eHarmony, who we know are jerks for making me begin a sentence with a lowercase letter, are running a commercial for a free weekend trial of their dating service that attempts to lure us with hypothetical questions aimed at making lonely people feel at fault for being alone. This is both dishonest and abusive! They say: (I’m paraphrasing) “What if your perfect match is out there right now, waiting for you?” And then they have the nerve to suggest that all your dream people are signed up exclusively to their website! I mean, sure, it’s really just a hypothetical suggestion, but still: it’s designed to get your hopes up unreasonably, and designed to make you feel like it’s your fault for not being at the right place at the right time to meet your perfect match. I mean website! Sorry, I forgot for a second that of course you’ll never meet anyone in the real world: that’s for losers! All the real, quality people are only online!
But the problem I have with this ad’s intention is that it’s totally misleading, and it’s totally vague, with its “what if’s” and stuff. But they only tell you the part they want you to think about, which is that the perfect someone is out there just waiting for you, and you just have to (use their expensive service to) find them! But they don’t give you any other important “what if’s” to think about! Like, how about these, for instance?:
(We’ll assume the first hypothetical question they asked is stated first, and is accurate, for the sake of argument; so to begin: “What if your perfect match is out there right now, waiting for you?” So then, to follow up…):
What if that person has been waiting for you so long, they’re getting really mad at you for not showing up sooner?
What if that perfect person decides you took too long to find them, and that they’ve decided to get revenge on you for making them wait and feel lonely for so long?
What if, as a punishment for not finding them earlier, they decided to really get a horrible revenge upon you?
What if they’ve been going to bar after bar, night after night, having more and more desperate and unprotected sex waiting for you to come along until they got herpes or hepatitis C, and they decided they were going to give it to as a thank you for keeping them waiting for you for so long?
What if after infecting you with whatever incurable disease, they put a picture of you on the internet saying that you had this disease now, and that it was your fault that they had gotten it too?
What if they sued you for emotional distress for making them wait so long to find you on top of everything else?
You see where I’m going with this. There are tons of hypothetical situations that could come out of online dating, and they’re only offering one really optimistic one. But isn’t it more likely that things may not turn out so rosily, especially with the people you’d meet on a free weekend, when all the cheapskates will be on?
