So this guy winks at me on Match...

So this guy winks at me on Match...if that sounds like the beginnings of a bad joke and the punchline is my attempts at online dating, well it is.

When you unsubscribe from Match, your profile is kept on file for a year.  I don't know if it is viewable that entire time or not but it is definitely viewable at first.  I keep getting e-mails alerting me that X-number of men viewed my profile this week; resubscribe to see who is interested!  Umm, if they are just looking at my profile and moving on, they aren't really interested, now are they?  So I didn't take the bait and rush right online to see who these men who aren't really interested are.  I thought "Let me know when someone winks or e-mails me.  Then I'll consider it."

And then I got an e-mail that Mister X. winked at me.  The e-mail showed his main profile picture but if I wanted to check out his profile I had to pony up the $36.99 for another month.  He's not bad looking but one wink didn't really justify the expense in my book though I did feel bad I couldn't contact him to tell him my account is expired.  I figured that would be the end of it.  But no.  Match kept sending me e-mails that I'd received a wink, even going so far as to offer me a discounted price to resubscribe.  Again, I did not take the bait.  Instead, I bought my own.

I have a friend who has an active subscription on Match.  One of the (many, in my opinion) minuses to that site is you can't search by username.  Which means if that is all you know, you can end up with a lot of profiles to sort through to try to find a specific user.  Using my mad research skillz (research, cyber stalking-it's a fine line), I was able to determine Mister X's age and location which my friend and I used as our search parameters.  A sort of the results by username and voila! here we have Mister X.

His profile didn't raise any red flags other than he may have a reddish tint to his hair when the light hits it a certain way and did show we like to do a lot of the same things.  So my friend e-mailed him for me.  (Have I mentioned how much my life resembles high school?  "Do you like my friend? Check yes or no."  Okay, that would actually win me over).  She started by saying this was going to seem odd but you winked at my friend.  She told him my subscription was expired but I got an e-mail he winked at me so we pulled up his profile on her account (Hello, Stalker) and this was my way of winking back.  She gave him my username and my e-mail address so he can contact me if he's still interested. 

The next day she got a response.  He thanked her for the nice e-mail and said that he went back through the winks he sent and could not find my profile among them but if it popped up again he'd check it out.  So we searched for my profile and had no problems finding it.  I was surprised to see it showed I had been active on the site within 24 hours; I guess if you read their e-mails, it shows your profile as active?  (Note to self: check credit card statement to make sure you aren't being charged). 

Really?  So now I have sunk to the level of getting rejected via third party by someone who expressed interest in me first?  Awesome.  I'm not sure it gets anymore pathetic than that.  (I could renew my subscription and find out...).  As if this wasn't insulting enough, two days later I got another e-mail from Match letting me know Mister X winked at me. 

This morning I got an e-mail that I "sparked someone's interest."  From what I gather, that means someone clicked "yes" when I popped up as one of their Daily 5.  Of course, in order to find out who it is, I have to resubscribe.  Wouldn't it be funny if it was Mister X (assuming he's real and that isn't a fake profile used to get women to resubscribe, that is)?