LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

I’ve noticed lately that a wide variety of informational, or networking sites such as Meta, Instagram, Linked-in, even Quora, and Reddit, where people go to read other people’s work, publish their own and share their opinions, have become something akin to online dating sites.

The whole thing is a bit of an eye-opener. Why exactly is it that people these days think every site must also be good for finding a romantic partner? After all, national, professional, non-dating sites have none of the cute, personal features to even be effective dating spaces. Is it due to the wholesale adoption of online dating platforms, making it a common way to discover potential partners, and leading to the perception that many online spaces can now also be implicitly used for dating? Or perhaps people want to avoid the feeling they’re on a dating app and favor a more organic way to meet someone through a shared profession, interest, or hobby?

Take a site like Substack. Its raison d’etre is to provide an outlet for writers and readers interested in their work. Yet, there seem to be a lot of men who have signed up for the platform, do no posting but instead troll for dates by messaging people like me.

(I’ve also had a myriad of young naked women in porn pose following me, too, so as Miss Marple would say, it’s all very ecumenical, if startlingly creepy.)

I deliberately did not post a picture on my Substack profile for this very reason. Photos evoke a response and not always the one you wanted.

Recently I had someone purporting to be Jason Statham, the actor, with a true Statham photo, messaging me. “Hi, I liked your article,” he wrote.

Me: Why are you pretending to be the actor, Jason Statham?

Him: I don’t understand what you are saying.

Hilarious.

Another wrote saying he liked one of my articles and thought I’d be interesting to chat with. Then he asked me what my marital state was. Then I said, “You do know that this is not a dating site, right?” Then he said he just wanted to be friendly. Which included sending him a photo of me at the gym.

What’s going on? Has the internet become one big singles bar? Another symptom of our increasingly border-less society where no one stays in their lane?

Or is it just that everyone everywhere all at once is looking for love?

If so, I hope they find it. On a dating site.

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