E-Unharmonious

The beer actually helped. I finished my dating resume and paid for the membership. Got my first matches.

Oh boy.

There is a reason these people are single. I wonder if they are saying the same thing about me.

First on my list of grievances are the pictures.

I went to great lengths to put the right pictures out there. My profile picture is one that Charlotte referred to as "stunning." (Which I guess is better than "shocking.") I made sure I put a photo of myself with each of my children. Photos that deliver the message that I am a mother, a mother of exactly one boy and one girl, that we do fun things together and Mom still manages to be consistently inoffensive in her appearance. I was careful to refrain from posting any picture, no matter how flattering of me, with any man from any stage of my life, no matter how long dead the stage has been. I put pictures of me engaged in fun activities - boating, on the boulders on Arizona, attending a football party, or hugging the pro baseball team mascot. I skipped over the ones (again, no matter how flattering) of me holding an adorable kitten or a gurgling and cooing baby. I also make sure that my pictures show various hair lengths but consistent dress size, if you know what I mean.

Some men make no such effort.

Some men post no picture at all. What??? If you can't make the effort to find or take one photo of yourself that means one of two things: You are either really lazy or have a face that even makes your mother cringe.

And if all of your photos are either selfies taken in the mirror with the phone obstructing the view or have been all taken on the same day because you are wearing the same outfit in all 10 of them, you have had an abysmally mundane life that was not worth committing to pictures. I will forgive a house fire in which all memorabilia was destroyed, but not much beyond that.

And if you can not be discriminating enough to exclude the grossly unflattering, wildly inappropriate, hideously attired and groomed shots, you are either too dumb to date or have no good friends to talk you out of selecting those photos.

And if you don't have the good sense not to show a really filthy house in the background, you don't need a date. You need a maid and a smack in the face.

If you've cleared the picture hurdle, let's move onto orientation to detail.

Misspellings are unacceptable. Particularly in your own first name.

When filling in the data section one seems like a boob if he fills in the "city" section with "Boston MA," and then the "state" section a second later with MA. Boston, MAMA may as well read "Boston, Idiot." Small detail, but come on. Life is in the details.

And if you do not have the integrity to use your name (only your first name is published) and have to resort to a nickname, you do not have the integrity to be interacting with people. Any people. And names like "Serendipity" make you seem like a kook. And "kook" trumps "no integrity" so it's a lose-lose situation for you. Especially if you misspell "Serendipity."

I decide to wait for Mick and Terry to arrive. They will help me zero in on why on Earth I would have been matched to such a bottomless pit of undatable losers. In the mean time, I file through the profiles, cringing and laughing and almost crying again.