My personal views on the whole dating thing
I'm 17.

How on earth have I just managed to put my picture on hotornot then? Well, with the kind of masterful ingenuity that accompanies the reasoning that four months is as near as dammit.

Anyway, aside from my visage now adorning the net for your ocular delection, I had a point. That being, I'm surprised how many people my age have/desperately seem to need other halves. I'm single and, frankly, loving it, not because it means I'm currently engaged in an orgy of one night stands with a cavalcade of attractive women (when your topics of conversation generally consist of the Riemann hypothesis, the lydian chromatic concept of tonal organisation and 'don't you think Mohammed Asif bowled a great spell against India the other day?' and various other things along those lines, talking to girls becomes quite difficult. I'm sure there are jazz maths and cricket loving girls out there, I just haven't met any of them. Anyway, I'm not really complaining (rambling yes, complaining no), as is my point), but because from what I've seen from my paired-off friends, it basically seems to be nothing short of slavery. Some of them can't piss without getting a text from their better-halves whinging about how they should be together. This is all very well and good when you're looking to settle down, and so forth, but some people my age don't even have body hair yet. I'd much rather watch the cricket with a beer of an evening than have to drive any hypothetical girlfriend to some ghastly club. It's all very silly in my opinion. People take it much too seriously. Especially youths. In fact this isn't aimed at you lot. Mostly people I know. You get to read it, though, anyway, you lucky people.

Anyway, to add some sort of relevance to this post, a girl added me on myspace once who I didn't know. I proceeded to wind her up a bit in a harmless, english sort of way, as you do, only for her to start telling me, at length, about how she was raped when she was 14 then got pregnant only to lose the baby. I couldn't look away. It was like a car crash. I really hope it isn't true, and she was just a nutcase, but anyway, she seemed to be suggesting that if I were to go to America (unlikely) we could get married and everything would be all right (impossible). She may well have been just a tragic soul, so I tried to let her down gently. After a few days, the messages stopped, and I breathed a hearty sigh of relief.

Then of course, there was the girl on the chatroom that an evil-minded friend of mine gave my number to, unbeknownst to me. I'm almost certain she was in fact a middle-aged man, but the less said about the whole slightly horrifying affair, the better.
(WarneMarsh My priority for frivolity begets quality jollity, Mon 17 Sep 2007, 23:15, Reply)