Do you want to dig your eyes out with searingly hot spoons whenever a match.com commercial comes on? Because I do. Everytime one of those creepy-ass ads comes on, I start to feel skeezed out while watching the nervously giggling girls followed by the tagline: "It's okay to look." They are oddly reminiscent of the horrible Calvin Klein ads made to look like teen pornography from the 70's. And what's up with the one dude that looks like a pimp crossed with Peter Pan? I'm confused and feel like I need to take a shower after these voyeuristic pieces of advertising crap pass by my retinas.Then we have the relentless barage of chemistry.com ads that feature annoying people making
vows to one another while on dates in sushi bars and city parks. Vows generally consist of stupid things like "taking the recycling out even though you are way better at it." Now, maybe I'm just a bitch (ok, omit the maybe from that sentence) but if someone started promising weird-ass crap like that to me on a date, I'd be out of there faster than you could say "cucumber maki." My personal favorite (ie the one that makes me want to stab my eardrums with sharpened chopsticks) is where the girl promises to never wear a flannel nightgown and the guy says something like "Can you just promise to never wear a nightgown?" Then they both laugh annoyingly. Now, besides the fact that I want to vomit at the idea of a bunch of ad writers in Dockers laughing at their own "joke" in a self-congratulatory way as they identify with this total tool, I just have to state the obvious here... these ads don't make me want to meet, have sex with, or vow anything to any of these people! Now, to be fair, chemistry.com does feature a same-sex couple in one of their ads and before the horrid "vow" campaign, they had a fantastic "rejected" campaign where they challenged...the Holy Grail of horrendous online dating ads. Yes, I am talking about eHarmony.com. Ugh. Could there be a more repugnant display of sanitized blather about love and destiny anywhere on tv? (Not to mention, the founder is a crazy Christian and eHarmony still won't allow same-sex matching on their site and tried to force media not to run chemistry.com ads exposing this.)
However, what really makes me crazy are the couples who are routinely featured as the success stories for eHarmony. They usually go on and on about how they found the perfect soulmate and I just want to start stabbing them in the head. Especially that douchebag Lee and his little puppet Anne Marie. I really want to stab them in the head. Could they find a more smarmy guy than Lee to feature? The whole time I just sit there fuming and wondering what their story will look like in two years when Lee is feeling trapped by Anne Marie wanting a baby so he starts going out to the strip club with his buddies a few nights a week and she starts getting angry because he's gone all the time and starts pouring her energy into decorating the condo.Call me old-fashioned but I'd prefer some truth in advertising for these online dating sites. How about a girl talking about how match.com provided her a bunch of hook-ups with losers to falsely soothe her low self-esteem until she found a loser slightly better than the others (or, at least, one of the only ones that would call her back after a fuck or two) that she finally settled for? Or the guy who uses dating primarly to fill a void in his social life because he is a computer programmer with few friends and even fewer real live girls in his life? Or the single mom who needs to field the guys who are willing to date someone with three kids and an ex-husband? Or the lesbian who is seeking out another lesbian that doesn't smoke, doesn't have pets, and doesn't want children? Yeah... those ads would not only be truthful but they'd sure as hell be 100% more interesting. (And they'd probably be less likely to make me all head-stabby. Probably.)
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