On Internet Dating

Internet dating is a form of torture invented by the devil.

Amended: May 03, 2008.

Think of your best friends and the qualities that make them your favorite people. If you made a list of elements you were looking for in a best friend, would you, in any way, no matter how specific, careful, or imaginative, be able to conjure up these wonderful people from a shopping list? Would you have picked them from a dossier in which they'd identified the parts of themselves they wished to brag about while humbly missing mention of key quirks? Would they have posted the qualities they may not even be aware of but which charm you or challenge your growth, make you love them all the more, and make you a better person for knowing them?

Would your favorite past romances have caught you with a snapshot?

Could you have ever contrived the unlikely circumstances that led you to falling in love in the first place?

Can you actually plan your own favorite best ever bona fide surprise?!

Thesis stated, who else but Beelzebub could tease a society into thinking it could find true love via approvals and denials of assessments of inventories of evaluative criteria? Yes, yes, a preacher from the Midwest and a dozen or so savvy business teams could and do. Oh how rude of me to demonize them, perhaps they know something about a certain elemental personality type within the population for whom ticking off lists is romantic rapture - for these few (and I must admit I know three couples who discovered each other this way) the statistics bare this out as a worthwhile business enterprise with profit margins significant enough to make the venture worthwhile to capital investors across the board.

BUT for those whose desire is for the wondrous surprise of sun-kissed windswept flourishing joie de' vivre (et j'en sais quois!), romance, love, laughter bliss my heart my soul is home - what magic I never knew - for this type to turn the gift of romance over to the devices of conscious selection and measured critical evaluation, every befuddling encounter with an oddball causes a piece of the soul to die trying, and this, my friends and loved ones, is indeed, a form of torture.

N'est pas?