
Typical profile from a dating site:
‘i am complex and intresting and like foppish indie bands that you have never heard of. i am a delicate balance of conflicting emotions, demanding, loving, at times wistful, sensitive, poetic, philosophical, sensual. i’m a lover, artist, friend, warrior, poet, mystic. i am 14 years old and avoiding my gcse coursework.’
It is reading men’s profiles that I find the most intresting and at the same time repellent. Perhaps I am jellus but I find myself raising an eyebrow in mocking approbation when I read about how they are doing a PhD at the Institute of Extreme Cleverness, play the drums in a trendy rock band, write award-winning TV shows, sell their watercolours through a small privately owned gallery, and are basically immeasurably sophistercated, rich and successful. I cannot help but add sarcastically in parentheses, ‘yet mysteriously I do not have a girlfriend’.
I think if it was a woman I would be far more attracted to someone who said ‘I am a bit confused and mixed up and perpetually feel as though life is an exam that I’ve forgotten to revise for, I lead a semblance of a normal existence but underneath the cool exterior I am hiding under the duvet chain-smoking, glugging cold saké out of a beaker and putting on make-up as a hysterical displacement activity’.
A little vulnerability is appealing. It is no good saying that you are a cross between Einstein and Paul Gauguin as we will assume you are either a fantasist or a narcissist.