Darling friends and acquaintances,

Join me in a social experiment?

I’ve been terribly bored with internet dating for some time now. It’s such a dreary proposition: write something glib and self-aware, agonize over/upload pictures, flip through profiles of people in your neighborhood, then send messages into the void. I don’t enjoy looking at profiles, I’m too judgemental for my own good, and no matter how many people I send messages to, the outcome is the same: rarely engaging responses amidst a sea of mono-syllabic “Hey”s.

When I complained about this problem to a friend in New Mexico he echoed my despair. Neither of us have had much success at finding dates online. We were sick of the format, it felt like buying a stack of lottery tickets, knowing the odds are impossibly low but hoping the next one might match.

We joked that it would be more fun to search for dates for each other than for ourselves.

We traded login information and started the search.

Turns out it’s much more fun to set up a friend than it is to look for digital love on your own.

Of course, once the trade was discussed my head kept spinning. What if I passed out my login info to all of my friends? What if I made my profile, so challenging to fill out on my own, a veritable Wikipedia entry of testimonials and pictures from friends? What if my digital dating persona was curated not by me, but by my community? What if our friends are better at describing our personalities than we are?

And so I did it.
I cleared my OkCupid profile (except for a slight disclaimer at the top, warning perusers that the writing is publicly generated), and am publishing my login info right here:

www.okcupid.com
Username: DK27
Password: publiccupid

I’ve left some pictures, most are terrible. Perhaps you have better pictures of me? Do we look adorable together at some event? Go ahead and upload it, this isn’t a joke. The answers to all OkCupid bio questions are blank, fill them in as you see fit.

Some ground rules:

• No changing the password or login info, that locks everyone out and ruins the experiment.
• If you decide to message someone, bravo! Feel free to log back in to follow up on that message. If you don’t, I will.
• Write anything you want, edit what other people have written, click through profiles and have fun.
• The only text that must remain in the profile is the disclaimer at the top: Much like Wikipedia, this is a publicly curated profile. All answers have been provided by a community, some close, some far (both in miles and mindset). Tread with caution.

I have no idea if this will go anywhere, but it would be delightful to go on a few dates selected by my community. Be bold! Be brave! Type away!

(I expect you all to behave with a modicum of decency, though not too much. Never too much.)

Cheers,
Dan