Hi. My name is Nathanial, and I live in downtown Portland, Oregon. I do not have a typical Friday night because some weeks I am out with friends, some weeks I am babysitting, and some weeks I get to stay in with a cup of tea and read. Parenthetically, the only beverage in this sentence is tea because I will never admit the number of [other drinks] I consumed last Friday. The six things I could never live without are purposely left blank, because I believe that you would be surprised what a human could live without.

I work in higher education, blah blah, do you really care about this? I do have great benefits though, which I am pretty proud of. I believe in Jesus and the closest thing to that is clicking the box that says Christian, so I guess I will select that even though I would not say it is wholly accurate. Of course, if you see this, you will think I am one of those new liberal Christians. Which is not wholly inaccurate. Anyway, on to the next thing. OH, who actually puts their salary here, and why?

Is there a point to putting effort into this? You are likely going to read this and decide that I am a dude using a free dating service, and why would any guy who is as kind/funny/employed/motivated/whatever as I portray myself be on a free dating website? This logic is likely similar to why I will not message you and instead we will look at each other’s profiles every time they come up because we forgot we have already seen them.

It seems a little bit unfair that books, music, TV shows, movies AND food are in one question. Like, because of how broad this question is, it seems inevitable that something will be left out. Also, I believe this question is designed to demonstrate how many carbs I eat. Answer: SO MANY CARBS. Maybe I should list salad here? But then if I would probably say Caesar Salad, which is not actually healthy, it is just lettuce with fancy sauce. TV shows? Well, before Netflix existed, I had seven giant boxes of DVDs that I moved every year. Thank God for Netflix, AMIRITE? And books? I have read so many funny, smart, engaging, vapid, fun books that I cannot possibly consider the proper selection to convey to you who I “really” am. Which, by the way, how am I supposed to convey who I “really” am into a series of paragraphs and a handful of carefully selected photos on a page?

You should send me a message if this selection of words that appears as a combination of zeroes and ones correlating to a human you have not met intrigues you enough to want to sit down and have a cup of coffee, or whatever people do these days.

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Authors Note: I recently deleted my online dating profiles. Partly because I was not ever checking them. Partly because after recently spending time with a young woman my friend introduced me to, I realized that I have fantastic friends, I go on incredible adventures, and I meet such great people. It is hard for me to believe that I can or will meet someone online through an intentional dating venue.   This was written in an effort to share the thought process I have had in previous efforts of writing dating website profiles.