Online Dating For Pretentious Weirdos
Who says the socially handicapped can’t be elitist, too?
Spend 10 minutes browsing “elite” dating sites like DateSmartPeople, SquareDating and GoodGenes, and you get the feeling you’ve stumbled into a sinister breeding experiment. “Your dating options shouldn’t be limited because you’re an intelligent and well-educated single, or are looking for one,” one site tells you. Ohhhh, so that‘s why I can’t get a date! I’m too smart. Also, I can’t play basketball because I’m too tall.
The euphemisms are equally precious: You’re not a snob, you’re a “discerning single.” It’s not a dating service, it’s an “introduction network.” We imagine there’s no such thing as sex in this world, only “amorous networking.” Hot!
The question here isn’t, “Who the hell would sign up for this?” Plenty of students already treat college like marital windowshopping (Dartmouth, Hillel, we’re looking at you) so it makes sense that the stragglers would need somewhere to convene. The question is, “Who the hell would want to date the kind of person who would sign up for this?” Because the only thing worse than an online weirdo is a pretentious online weirdo. (“What are you wearing?” “Just my monocle.”) Still, you gotta hand it to these sites for tearing down all populist pretense and playing to the unholy terror among some students that someday, God forbid, they might have to date outside their IQ percentile (read: tax bracket).
