Moving Forward

On the advice of a friend, I'm giving this eHarmony thing a go.

I've tried Internet Dating before, about six or seven years ago. By and large, I found it to be the fastest and most convenient way to meet plenty of people you'd never want to meet. There are those that don't know why they're there, there are those who are merely looking to hook up for sex (including, quite scarily, an old schoolfriend... though, to be fair, she was also looking for a dad for her son, just going about it in entirely the wrong way), there are those who seem to be performing some kind of social experiment (I saw two largely identical profiles that had used the same photo of Jessica Alba, but one had heavy makeup Photoshopped on), and there are those who are clearly just looking to replace their ex with a clone (one even going so far as to specify which brand of aftershave a prospective suitor should use).

eHarmony purports to be something different... all that advertising guff about matching folks based on values and intellect. Certainly, their signup procedure includes some fairly detailed psychometric profiling... and, while I tend to be sceptical of these things, the results were certainly quite impressive in my case. It's almost tempting to ask friends and family to try it themselves, just to see how their profiles turn out. It is sometimes said that these profiles are essentially middle-ground generalisations, true of just about anyone... but this one seems to be something more.

I'm not sure it'll go anywhere... And I have yet to upload any photos (largely because I have virtually none available - while I'm a fairly keen photographer (particularly when it comes to making 3D photos), I'm not keen on being the subject), which seems to be quite an important part of the process.

Then again, I'm not putting all my eggs in one basket... One of my ex-colleagues offered to play matchmaker for me a few weeks before I was made redundant, and I'm hoping to take her up on that offer, in the spirit of Not Dismissing Out Of Hand That Which I Do Not Believe Will Work. And, hey, maybe next time a woman serving me in a shop looks at me a certain way, and says or does something that's not entirely related to the sale at hand, I'll pay a bit more attention and do something about it.

Stranger things have happened, I'm sure... Just don't ask for an example.

Thing is, I often refer to myself (technically for reasons of comedy rather than veracity) as a Bitch Magnet... I have tended, historically, to attract the attention of those who are in some way inherently unstable, because I give the impression of great stability in and of myself. Unfortunately, I can't be a crutch the whole time... eventually it becomes too much and my own stability becomes jeopardised. In recent years, though, and by learning the hard way, I've been able to more easily identify the signs of instability in others... so, were I to become involved, it would be because I chose to become involved, rather than because I've missed the warning signs.

The question, then, becomes "am I the magnet, or the lump of unrefined iron?"

Only time will tell...

Or not, because I'm also consciously deciding not to become involved with anyone who's obviously unstable. What I need - what I'm hoping to get out of eHarmony, matchmaking friends, or my own sluggish efforts - is someone who is independently stable, knows who they are and what they want in life, and who is compatible with me in those ways.

A capacity for tolerating a toy-collecting, sci-fi, horror and videogame geek would be beneficial...