animal lover.  I cannot have that because I am allergic to furry things.  I told the girl I found her interesting, but I was upfront about how I couldn’t share in her passion for animals.  I didn’t hear from her again.  She didn’t have a photo posted and didn’t list a body type either, so that was another potential issue.  There does have to be at least some physical attraction.

As for my flirtations, I have e-mailed seven women (including the aforementioned) and winked at five women.  Besides the one gal who wrote me a couple times, I haven’t had any responses.  This is disconcerting for a couple reasons.  I do not know if these women just didn’t find me appealing or if they simply could not write back because they have free Match accounts.  I wish there was an icon or something that would say if a girl had a paid account.  So I have done my duty in contacting women to show my interest.

I am also proud, and somewhat dismayed, to report that I have gone through all the pages of results for my queries.  I looked at all 50 pages of results for both the Mutual and Reverse Match queries.  I also went through the six pages of No Drink results.  I only went through about 20 pages of the Wide Net results because I realised halfway through that I was going through profiles that hadn’t been active in over three weeks.  An inactive member would be unlikely to respond to a wink or e-mail.

This looks like it will be a failed experiment.  I checked out dozens of women and only found one dozen who appeared to have what I am looking for.  For the balance of my Match membership (another two months) I will continue to look at the new members who pop up for each of my queries.  I will also periodically re-examine the query results and give some women a second look or perhaps a first look if I skipped over them before.

So I’m having a hard time finding a woman who seems like a good choice for the long haul, and I might not be attractive enough to entice a lady.  I have tweaked my profile several times and added more photos of myself.  Nobody can say I didn’t make a decent effort at online dating.

My problem is that I am very quick to close a woman’s profile.  If I see anything that indicates they like to go out drinking or to a bar for fun, they’re out of contention.  Bars and booze are not my ideas of fun, so if we can’t agree on what’s fun, we won’t get along.  If she wants to go to a bar, she’ll have to go without me, and I don’t think a girl would be cool with always having to leave her boyfriend behind.  My anti-alcohol stance really kills my dating prospects.  I don’t mind much if a girl drinks, but my trouble is in finding someone who would be cool with me not wanting to set foot in a bar.  Women in their 20s have this obsession with bars, dancing, the “Cubbies,” coffee (I don’t drink coffee either), and far-flung vacations.  I don’t share such interests.

What’s next?

I need a plan besides continuing to check on Match while my subscription is still active.  I was thinking about joining a bowling league or some sort of park district volleyball team.  I enjoy both sports but haven’t played either in years.  Bowling is an unlikely source of a mate because bowling chicks tend to be homely beer swillers.  Or at least that’s the stereotype.  I have met lots of volleyball hotties in the public capacity of my job, but my appeal to attractive women has historically been limited.  I have to continue coming up with ideas for meeting women.  I’m down with spending the rest of my life alone (28 years down, what’s another 30-40 years?) but I’d rather not go down that road.