My So-called Sex Life
Number 3: Vegetarianism
"I'm looking for a nice, normal, interesting girl with a good sense of humour who isn't neurotic, pathologically insecure, obsessed with the size of her arse, a singer, a thesp, a rower, a smoker or a vegetarian. If this is you, and you are single, I don't believe you exist."
Thus reads my advert on Oxford Romance. If, like me, you have more spare time than self-respect, you've probably seen it. And before we go any further, for the benefit of the community at large, I'd like to clear up the origins of my name, which is the same there as here. It does not mean I am a gibbering, maniacal sex addict who grinds against any conveniently smooth (or bumpy) surface like an adolescent rabbit on heat, as a number of you seem to think. It is a reference to the great Gershwin jazz standard, "S'Wonderful". If they can have s'wonderful, s'marvellous and s'paradise, I don't see why I can't have s'excellent. And I think omitting the apostrophe is a small price to pay for a libidinous pun.
So what exactly is the point of this site? For one thing, I've learned a lot about keeping a girl's interest. Asking how a girl's doing, claiming to meet all her specifications or getting in too early (so to speak) with the smut are all miserable strategies.
And girls clearly don't regard it as being in any way contingent on them to keep the conversation going; after you open the channels of conversation, if you don't include a question of some kind in each message, you don't get an answer. I find this almost as irritating an attitude on the internet as in real life. Any girl who expects a man to make all the effort in conversation doesn't deserve to have a single door held open for her, ever. And if bought a drink she should be invoiced for it the next day.
Include VAT.
I've also learned, incidentally, that Oxford is crawling with vegetarian rowers. This is either a sad reflection on the demographics of the student population, or an affirmation that most people feel as I do about early-rising health freaks, which is why they're all still single and sitting in front of their computers. I suspect the latter, in which case I recommend telling the silly little cox exactly what to do with their rudder and finding the nearest kebab van.
So what about the real point of the site - ostensibly - as a matchmaking service? Well, it's not done me any good. I did have a look at the 'testimonials' page, and at first was quite impressed by the heart-warming succession of phrases such as: "I thought every man in Oxford was a syphilitic leprechaun until I met Hunkytory." Then, suddenly, it stopped. Last year, there were 13 testimonials (of which one was a somewhat bizarre request from a user who wanted to be blocked from the site to kick his addiction - "every time I delete an account I start all over again in a matter of days"). It doesn't take (very) long to work out that even if there were, say, three more successes for every one reported, this means you had slightly less than a 10 per cent chance of finding a partner in 2003, based on the current number of users (a whopping 1022).
A 10 per cent probability over a whole year - you'd have better odds than that trying to pick up girls in a hardware museum.
Sadly, with one or two notable exceptions, the basic assumption that people on there are those not attractive enough to get a date any other way may well be a fair one. Perhaps I've just been unlucky. Perhaps the real function of the site is as a sort of clearing system, matching up what's left over after all the desirable placements have been taken. But for anyone with as many criteria as me, I fear it's a lost cause.
Apologies for failing to deliver on last week's promise of an article on the deleterious culture of "don't-call-ism". He blames his editors, with no justification whatsoever (absolutely none - Ed). It will appear next week.
29th Jan 2004