OkCupid is my steez.

When I first signed up for an account a couple years ago, I was delighted at the prospect of being able to get a little bit of a feel for the unique qualities of the girls I was creeping on mercilessly online before actually meeting them. It helped that I had just moved to New York City when I enlisted myself as a lackey in the online dating game.

In that time, I’ve spent more hours than I can reasonably quantify skimming profiles of (mostly) single women.

It’s been a fun and enlightening journey, one rife with many random observations, which I will dispense to you now. (Note that these observations come from diligently skimming the dating pool in New York City. I assume it’s at least partially different everywhere else.)

• Women seem to really, really enjoy avocados. I’ve got nothing against them (I mean, after all, they got that good fat), but I can’t help but wonder if avocados have jumped the shark. Has it become so cool to love avocados that women are just saying that they love them because they feel like they are supposed to? (It’s like the inverse of liking Nickelback.) I’m worried that avocados are scarily close to joining the bacon league, where people forget how delicious you are and just start touting their support of you because they feel like they are supposed to.
• Sarcasm seems to be another thing that many women with OkCupid profiles enjoy very much. This strikes me as odd, because when I am messaging a girl on OkCupid and she doesn’t understand my deadpan wit, I often have an urge to play a GIF of Charlie Brown screaming “DON’T YOU KNOW SARCASM WHEN YOU HEAR IT?”
• They’re also crazy about sriracha. In fact, many of them seem to be unable to live without it. Which is strange. Sriracha can be substituted with pretty much any other hot sauce, and it’s almost never a life-and-death situation.
• The six things you cannot live without is the dumbest thing on OkCupid, because everyone’s answer should be: food (not merely “brunch”), air, shelter, water, the ability to evacuate waste from your body, and avocados.
• Netflix should never go on the things you can’t live without list. If you’re around my age, then you have lived more of your life without Netflix than you have lived with access to it.
• Either there are way more women who self-identify as bisexuals within the five boroughs and down into New Jersey, or there is something in the OkCupid algorithm that leads them to believe I should be matched with the majority of bisexual members on the site.
• If you leave the “drugs” section blank, then you’re just basically tacitly admitting that you do indeed do drugs.
• Girls seem to uniformly want to point out before getting into their summary that they do not know how to go about writing about themselves for a dating website. And then they proceed to write about themselves for a dating website.
• I am convinced that every girl who posts pictures of herself with better-looking friends knows in her heart and her mind that her friend is prettier, and makes said picture her profile picture so as to garner interest from dudes who think her friend is hot, but after clicking to visit her profile are just like “Eh, I’ll take it.”
• Our education system really needs to focus more heavily on spelling and grammar. Maybe we could just eliminate phys ed classes, because phys ed is stupid.
• It’s really awkward when you’re matched with someone you already know in real life and are not at all attracted to her, and vice-versa. This is even more awkward if the person is a co-worker.