(From the files of Catholic Match...)
When I joined Catholic Match in 2018, I made sure to create a very thorough profile with good quality photos. Listed were many of my hobbies and tastes as well as a brief explanation of my ongoing faith journey. This included a few of the problems I had with the Church just to let prospective suitors know where I stood on some issues before they reached out to me. I thought my profile was long enough to give people an accurate snapshot of my life while being short enough to be interesting.
Since this was my first foray into the world of online dating, I didn't know how some of the features on Catholic Match worked. For instance, when you clicked on someone's profile, that person got a notification saying you had checked them out. This was the website's way of trying to encourage more interactions that could lead to dating and marriage but it caused its fair share of problems early on in my Catholic Match membership.
One of the first profiles I clicked on was a woman from the East Coast who I thought was reasonably attractive. A closer look at her profile revealed she was extremely devout and didn't have much in common with me. Plus, I thought some of her other photos weren't that flattering. It was a hard pass. Unfortunately, my simple look at her profile caused her to look back at mine. She quickly sent a message that came on way too strong. Not only did she think we were a great match, she stated that I was the answer to her prayers. Gulp...no pressure.
I thanked her for checking out my profile but said I didn't think we had too much in common when it came to some pretty important things. I also wondered if she had taken the time to read my profile all the way through. After a few more awkward messages, I wished her well in her search but firmly declined to take things further. This experience rattled me and after a few more incidents like this, I put a lot of thought into whose profile I clicked on.
When scrolling through profiles on Catholic Match, all I had to look at was a single photograph with the person's first name, age and location. This told me nothing about who they were as a human being so using the website tended to be based on physical attraction only. There were times when I'd click on an attractive profile photo only to see a lot of red flags and deal-breakers listed in the text of their actual profiles. Maybe she was too demanding or materialistic. Perhaps she had unrealistic expectations for her future husband. Whatever the case might have been, instead of just moving onto the next profile, Catholic Match implied some sort of interest on my part by telling this woman I had just looked at her profile. On a few occasions, these notifications prompted women I had no interest in to reach out to me. Ugh!
It was the ever-present fear of the “look back” that reduced the number of profiles I checked out. This was counterproductive when it came to online dating because my fellow men on Catholic Match always gave the advice to click on as many profiles as you could and send lots of messages because finding a spouse online was a “numbers game” in their words. Since the response rate was typically low, the more interactions you had on Catholic Match the better your chances of finding a wife...or so the theory went.
There were some profiles I wanted to click on because I was simply curious about the person's photo not because I wanted to date them. Maybe they were holding a cute dog or featured a background location that seemed interesting. Thanks to those notifications, a look might invite a conversation that I just didn't want to have so I usually opted to move on.
Given my circumstances as a caregiver, long distance relationships were problematic so I had to think very carefully about clicking on those profiles from foreign countries. Still, I could not believe the number of women from the Philippines who reached out to me on their own. Then there were those absolute train wreck profile photos that I would have loved clicking on just to see how bad their profiles really were but with the possibility of a look back looming, it just wasn't worth it.
Eventually, I discovered exceptions to these notifications. If you clicked on the profile of a member of the same sex, they would not be notified. On a few occasions, women who were much younger than me either sent me messages or “liked” my profile without triggering a notification that they had checked me out. I later learned from a discussion in the forums that members of the opposite sex outside your particular age range were also exempt. As one person on the forum explained, this was done to prevent young women from being creeped out by all the old men who were checking out their profiles. So good news all you creepers! You can check out the young women of Catholic Match and they will be none the wiser. Of course, I found it odd these rules and exceptions weren't clearly spelled out when you first joined the dating website. Maybe it was buried in the fine print?
Free members could not see who viewed their profiles but they still received a notification that someone had checked them out. If they wanted to know who it was, they'd have to pay for full membership. With no way to distinguish free members from paying members, I couldn't tell who saw what. After a while, the number of look-backs dropped significantly and this had me wondering if the website was becoming a ghost town.
The profile notification system might have been created with only the best of intentions, but it was doing me more harm than good. In the end, it seemed pretty useless to begin with because as the years went by, I just didn't find very many interesting profiles to click on in the first place.
