The thing about online dating.

I’m on Match.com. I joined it last fall for 3 months and had an okay experience (a few dates, nobody special but nobody freaky either), but I wasn’t that impressed. This March, in the grips of what could only have been very temporary insanity, I decided to give it another shot and signed up for a 6-month subscription, and so far I am equally unimpressed.

It’s not that Match.com is a bad idea, per se. As my friend Banjo once pointed out, “It’s not like you’re going to meet a guy in your living room.” Plus, I work in publishing: NOT a haven for men, let me tell you. It’s all women, all the time, with a few married sales guys scattered about for leavening. And unless you’re into the bar and club scene, which I most emphatically am not, you’re not likely to meet many new people.

So on paper, things like Match.com and E-Harmony and the like make a lot of sense. They give you a chance to see who’s out there without having to fight your way through sweaty crowds and strobe lights, and you start out a date armed with a little more information than just “Looks hot in those jeans; decent pick-up line.” It seems like the solution to that perennial dating problem: finding somebody not gross.

But where they fail is in the execution.

The thing is, Match.com and its ilk give you too much information. When you sign up, you fill out a profile and a long list of “favorites,” “fun things I do,” “likes and dislikes,” “places to hang out,” things like that. So of course you try to come up with things that are important to you and define who you are . . . and then you find that you’ve come up with exactly the same things everybody else has (reading, movies, good conversation, coffee) and you still have a lot of space left to fill.

So you start to add the smaller things—the things that you like, but don’t necessarily take up every waking moment of your life. You go to the gym every couple of days. You think horse racing is kind of cool. You like to fish a few times a summer. Sometimes you like to watch really bad reality TV. These are all littler things that don’t necessarily define you, but you do enjoy them once in a while.

The problem is, dating sites make all those things—the main things and the little things—appear to have exactly the same importance. And when you see a profile that lists his likes as “Conversation, Coffee, Going to the Track, the Gym,” you don’t get a little bar graph that tells you the level of interest in each. You don’t get an indication that when he says “Going to the Track” he means “Going once a year and betting three bucks on a sure thing,” and when he says “the Gym” he really means “I hate it, but if I don’t work out that spare tire comes right back.” You just think, “Talkative and over-caffeinated gambling gym rat,” and click “Next Profile.”

Compare that to meeting the same guy at a party. He’s well-spoken, cute, and charming. You go on a few dates and you find you click. Maybe six weeks down the road the Kentucky Derby comes on and you find out he likes to watch horse racing once in a while—but by that time you’ve got some context. Horse racing is one of his things, but it’s just one of his things--it just adds another facet to his character. Or say you find out six weeks in that he likes to watch WWE wrestling because he thinks it’s hilarious and over-the-top. You can get behind that. It’s kind of cute. And anyway, it’s just another small part of what makes him him. But if you’d read that in his Match.com profile, you’d have clicked “Next” as fast as you could, because you didn’t have any context for how watching WWE wrestling once in a while fits into his character.

That’s really the problem. There’s no context. There’s no way to tell how all these likes and dislikes add up to make a personality. The sum of a person is greater than his parts, you know? All you get on dating sites are the parts.

So I’ll keep on keepin’ on with this Match.com thing until my subscription expires, but I think that’s about it. Maybe by the time I’m middle-aged, desperate, and surrounded by cats they’ll have come up with a better way to manage this and it’ll be worth the effort, but for right now I’m going to have hope I walk into a guy on the street. I’m pretty clumsy, so I think the odds there might actually be better than online.