What I learned from this experiment is that if you’re a woman, and you’re on a dating site for more than twenty-four hours, you’re awesome. Period. I admire your patience and resilience. I wish you the best of luck in finding exactly what you’re looking for and getting out of there as quickly as possible. I’m sorry to all the women I’ve ever been rude to on any of the dating websites I’ve used. I used to see it the other way around. I always wondered why women were so rude, not understanding what they were going through, not being able to comprehend just how many messages a lot of women receive on dating sites. It’s too much. It’s overwhelming. Now I understand why they never responded. Now I understand how I could take so much time to write a thoughtful, friendly message only to not get a response. I had no idea. NO IDEA what it’s like for women on a dating site. As far as I can recall, as a man I’ve only been contacted by three or four women in all these years of being active on these two free sites. It was completely incomprehensible for me to imagine getting 108 messages in one day. Well beyond any reasonable random number I might have guessed ahead of time. I often wonder how many unique messages I’d receive from men if I’d keep the profile open for a week. Or a month. If I received 108 messages in one day, how many men would message me in a month? At the twenty-fourth hour mark, I deleted the profile permanently. I decided I didn’t want to go any further. I’d done what I set out to do. This whole project made me sick to my stomach. Not just to hear all the things the 108 men were saying to me, but mostly because of what I was doing. It was incredibly difficult and exhausting to handle twelve straight hours of being shady, dishonest, and deceitful to 108 different strangers. The whole catfishing experience made me feel like a creepy, weird, pedophilic, desperate stalker…and most of the men who contacted me gave me that vibe as well…like a heavy, thick fog of desperation and vitriol. With a drizzle of perversion mixed in. I didn’t need to try to play the role of the woman on a dating site, it hit me like a ton of bricks within a few hours of creating that profile. I sunk right into it. It was not pleasant at all. Made me sick to my stomach. It helped that most of what I said was true to me as a person (where I was born, The Walking Dead, my love for animals, etc.) but my only saving grace was my female avatar being a radical vegan. Statistically speaking, maybe one or two of the guys who messaged me were vegan, so that gave me a pretty good reason for these guys to not want me, but it was still like trying to swim in a pool filled with piranha. I owe an apology to every woman who’s ever been on a dating site. And women everywhere.
