A couple of months ago my friend Deanna* suggested I try a dating website her friends were using.

As most of you know, my previous online dating adventures haven’t ended well (see http://wp.me/pirqj-1m for the time I fled out the back door of a restaurant to escape my date). So I understandably reticent.

But Deanna* said her friends were actually scoring some good quality dates so I thought, “What the heck!”

I registered, drafted a few sentences for my profile, answered some questions and uploaded my photo.

The deed was done and I sat back to await contact from men who were ‘good quality dating material’.

The site automatically matches you with suitable partners. Well, that’s what they claim. I can’t say that I saw much evidence of it.

Within a day I’d received messages from a few men saying, “Hello!”

Well, sort of.

The messages were not so much “hello” as bad corny pick up lines and some really inappropriate comments.

Some of the highlights (and I use that term very loosely) were, “Hi queen, i think my eyes are stuck..cos i just can’t get em off you…” and “howdy there ma’am…how is thou doin?”

The lowlight was the man calling himself Tofu… who greeted me with “omg can I totally suck ur toes please…”

Ewwwww!!!

There were also approaches from men looking for polyamorous relationships. I have no idea what part of my profile indicated that I’d like to join their private harems.

And the things other men said they’d like to do on public transport were quite obscene.

There were messages from some men who appeared to be relatively normal. Donny* mentioned he needed a ‘sleep fan’ to sleep at night. But when I asked, “Wouldn’t that just give you a head cold all year round?” he didn’t respond.

I’m guessing I blew my chances by being a little cheeky (my sincere apologies to all the sleep fan devotees out there).

After a few weeks it seemed that Donny was the best of the lot.

There were other men who sent messages but it was clear from their profiles that we had little in common so I didn’t respond.

One of these guys, Mickey*, was only 24 years old. I didn’t respond because I’d made it clear that my preferred age group was 34+. I figured, why waste time for both of us and he clearly didn’t read my profile.

Anyway, evidently he got sick of waiting for a response or somehow knew that I’d deleted his message because, two days later Mickey sent me a one-word email. It just said, “bitc!h”.

I guess we know why he’s single.

I deactivated my profile the next day.

My score for quality dates was zero. But the site did provide me with some amusement, so it wasn’t a total waste of time.

My search for love continues…and no, you cannot suck my toes.