Love at first wink?

I used to say that I would like to be married by the age of 25. With just having a recent birthday and turning 23, I'm beginning to think this goal is unachievable, unfortunately. Seeing everyone I graduated with becoming either engaged or married, and my best friends recent boy toy, I decided I should step up my game. I mean, who would want to be a third wheel? Nobody that's who.

Upon "stepping up my game", I pondered just exactly how I should go about achieving this task. There's many options these days ya know. I considered applying for the reality television showThe Bachelor. I've seen many women going on this show in search of true love. Honestly, as much as I love watching this season, there's no way I could go on the show with the purpose of finding true love... not when the guy is taking out 20+ other women. I would definitely apply however, due to the fact that they get to travel to a lot of amazing places for free. As much as I would love to travel though, this option is highly unlikely for me to find a boyfriend.

So what's my other option? Well since I don't have the ovaries to place my phone number on a napkin or leave it on some cute guys car windshield that I see driving in the wal-mart parking lot, I thought I'd give internet dating a shot. Before anyone starts to get the wrong impression, let me clarify that last sentence: I was merely CHECKING into it, and I went with match.com for my taste of online dating services.

So what did I find? A lot of nothing.

Match.com allows you to sign up for free and create a profile listing what you're like and what you're interested in in a partner. It also allows you to search other profiles on the site and 'wink', e-mail, or request a phone number. They say nothing in this life is free. They're wrong. You can 'wink' for free all you want to other members of match.com, but if you want to actually contact someone or read an e-mail someone has sent you, that is going to cost you.. a lot. Being the cheap-scape that I am, I'm not paying for a subscription to an online dating site just to see who sent me an e-mail. I guess after receiving lots of different e-mails notifying me that someone had either winked at me or that I had caught someone's attention, I was fed up with the fact that I would have to pay for a subscription for this to actually work. After two days with the "free" version of match.com, I deactivated my profile. Needless to say, I'm back at the drawing board. Maybe one day?