lfFE ana SLYIE #, ex ly le Operation online boyfriend Because sometimes you can’t always get what you want By Sharon Miki can offer out there instead of playing coy games. After in person. With one week to Valentine’s Day, I’m sifting through plenty of messages, I’m hoping that cautiously optimistic that there are more than plenty of o I’ve been selling myself online for about a week;I _ this week I will find someone that I can actually meet creeps in the sea to fulfil my Valentine’s dreams. S signed up for www.plentyoffish.com and already I’m completely overwhelmed. Without actually setting my eyes on any suitors, there are apparently 33 men that want to meet me, seven that consider me their favourite, and 11 that have composed messages for me. While this online interest is definitely a pick-me-up (considering my real-life romantic progress this week consisted of a guy on the bus asking me for a quarter) it’s also very confusing. Who are these guys? Who do they think I am? Are any of them worth wasting a nickel’s worth of mascara and a push-up bra? The first thing that you will learn upon setting up an online dating profile is that whether or not you have a “type” there is a specific “type” that is into you that you may not have been aware of. For me, it seems that 90 per cent of the men interested in me fall into the very specific demographic of beefy blonde Caucasian Catholic stoners in their mid-to-late-thirties. Now, I’ve tried dating older guys in the past to little avail (they tended to want serious things like marriage and children that do not appeal to me). Kh The difference here, I think, is that my profile specifically states what I’m looking for and what I’m not. Potential lovers can easily read that I’m not interested in being their baby mama. So, thanks to Plenty of Fish, I now see that I might have written off an entire group of potential Sharon- worshipers prematurely and that casting a wider, yet more targeted net might reel in more delicious fish. Inversely, the men that have contacted me suggest to me that I might not know myself as well as I think I do. EXPLORE YOUR OPTIONS AT BCIT’S Many of the messages I’ve been sent have been focused on PROGRAM EXPO IN COQUITLAM guys wanting to take me on athletic or adventurous dates: hiking up mountains, riding bikes through forests, bungee- USC ager Lg jumping off of rickety bridges, etc. Similarly, many of these eel) guys have also stressed how important it is to them that their potential girlfriend maintains and enjoys a state of Executive Plaza Hotel and Conference Centre optimum physical fitness. Since I spend the majority of my 405 North Road, Coquitlam time hunched over a computer while eating gummy bears, I thought this was kind of weird. Then it hit me; when filling out my profile, I had thoughtlessly mentioned that Register now at bcit.ca I am a former gymnast and cheerleader. Though I haven’t tumbled in years, gymnastics and cheerleading was a big (guy-friendly) part of my life for a long time. Confronted with the textual evidence from the POF guys, I now see that the version of myself that I’ve been presenting to the dating pool might be a bit outdated, and that might be part of the reason I’ve been so unsuccessful as of late. Online dating profiles, while somewhat awkward, are useful tools in teaching us to put what we want and 8 ies (elt eee geil Get if right.