A few months ago some of my friends convinced me to jump into the whole online dating thing. I had never done it before, but what was there to lose right? Right.

Unfortunately, I learned rather quickly that it was not for me. One of the bigger problems I had making it work for me was MY PROBLEM not the sites. As much as I live my life online, most of that is for work or for networking. After the first week of “isn’t this fun!?” wore off, I would sometimes forget to check the sites for a few days or even a weeks at a time. And I would come back to messages from people who demanded to know what I thought was so wrong with them and why I didn’t respond. Or see that they had “closed the match” due to “being put on hold.” Without doing anything, I managed to piss people off.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that it works and I’ve seen it work very well for lots of people, including several close friends who met that way and eventually married. That being said, my experience was VERY different than all the stories I had from these friends. The majority of what I received from one of the well-known popular sites were sex propositions (Um. No.) or messages from men who are older than my father. I ended up chatting with a few people from another well-known, popular site but quickly learned this was the opposite of the other one. I wasn’t getting sex propositions, these men were in it to get married. Their lights were ON. They were ready and were ready to talk about it. With me. On the first date. Call me crazy, but don’t people date any more? Like meet up and go out for coffee without immediate sex or a marriage proposal?

I know it’s not like that for everyone, these are just the people I happened to be matched up with and the results I got from not spending more time and being as plugged into the sites as maybe I should have been if I were really serious about it.

After the first two months, I realized this was not going to work for me – at least at this point in my life – so I canceled all of my memberships. The thing with these sites is you buy memberships in month increments: 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, etc. Initially I had purchased 3 months on a few sites, and, like I said canceled after 2. Meaning, my membership would not renew, but I had already purchased up through a certain date and could continue using the site until then.

I realized my membership is up at the end of this week on one of the sites, so I logged in just for kicks the other day. There was a message from a good looking guy with a great sounding profile.

But the message? “Sooo when can I meet up with your BFF (oh haha and you) for drinks?”

My “BFF”? Andrew. My very good, very male, very GAY friend who happens to be in one of the pictures with me.

THIS IS MY LIFE. EVEN ON A STRAIGHT DATING SITE.

I’ve decided that this could be the next big thing. I’ll start a new dating site and wait for the cash to roll in.

I’ll call it “Beard.com” where all the photos are straight girls and their gay best friends. So all the closeted guys out there can seemingly peruse profiles of these girls, but are really in it for the BFFs.

I smell a hit.