Dipping My Toes into Online Dating

I finally gave in! Last week, I dipped my toes into online dating.

Bouncing from much too old (Jeanni) to much too young (Shirley, Cathy), I have decided that it might be time to turn to tech for some help.

Certainly, San Francisco seems like the perfect city to do it in. Everybody that I know seems to have successfully found their significant other on OkCupid. Hell, I know somebody who has even gotten engaged from off of OkCupid, and they seem like a lovely couple. Any of my notions that online dating is just for hopeless 30+ year old loners, does not exist here. In fact, online dating seems to be the preferred method of dating in the city for all ages.

If you can't beat em, join em.

However, I haven't totally gotten on the OkCupid train. It is just too big of a step for me right now, since the profile is too long and it seems you have to aggressively message others in order to experience any success.

Instead, I have been messing with Tinder, a very shallow app where you are shown pictures of women located near you. All I have to do is swipe right to "Accept" and if the girl also accepts me then a match is made and we can begin messaging. I have had five matches so far, but have not messaged any of them. Partly because everybody I know that uses Tinder just messes around with it. My coworker told me Tinder is where he A/B tests his pick up lines. Tinder is probably not the best place to find a significant other, but it is still a great way to pass the time and it's a nice ego boost to see that there are girls that "like" me.

More seriously, I created a profile on CoffeeMeetsBagel.com, a dating site that has been making some noise in the startup community. The concept is simple, you get one match a day and either you like or pass on your match. If both of you like each other, then texts are sent and you can start having a conversation.  Hilariously, for my first match, I was given a guy! Turns out, while lazily filling out my profile I had selected  seeking a male. Setting it to seeking female meant that the next day I did not get a match due to a gender imbalance on the site. Since the initial mismatch, I've had two matches with girls, but needless to say, they went nowhere.

Maybe, I'll have better luck next week. Keep you all posted.

-muffinman

Resurrection

You might have thought LifeAfterARC was dead, and you would have been right. For a while, I did not think I would get back to writing about my personal life. I thought I had moved beyond it, this blog was a relic of a younger life. When you are grown up and  working 60+ hours a week and viewing everything not helping the bottom line as a waste of time, blogging just does not seem to make sense.

However, what I am realizing now is that the personal is inseparable from the professional. The lack of personal understanding is very negatively affecting my well being and as a result my work. I've tried to be the robot/model employee that just buries myself into work to stop feeling, but it has just resulted in part of me dying inside.

That is why I am going to resurrect the blog today, in the hopes it will also breathe new life into me.

In addition to actually taking the time to blog each week, there's going to be a few changes in the format. Posts will be shorter and more concise, as well focused around just one subject. Gone are the days of long posts covering multiple subject matters, I will just break those up into separate posts now. Long posts will be reserved for particularly drawn out and dramatic events.

-muffinman