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"It&amp;#039;s brutal out there on the internet. Especially if you are (as people so tactfully describe) &amp;quot;a woman of a certain age&amp;quot; - and by that I mean too freaking old for this nonsense. When I first created my online profile, I did it with the full intent of leaving it inactive, until I felt like activating it. Unfortunately, the default setting is active, so until you finish it and then choose to make it inactive, you get tossed into the pool and it doesn&amp;#039;t take long to get noticed. Three minutes. I had a message within three minutes. Within five I had three more. I deactivated and didn&amp;#039;t reply to any of them. Of the four, two were simply &amp;quot;Hi&amp;quot;, one was &amp;quot;Do you live near ___ and do you like to party?&amp;quot; and the final one was some guy wondering if I liked [insert sexual act I could perform on him]. So it was no surprise for me to read an article today about a man who thought it would be funny to masquerade as a woman and create an online dating profile. He got more than he bargained for and abandoned the profile after two hours, more than a little disheartened and disgusted by what he encountered. (I&amp;#039;m not linking to it because the site has some definite NSFW language, but you can search Jezebel.com and find it easy enough). I have a good friend who&amp;#039;s close to my age and also divorced, and she has the misfortune (at least when you&amp;#039;re online dating) of having a very large chest. She says fully three-fourths of her messages start out with some comment about her breasts, which while not flaunted, are noticeable in her picture. She hasn&amp;#039;t bothered changing her profile pic, either. It helps her weed out the jerks right away. I know some of you have had those same sort of horror stories. Did anybody make your skin crawl when they responded to your profile? [Follow Ellie on Facebook and Twitter] "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.womansday.com/relationships/dating-marriage/a48211/seedier-online-dating/>