Reverse JDate
I was bored one night over these past winter holidays for UW, so I signed up for JDate, the online dating site for Jewish people. Even though I thought that it is totally lame, I am getting roped in and am actually checking the account that I made for myself. In fact, it’s getting quite exciting since other people are even messaging me (although these are probably people I already know who are giving me a hard time).
To communicate with other people on JDate, you have to upgrade to the “premium membership”, which involves paying a fee of about $30 per month. As a poor student, I have better things that I can spend $30 per month on. Nevertheless, it would be fun to actually try to get in contact with some of these other Jews who are supposedly “hot matches”.
So what to do? How can I get in contact with people without paying for membership? One technique employed by smart J-daters is to post their MSN name or e-mail address in their biography. For example, my username on JDate is kenrose2005 and one of the lines in my biography reads:
I’m usually on MSN, so contact me there (hint: my MSN name is username AT hotmail.com)
That description is hopefully vague enough to fool any keyword parsers, though it is still susceptible to manual inspection. Anyways, many people are not so courteous to put their contact info in their description, hence my proposal of Reverse J-Date
Essentially, people should post the names of people that interest them (their hotlist) on some website. If you see your face on the page and are interested, then contact me. Now you see why it is a reverse Jdate: you have to contact me. If you know a person on my hotlist, then inform them about their presence and leave it to their discretion if they want to contact me. Please don’t violate their privacy and contact me on their behalf.
At first glance, the reverse JDate idea seems a bit inefficient since it involves polling. Indeed, it is less efficient than contacting the person directly. However, it is ultimately cheaper (it is free) and given how good many people are at Jewish geography, it should have a low turnaround time. The only real drawback is that if someone on your list doesn’t contact you, you have no way of knowing if it is because they never knew that they were on your list (i.e., they never discovered themselves on your hotlist) or if it is because they did discover themselves, but just plainly did not want to contact you. Oh well, it’s still worth saving $30.