I come from a rather conservative small town, where the rednecks are kings and the hockey players are gods. I never really fit in there, and this means that dating was always difficult. I am a geek, and I have never been anything else. I was always small, so hockey was never my thing. I am allergic to horses, so joining the redneck crowd would have been uncomfortable, if not impossible. What I am trying to say is that there were very few social avenues for dating. In order to meet girls, I had to pretend to be somebody I wasn't. I had to go to the bar and attempt to behave in what I thought might be an attractive manner. As to what that manner might be I could only guess. As far as I could tell, good shoes and self confidence were part of it, but my knowledge ended there. I got lucky a few times, but nothing ever really stuck. Unsurprising, really.

I'm a little bit older than most of the internet generation, so it took me a little while to catch onto the possibilities of online dating. It struck me as a bottom-of-the-barrel sort of option. Nothing could be further from the truth. Online dating is the key to escaping small-town social conformity. A strange person like me, in a bar containing a few hundred people, is likely to be the only one of his type. A strange person like me in an online dating site containing thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people is going to find that he is part of a group that has something in common with him. It may be a small group, but I can tell you that a small group is infinitely preferable to no group at all.

This is why I love online dating: because it provides me a larger population of people to choose from, and with a larger population, I have a greater chance of meeting someone like me.