Nerves of Steel

I’ll tell you something about this Match.com lark – it certainly separates the men from the boys. You also need to have nerves of steel and a mighty determination not to have your hopes and dreams destroyed by the vicious jostling that goes on.

I usually only contact one person at a time on Match.com so that if they respond in a positive manner I can concentrate my efforts on the one person – plus I won’t get their names mixed up. I can only assume that the ladies don’t adhere to this rule – plus they can cherry pick from the many hundreds of blokes that must contact them.

So, breaking my own golden rule I decided to contact five people in one go. Mind you, there was another reason for this - I need to contact five people a month in order to qualify for the additional six months free membership if I don't succeed after the six-month subscription (and I fear I’m going to need them too!).

As usual, I spent an absolute age searching through the members in my area and finding five people of interest – two of them without pictures. So, I duly sent off some carefully crafted messages and then waited with crossed fingers for my inbox to be flooded with replies from the ladies in question.

Alas, I fell at the first fence with two of them – with no response received – whilst the other three did actually respond with a few brief sentences (experience has now told me that this is always a bad sign) wanting to know a bit more about me.

I felt pretty awkward talking to three people at once, but I needn’t have worried, as two out of three never bothered responding back to my replies. That left one person – and someone without a picture too - but by not having a picture it meant that rather than having pre-judged someone on their appearance, I could instead concentrate on their personality.

Fortunately, they offered to send some pictures – of which they are very nice – with the promise to email again later, sighting some computer problems, and supposedly using a friends PC until hers was fixed. However, with no reply or email after three days, and yet with activity on Match.com, it looks like I’ve failed that ultimate of judgement tests - the “friends test”.

Ordinarily, I’d be patient and wait – after all there’s always an explanation, but Match.com is increasingly hardening my attitude to such things and I fear I’m starting to lose my “nice guy” personality and outlook. However, I can’t help wondering whether this is actually going to be more help than hindrance. After all, nice guys always seem to finish last.