We need to talk about Kevin

This is the story of Kevin. 

A flavour

Have I got a treat for you...  When you join an online dating site, you receive all kinds of emails. From the zero effort (hi. how're u?) to the creepy (hey baby, want to give some young c0ck a break?) to the plain bizarre.  Below is an unprompted first email I received from "Gar" (on POF in case anyone is wondering what sites to avoid) - original punctuation and bad spelling included.

"Im sick o this sh*t, im not perfect r anything but u said ur singlwe 6 months and arent getting any ,try being me single for years and still not gettin closer to setting sum ,,

ok the boxes which u have which i can tick are the big shoulders box and the swimming box ,,also im quite good at guitar so i could teach u that 2 ,,in exchamge for sex of course if thats ok with u cause i may as well start trading for it ,i aint gonna get it any other way cause i never seem to tick the watch what u say r language box ,but i am pretty deadly on guitasr so bear that inm mind next time your trying to learn a metallica solo,,,, 

not much good with computerzs though ,alwauys seem to press the send button b4 im done by mistake ansd jus one more thing ,boybandz are shite ,beginning middle and end of story ,

ok and finally id like to ask why u dont have a picture of yourself up cause u sound lovely and if u think im askin cause im afraid your fat ,im not ,.. i love fat chicks too ,more o them to love thats all and im seriouis about that so stop bein so sexist and homophobic please

anyway ,i doubt u will get back to me but if u decide that my mail was in fact funny and not psychotic,im Gar ,i have big shoulders an average sized willy and im lookin for a girlfreind ,,o ye and im deadly on guitar.  what do u really look like :)?" 

Are your eyes hurting?  "Boybandz"? "Sexist and homophobic"?  No clue.  A depressing thought: is this indicitive of the calibre of single men in Ireland..?

Serial fiancée...

Work and holidays delayed my plans but once I settled down to it, Match.com seemed to get off to a good start. I invested an hour winking and emailing a few interesting enough looking prospects. And one, Rory, got back pretty much straight away and asked me out.  I kind of liked his approach and so ended up meeting him for a drink after work during the week.  And it was, well... not great if I'm being honest.

He seemed ok for the first hour until I agreed to have dinner with him. (Seriously, have I learned nothing? I know that dinner on a first blind date is a bad idea).  He did an awful lot of talking about himself. He interrupted the few stories I had the chance to tell to make non-funny, often lewd jokes. He mentioned that he'd been engaged 3 times. I looked, I would imagine, quite incredulous at hearing this.  He quickly assured me that the first two weren't "real" engagements - he didn't didn't even get as far as a ring with one of them. So, third time lucky, he joked. Given that the marriage was a brief one and he was now separated, I didn't really agree.

He was just really not my type.  I fudged spectacularly when he asked to meet me again, made a hasty escape and haven't heard from him since.

So, I have one other prospect of a date in the pipeline. All in all though, I'm not loving Match.com this time around. There doesn't seem to be a significant number of men on it. I may be going back to POF at the end of my subscription after all.