Steph Not Stephanie

Well friends and neighbours, it seems like lately everything’s coming up Milhouse Steph in the dating world!

A coworker gave me a heads up about a feature in this month’s Flare. While the article takes a bit of a dark turn, I will happily serve as the anecdotal lead (especially when the author calls me a ‘cute, curvy thirtysomething blogger’ – flattery will get you everywhere).

Shortly after that, I received possibly the best first message on Tinder ever:

Now they’re finding the blog before they find me. This bodes well for my traffic; the verdict is still out on what it means for my dating life.

I’ve also been doing a bit of a hesitant experiment of sorts on Match.com. I’ve had more than a few friends and supporters suggest one of the underlying issues is the quality of people on the free sites. The paywall on sites like Match and E-Harmony is supposed to keep out some of the riffraff. With this urging, I decided to give Match a full go, but fully thinking dating sites are dating sites and ready to get all ‘I told you so’ when it failed. My first few interactions supported my theory, with the usual inappropriate messages (crass or boring or both) from inappropriate people (age, distance, the usual suspects). The biggest difference I noticed was dudes pretending they wanted something more serious but still treating it like Tinder. One guy in particular kept insisting he was looking for a serious relationship that ‘starts in the bedroom.’ Oh, so we’ll get to know each other really well while boinking? If you can have that in-depth a conversation in the middle of sex, you’re doing it wrong. And to make it even better, I paid for these interactions.

I was about to tell my friends they owed me some money, when I received a comment on this Christmas photo:

This is the kind of shit I think is funny, so if you do too, chances are we’ll get along (if you like cats, even better). The same gent took my headline, ‘Talk nerdy to me,’ literally and sent me a message in binary. Swoon. We went for drinks last weekend, and there have been more clever messages on his part, and plans to get together again – as long I don’t fuck it up.

So while I’m not quite ready to fully endorse Match, 01000001 01110100 00100000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01100001 01101110 01111001 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100011 01101011 00100000 01110000 01101001 01100011 01110011 00101110.