FIRMLY OUT THERE NOW!

Hey there Mal-Pals!

Haven't really done a lot over the past couple of days besides sleep lots and experience limited success on various dating websites, so I thought I'd come back to that. My sleep patterns are weird, I sleep less than average, and there are definitely nights when I just don't feel tired and just keep doing what I'm doing and then suddenly it's breakfast. Because I live in a care home they check on me every two hours throughout the night, so I leave a lamp on 24/7. The last couple of days I've been pretty tired and napped a lot and I'm hoping it's just sleep catching up to me and not an infection coming. Guess we'll see!

Last weekend I watched HBO Max series Soulmates and this weekend I plan on watching Netflix series The One. Both shows have the same premise: What if there were a scientific way of determining your perfect partner. It seems that true romance in the 2020s is elusive enough to classify as science fiction. That said, I signed up to a couple more dating websites; here are my first impressions:

DisabledPartners.com - Asked lots of good questions for your profile and it's free to explore other profiles. The website looks awful, though, and with only 22 female users in the UK the odds of finding romance here are slim to none.

Disabled Dating Club - Seemed promising, solid recommendation, good home page with articles and tips or whatever, but turned out to be Whispers4U/Disabled Singles Club/ Disability Match under yet another skin! Of the three of these I signed up for I've received e-mail notifications telling me that two ladies on Disabled Dating Club is interested and another telling me that a third has sent me a message with her e-mail address so I've written back to her. I don't have any romantic plans as her profile lists her as having learning difficulties that mean she can't travel unsupervised, but some of my closest friends have had special needs, so if she's looking for a pen-pal then I guess she's in luck!

Special Bridge - After exchanging a couple of e-mails with their tech support I was able to look around the site. Unfortunately you can search by location but only by US state - the rest of the world is out of luck! There are eight members I have matched with at 62% but I have no idea what metric is used to calculate that score. You have to click on each match individually to find out where they're from. I've had three friend requests, all from stateside members, one male and two female, but you have to pay ten dollars minimum to accept a friend.

Bumble BFF - Downloaded the app, answered a bunch of questions and was given a series of photos of dudes, with the option to swipe left or right to show if you're disinterested or interested in becoming friends. Each photo had the guy's name in the corner and sometimes it would tell you a little more, but that was it. It wasn't until I reached the end of the run of about 12 guys, all of whom I'd rejected without further knowledge, and moved on to regular Bumble, that I realised you could swipe down for further information. C'est la vie, as they say in Ireland. (If you laughed at that we really should be BFFs!)

Some people say I look like me dad!

Bumble Date - Annoyingly I had to fill out a bunch of the same information despite it being one app for Dates, BFFs and Work. Again, I swiped most of the first dozen or so right, only rejecting those with red flags like being incredibly airbrushed and filtered or being a group shot with two other girls or a bunch of dogs. I felt better about swiping left when I realised you could see more photos and some brief profile answers for the girls that had bothered to fill them in. I weeded out women with kids that didn't specify how many or his old (one woman saying she "owned a humanoid!"), heavy smokers, girls that made multiple spelling or grammar mistakes, girls that put a lot of effort in their appearance and would never be seen dead with me anyway. I probably swiped right about fifty times; Bumble is clearly a numbers game and it's hard to imagine a woman on a regular dating app swiping me right.

Elite Singles - I researched a few more regular dating sites and this one seemed to be the opposite of Bumble - there's a fairly in depth questionnaire when you sign up and plenty of opportunity to big yourself up in writing. You get twenty matches a day and you decide whether or not you're interested, if you both are then you can message. My best result was a 92% match with a vegan paralegal living forty miles away. I have low hopes for finding romance in general, but this seems like my best bet.

Single Disabled/Genuine Disabled Singles - Thought I was doing well here but upon further investigation, not so much. Unless you go into Advanced Settings and select otherwise, you will receive messages "sent on behalf of the sender to people who match what they are looking for to encourage you to connect." This means you'll get messages from girls that didn't send them and may not even be regularly looking at the site. As you have to spend money before you can read messages this seems very underhanded. As I was writing this I got another introductory message at Genuine Disabled Singles, so I guess changing the option makes no difference. It's funny how I'm getting more messages on the site I haven't paid to go premium on. I thought it was weird almost no-one was writing me back, now I know why.

I say almost no-one, one girl swapped a few messages and asked if I wanted to talk on WhatsApp or Hangouts. I said I didn't have those apps yet and she suggested Skype. We talked a lot on Wednesday morning, but I was very cautious, a lot of the details she gave about herself were different to her profile on the site and she was very keen to know more about me without telling me much about herself. She shared a couple of pictures of herself, she reminded me a lot of the actress Zazie Beets:

Spoiler alert: I am not dating this woman.

She asked me if I liked latinas, I told her I hadn't really had much interaction with anyone latinx, but that I was open-minded and judges people based on their merits. I must point out that I haven't avoided the South American community, it's purely that finding a confident single latina living by herself in Devon is about as likely as finding rocking horse shit.

Update: As I was writing this I got another "introductory message" from a girl on Genuine Disabled Singles. I have now deleted my profile!

She showed me a couple of pictures of her car but ignored me when I asked for the make and model. She also showed me a picture she had taken of herself at the gym:

At least I'd always have somewhere to park my bike.

Now, I don't like to judge a book by its cover, but I found it hard to believe this was the body of a lonely nurse working full time at a mental health facility.

We chatted a bit more, and then she abruptly stopped answering. She made contact again this morning, and was this time incredibly eager to meet up. I reminded her of my living situation and said she was free to make an appointment to visit me in the care home at any time. She asked if I had a Jumio so she would feel safe before meeting up. I googled Jumio and told her I'd never heard of it. She told me it was a process that verifies your identity, which is true, but she was lying about how it worked. She told me you out your credit card into the very dubious website she gave me and upload a photo and they'd give you a card to show she was on the level. She showed me hers:

I don't know, seems kind of fishy!

Aside from everything else that screams fake the surname was different to the one she gave me and the birth date makes her two years younger than what she told me. I messed around, toying with her for another couple of hours because it was fun to waste her time and catch her out with basic lies. Plus it was funny seeing her trying to connect, asking if I'd "ever seen the Star Wars before" like she was Lucille Bluth. When I told her I liked comedies she asked if I'd seen the Three Stooges. To paraphrase Andy Kindler, there's a reason that women don't like the Three Stooges, and it's because they're not funny.

Eventually she got frustrated and left and I reported her to the site. Exploiting those looking for love is evil at the best of times, when you're lonely you'll talk to anyone, and even though you're sure you're being played a part of you is praying that it's somehow real. Deliberately targeting those who are lonely and vulnerable due to disability? Reprehensible, sickening behaviour. I'll always strong a scammer along because if I'm wasting their time then they're not spending it preying on someone even more gullible than I am.

I should mention that when my laptop found the care home Wi-Fi I was able to do a Google image search and they are public photos of a Twitter fitness guru named Katya Elise Henry, I wouldn't have shared them if they weren't already public.

I was briefly carriages one other time, whilst on holiday in Portland in 2013. My plans for a Tuesday evening had fallen through and by the time I got to my hotel and checked my laptop to see what was open it was too late to catch a show or a movie and I didn't really fancy drinking by myself so I spent the evening on my laptop, listening to podcasts and surfing the net. I went on to Craigslist with an alias to see who else was looking to hang out and attracted the attention of a pretty young thing wearing lingerie. Throughout the evening we exchanged messages and she showed off more and more of her anatomy.

I don't know what her endgame was but in one of the early photos she proved she was who she said she was by holding up a sign with my (fake) name. The poor model had obviously been told to hold a blank piece of paper and they filled in whoever's name free hand with MS Paint. It was hilariously bad, like if I tried to pass this off as myself:

My hat's all wonky, you must think I look terrible!

So more misses than hits, but it's only cost me £22.49 and I'm glad I made the effort. I'm still doubtful that online dating is right for me, but I'm probably going to sign up with I'M Cupid and  Parship despite myself. To quote Canada Bill Jones, it's the only game in town!

Peace!

✌