I've been doing online dating since before there was a world wide web. I was on usenet, for heaven's sake. If you don't know what that is, ask your parents. If your parents are geeks.
In my work life I'm surrounded by other women, married men, gay men (though they're mostly closeted here in Qatar), and 19 year olds. I'm not meeting dateable men at work, so online dating it is. And mostly it's paid off for me. In the last ten years I've only met one prospective swain offline, and he turned out to be a registered sex offender. So I'm a big fan of online dating. (For one thing, you're already on a computer, so it's easy to google the local sex offender registry.)
When I came to Qatar I thought that online dating would be a productive way to meet single men. There should be a lot of single, male, expat engineers floating around here, right? Or military officers? Wild adventurers?
Apparently, instead, if you're a heterosexual woman, the online dating market in Doha is filled with very young men, average age of 25. And...
(... I'm about to describe their ethnicity. Which requires a side note.)
As much as I'm loathe to admit it, people's ethnicity and cultural background matters in the middle east in a way that would be wildly offensive to suggest in the US. It's rare that you'll tell a story about a funny thing that happened in a store, or that person at work who's annoying you, or someone who cut you off in traffic, without the listener asking the person's nationality. Nationality is a symbolic label here, for how society treats you, where you're positioned in the strata, and what cultural assumptions you're operating from. I don't think it's a good thing. I wish I could opt out of it. But unfortunately, nationality/ethnicity/call-it-what-you-will, plays a role in every interpersonal interaction in the Middle East. ESPECIALLY interactions that involve gender.
(Now... where was I? Oh yes...)
The online dating market if you're a heterosexual woman of a certain age, is filled with very young, Middle Eastern or South Asian men.
Who think that western women are easy.
And who can't spell.
Normally I would feel cruel for making fun of somebody's grammar or spelling, but these guys are asking for it.
So what I get are floods of poorly written, highly sexual, come ons. I supposed it's fortunate that they're usually quite brief. That saves me time yelling at the screen, "Would you write that to a woman wearing an abaya????" But they're crude, gross... and often pretty funny.
My favorite examples:
"Wud u like to have casual sex ?"
(If you can't bother to type three letters to spell "you", your attention to detail probably isn't up to my standards.)
"Would you like an arab hotdog?"
(Is it halal?)
"Hello sweaty!"
(this one gets points for being literally accurate.)
"I love making sex and I have a big .............and alot of Genital "
(It's not the size that matters, it's the quantity.)
"I love you from the first Fresca"
(I... I got nothin'. )
There are also regular messages from Nigerian scammers. I won't go into all of the grammatical quirks that flag a message as a scam, because I don't want to call their attention to just how consistent they are in their writing style. But I'll say that two red flags are the inability to start a sentence with "I", and the overuse of the word "dear" by profiles that are supposed to be American men.
"Am Thomas by name. Dear, your beauty is taking my breathe away! You are angel dropped from the sky!"
So... yeah... the local online dating scene hasn't exactly been paying off for me, except in entertaining stories.
But I stick with it. I keep trying. I don't want to give up on the possibility of making a connection. Lately that has led to a number of long distance penpals, but that's better than nothing. They provide a little excitement in my day, when I see a message in my inbox. And working here has let me earn enough money that I could, imaginably, travel to see these people someday, if something real seems to be developing.
But I do really wish that one correspondent understood: "Sweetie" is spelled with a double "e".
In my work life I'm surrounded by other women, married men, gay men (though they're mostly closeted here in Qatar), and 19 year olds. I'm not meeting dateable men at work, so online dating it is. And mostly it's paid off for me. In the last ten years I've only met one prospective swain offline, and he turned out to be a registered sex offender. So I'm a big fan of online dating. (For one thing, you're already on a computer, so it's easy to google the local sex offender registry.)
When I came to Qatar I thought that online dating would be a productive way to meet single men. There should be a lot of single, male, expat engineers floating around here, right? Or military officers? Wild adventurers?
Apparently, instead, if you're a heterosexual woman, the online dating market in Doha is filled with very young men, average age of 25. And...
(... I'm about to describe their ethnicity. Which requires a side note.)
As much as I'm loathe to admit it, people's ethnicity and cultural background matters in the middle east in a way that would be wildly offensive to suggest in the US. It's rare that you'll tell a story about a funny thing that happened in a store, or that person at work who's annoying you, or someone who cut you off in traffic, without the listener asking the person's nationality. Nationality is a symbolic label here, for how society treats you, where you're positioned in the strata, and what cultural assumptions you're operating from. I don't think it's a good thing. I wish I could opt out of it. But unfortunately, nationality/ethnicity/call-it-what-you-will, plays a role in every interpersonal interaction in the Middle East. ESPECIALLY interactions that involve gender.
(Now... where was I? Oh yes...)
The online dating market if you're a heterosexual woman of a certain age, is filled with very young, Middle Eastern or South Asian men.
Who think that western women are easy.
And who can't spell.
Normally I would feel cruel for making fun of somebody's grammar or spelling, but these guys are asking for it.
So what I get are floods of poorly written, highly sexual, come ons. I supposed it's fortunate that they're usually quite brief. That saves me time yelling at the screen, "Would you write that to a woman wearing an abaya????" But they're crude, gross... and often pretty funny.
My favorite examples:
"Wud u like to have casual sex ?"
(If you can't bother to type three letters to spell "you", your attention to detail probably isn't up to my standards.)
"Would you like an arab hotdog?"
(Is it halal?)
"Hello sweaty!"
(this one gets points for being literally accurate.)
"I love making sex and I have a big .............and alot of Genital "
(It's not the size that matters, it's the quantity.)
"I love you from the first Fresca"
(I... I got nothin'. )
There are also regular messages from Nigerian scammers. I won't go into all of the grammatical quirks that flag a message as a scam, because I don't want to call their attention to just how consistent they are in their writing style. But I'll say that two red flags are the inability to start a sentence with "I", and the overuse of the word "dear" by profiles that are supposed to be American men.
"Am Thomas by name. Dear, your beauty is taking my breathe away! You are angel dropped from the sky!"
So... yeah... the local online dating scene hasn't exactly been paying off for me, except in entertaining stories.
But I stick with it. I keep trying. I don't want to give up on the possibility of making a connection. Lately that has led to a number of long distance penpals, but that's better than nothing. They provide a little excitement in my day, when I see a message in my inbox. And working here has let me earn enough money that I could, imaginably, travel to see these people someday, if something real seems to be developing.
But I do really wish that one correspondent understood: "Sweetie" is spelled with a double "e".
English is haaaaaaard. My beloved is a native German speaker and, well... when he complains about the Chinese sweetshop merchandise in the tourist-trap stores here in Wien, it's just insanely adorable.
ReplyDeleteWhen you are following it with unsolicited overtly sexualized offerings, I can see how it loses some of the adorables.
I hear you, Siobhan. But yeah, if these guys were trying to make pleasant conversation and just were a little rough around the grammatical edges, that would be one thing. But since they're just looking for an easy American woman, and putting precious little effort into it, at that, it's another. :-/
ReplyDelete