Strange Bedfellows
Which is the right internet dating site, if any, for you? To find that out-or really mostly just to meet women-I spent several months trying out a number of dating sites. This experience confirms what the sites' advertising suggests: They're vastly different from one another and while there many not be a right one for you, there's bound to be a wrong one. Maybe many.
Over the next few weeks, we'll go through eight; this week it's Nerve, the site for Nerve.com as well as for The Onion, Salon.com and approximately two hundred other publications.
If you want to meet someone of the opposite sex who's into Nabokov and is on medication, you've come to the right place. Through Nerve I found myself lying in bed on just my second date with a nude University of Chicago undergrad literally half my age who works part-time as a hostess at a swinger's club. Still lying in bed, but with her half-inch thick glasses placed back on the bridge of her nose she told me about her recurrent desire to kill herself and her love of de Sade's novels.
Also through Nerve I encountered a bipolar waitress, a stunning singer from Oklahoma whose parents had twelve marriages between them, and I exchanged notes with a bond-trader who described herself as "a spanking virgin."
Two brothers I know ended up going out with separate webcam girls, each unaware that the other had done so. One of the girls was having all the sex she could as some sort of field experiment. (Her site, by the way, is at wondergirl.org.)
A good indication of the men on the site is given by the admonition many of the women place on their profiles: Please don't send photos of your penis.
At least one woman I know was assaulted by a man she met on the site. In her sleep.
Many Nerve members are bright, interesting and intellectual. A fair number are good-looking as well. Most also appear to be sexually accessible. The friend who first suggested online dating to me, recommending Nerve in particular, is a very handsome, witty guy who tends to pursue a Clintonian quantity not quality approach to sex. For someone like him, Nerve is a wonderful site.
But for those looking for something lasting it may not be the right watering hole. Because Nerve offers members the choice of seeking a mate for "play" (i.e. casual sex) and "discreet" encounters, including ones between people currently "in a relationship", the sleaze factor is high.
Another problem is that profile pictures come up so small that you have to actually click on every vaguely presentable-looking snapshot to enlarge the person's photo and get a clue whether they might actually be prepossessing. This problem is compounded by the slowness of the site's searches. The site claims that it will soon be changing its format and updating its technology, which is overdue.
On the plus side, the site doesn't offer canned responses to profile questions of the "I love puppy dogs and roses" variety that many other sites feature. Nerve members have to speak for themselves. Since the members tend on average to be a bit stronger upstairs, this means that more than a few of the profiles are not only amusing, but intentionally so-a real virtue if you're scanning through a good number of them.
What's more, because the site charges only for each note sent off to a given member and not a monthly fee, it may be considerably cheaper for most of its users than other sites. Of course, that also means if you're being blown off 99% of the time, it'll be even more expensive.
Politically, members are often doctrinaire left-wingers. ("This Bush isn't for?") However, like all internet sites, it also has a goodly number of Ayn Rand fans on it. And once in a blue moon, to be sure, they end up in bed together, since sex, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows. -Jonathan Leaf