The Heart of the Matter

One good thing about my being busy at work on the Project is that I've been too busy to be down during the holidays that occur from Thanksgiving to Easter. I won't go into the details why I'm normally not filled with joy at this time of the year. Suffice it to say that my life's extremely hectic this year, which means that I've been too tired to be filled with Un-Joy.

Despite the fact I've got more stress in my life, that's a good thing. I will, however, make an exception for today, Valentines Day.

I was once a fan of Valentines Day when I was a child. As I've gotten older, I've become increasingly disenchanted with the holiday.

Partly, it's because I believe it's grown to be just another commercial holiday. Mostly, it's because I'm a single guy who has for years had the idea that as long as I live in Mississippi, my romantic life will be nothing but misbegotten misery.

Speaking of which, it's been a while since I've provided an update on my match.com travails. Sorry, TD, no hate e-mail this time.

I still get a good number of responses for someone who doesn't have a photo on his match.com profile. It helps that I've been creative and humorous. I am a bit peeved at match.com though, I used anal-retentive to describe myself at one point in my profile. Now, it's no longer acceptable. Apparently it got caught by match.com censors, and so I have to come up with an alternative synonym. Sadly, none of the synonyms have that same je ne suis quoi.

As far as how things are going currently are concerned, I'd gotten along well with a respondent, but she's decided to go in another direction. C'est la vie. Communications with one correspondent have progressed to the "let's exchange emails" stage. However, another respondent is just content to send emails through match.com. She just wants to talk and appears uninterested in going to the email exchange stage even though she's accidentally given me her email address and I responded with mine. Apparently, she doesn't respond to subtlety, which isn't a good sign. Sooner or later, one of us will accidentally "forget" to respond to an email & there will be no more communication. I'd guess that would happen sometime this week. I'm surprised it's not happened already.

Surprisingly, I've gotten a lot of responses from women looking only for Christian men-- even though I'm not the type of guy they would normally prefer. The six regular readers of my blog might just recall my previous mention of my religious status. Anyway, it's gotten to the point that I had to create a template for responding to women looking for only Christian guys. It saves me a lot of time.

What does match.com have to do with Valentines Day, you may wonder? At the moment, the answer is: Not much at all, and that's the heart of the matter. As far as I'm concerned, looking for love and in Mississippi particularly is like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack. I'm looking for love in all the wrong places, and unfortunately, the right places are also very much wrong for me.