It’s interesting getting feedback on internet dating from a man, and a player at that.

Which my friend Big Jeff totally is. He’s done this for years, at least since the days of Love@AOL. We used to sit around on slow days at work and browse women for him and JJ. And he’s such a dog; I remember one summer where he had a different girl up at the house every week, and sometimes more than one in a weekend. I think he’s still doing that, but I don’t think it’s all internet women. I think he’s gone through every single woman in every town that he DJs in.

And somehow, he rarely gets called on it. Maybe that’s because he’s either dating the young girls or women my age who are just after sex too, and don’t care that he dumps them. The younger women don’t seem to know how to stand up for themselves and give him hell for it, and the older ones don’t seem to care.

Yeah, he’s a dog, but he’s never dogged me. We’ve been close friends for years, and I’m just not in that “screw them and leave them” category. Not that I haven’t met my share of dogs, but this one is my friend and I like him.

I tell you what though, having a player’s perspective on dating is priceless. If I go down to the bar when he’s working (and I might tonight) he warns me off of some men. He knows who the other dogs are, see, and doesn’t want me getting involved with one of them. Possibly because he has to listen to me when I get my feelings hurt, but he does watch out for me.

I was picking his brain last night on the online thing. I wanted to know if, by making the first contact with a man, I come off as desperate. I’m not desperate, and my immediate goal is just to meet a fair number of people, but I don’t want the perception that I am. He says that most of his contacts actually come from women contacting him, so I guess I don’t need to worry about that. He also says that the men on Match are looking for models (aren’t they all though?) and pointed me towards MySpace, citing it as containing more “real people.”

So I went and looked, and oh my god, I don’t think so! That’s the one that’s clearly all about getting laid and is full of freaks with horrible graphics and women with their tits hanging out. He pointed out one guy that he knows who says he’s got around 20 women on the hook at any given time. I assume by “on the hook” he means talking to them online, but he could also mean that he’s screwing that many. Jeff would think that was something to brag about. I really don’t think I’ll be fitting in there.

So I guess I’ll stay on the one I’m on and try to sort the players from the normal guys. My friend with benefits recently popped up with a girlfriend and I think he met her at the same site, so I know there is the occasional normal guy browsing through there.

It does sort of bite to keep getting rejected by guys that are no more attractive than I am though. What the hell do these middle-aged, paunchy, balding men think they have that they can be so picky as to request only stick-thin, blue-eyed, blonde haired women? I’m not targeting the super hot guys here, just the average ones.

You really have to have a thick skin to do this sort of thing, and in this regard, mine is getting thicker by the minute because I really don’t have a whole lot of expectations invested in this project. If I meet someone, fine. If I don’t, then oh well. I’m just treating it like a project; sort of a hobby, I guess. And maybe some of the bad dates can make good journal fodder, except all I’ve gone on lately have been kind of meh dates. A little boring and not right for me but not truly horrible.

So I think that I’ll keep seeing the horseshoer, who calls a couple of times a week. If he tries to put the moves on me, I’ll probably have to drag out the “I’m not ready to date one of Cowboy’s friends yet” line because the more I think about it, the more sure I am on that particular point. At least not this particular friend anyway. But he’s fun and promised to take me riding up in the hills and I could use another friend to pal around with. If he doesn’t want to be that, that’s his call, but I don’t want more out of him.