Ms Francesca's Rules

Today I checked out eharmony. The personality tests seemed cool but they took almost 30 minutes. I figured that 30 minutes was a good investment in my future happiness. When I was done with the testing I asked the eharmony genie for my matches. I waited with anticipation as the screen counted down the seconds until my perfect love matches would appear.

Tada....I got 5 matches and all of them lived at least 45 miles away from me. I had to pay to join if I wanted to find out much more about these potential soul mates but alas I spotted a button that said 'find more matches' so I decided to roll again. My response, "sorry, there are no more matches for you right now." Am I that difficult to match? A nationally advertised dating site and all I get are 5 guys within a 100 mile radius of my home. This was not encouraging.

I went back to match.com to see what treasures it had for me today. It said that my profile had been viewed 144 times since I had posted my picture. "This is fantastic," claims Francesca, my internet dating guru.

Francesca and I had dinner last night so that she could fill me in on the match.com norms.

1. The guys do the emailing.
I was surprised to hear this. No man I new was going to design a search, thoughtfully review the results, and then actually compose an introductory email.

2. If the guys are interested, they'll wink. Then you wink back if you're interested. Then the guy will send an email.
This sounded a little more encouraging since the guy would only have to exert some effort if he already knew you were interested.

3. It takes 17 dates to find a real match. I accepted this with the caveat that I would count meeting for coffee at starbucks a date. I wasn't going to spend 3 hours each with 16 marginal men just to find one match. For the love of God, I'm already 39 and I'd like to find someone before the end of the decade.

With these rules in mind I clicked on the 'who's viewed me' button. All different types, ages, hairstyles, facial hair, hats, clothing, and lack there of. A few of them had winked at me and I returned one wink. He emailed and suggested meeting. I'll keep you informed. Only 16 more to go.

As for Ms Francesca's rules. I keep winking at the cute men before they've winked at me. I'm curious to see if this works of if it's just the tell tale sign of a desperate woman.