Soulmates

Each Saturday in the Guardian Guide there is a section of personal ads. This section also features two 'Soulmates of the week'. These are excerpts from the profiles of people on the Guardian's online-dating site. Here's a selection of them from the last few weeks (click on the images to enlarge them; Blogspot seems to have its own ideas about how big I want images to be).




Read them? Good. Did you notice anything, something that they had in common? Exactly! "They all seem like cunts." Couldn't have put it better myself.

Someone is choosing these people each week. It might be that this person is performing a practical joke and the hilarious resolution is yet to be delivered. More simply, they might be making a statement to regular readers – Online Dating: sail the boundless ocean of banality, electronically meet a thousand 'outgoing' people who are also 'a bit introvert' and like nothing better than to have 'a few beers and a few laughs with friends in the pub'. Wit and charm will be but a distant memory as you discover shared passions such as 'going to restaurants or the cinema sometimes'.

To join the ranks of a group of insecure, romantically unsuccessful, boring people would be scary. I imagine that they would hide behind the arcane language of early twenty-first century, codified, courtship practice. Knowing references to phenomena such as 'the third date' would abound. I seem to remember that on Friends the third date was known as 'the fuck date'. This strikes me as a singularly terrifying prospect. First of all, you will need to choose a set of clothes that are every bit as clean and appropriate as the clothes that you wore on the first two dates but, crucially, are not the same clothes. It may be that you have to resort to buying entirely new clothes. In many ways this evening's meeting will be the culmination of several hours work in various date-venues over the past few weeks displaying the most socially-acceptable aspects of your tightly-corseted personality. Devil may care post-nightclub sex is not on the cards; this is the test drive for, the ominous-sounding, LTR. Candidates will be assessed on: the size and shape of their bodies; the arrangement and relative size of their facial features; their choice of shirt; the number of buttons that have been done up on that shirt; the tenor of their voice; method of eating asparagus; the co-ordination manifest in their choice of shirt, socks and shoes; annual income; judgement of whether or not I am the sort of girl who thinks that you should pay; competence of tipping/giving-orgasms.

And yet there is still hope. In January, the Guardian published a selection of personal ads from the London Review of Books. Many of them are very funny (again, click to enlarge).