Now that one of my courses are over, and my mom has gone back to Liberia, I suddenly find myself with bucketloads of time that I don’t know what to do with. For the first time since I started my master’s program, I actually have nights off. It’s not that the course that I’m taking now is easy, it’s just, right now we’re doing aerial photo interpretation and mapping, and once I leave campus, there isn’t anything more I can do. The software and the data is at university and here I am, at home, rolling my thumbs.
This is what I’ve been waiting for. Having free time. But now that I have it, I seem to lack the ability to handle it. My thoughts start going in circles, I have to stop myself from sending weird text messages to people that really don’t deserve to be harassed by me, I have nightmares. So, I decided I have to put my energy into something. And for some reason, that led me into putting up a profile on an internet dating site.
Honestly, I don’t know how I ended up here. I am single, but it’s not as if I’m looking for something actively right now, I’m quite casual about these things, and the internet is really not the place I think I would find someone anyway. But at a dinner last week, some of my friends were having so fun looking at other people’s profiles, messaging with them and it seemed like an interesting thing to do. Like an experiment, kind of. Something to do just for fun.
But now I’m sitting here and am actually feeling quite sick. The incredible superficiality of the thing. You fill in lists about your personality, looks, job, political opinions and interests, and write a text with max 2000 letters, upload a photo, and then people start writing messages to you. As if a person can be captured in a list of single word statements. You get notified when someone has visited your profile, and you can even see how many times they’ve clicked on it. It makes me feel stressed. It is like some kind of meat market and there is no casuality about it what so ever. It’s giving me performance anxiety already, and I haven’t even started using it yet.
Well. Let’s see what happens with it. Maybe I’ll get used to the transparency of it all. I also changed the status of my couch on Couchsurfing to maybe available again, so the couch requests are going to start dropping in soon too. I am pretty sure I will get more out of that, life experience-wise, than my new internet dating profile. But we’ll see. Testing new things is always beneficial.
Katja Malmborg 