Before

Ah, I remember my close call with Match.com and their 72-hour Memorial Day promotion as if it were yesterday. I almost signed up, but at the last minute noticed the small print saying the only way to get out of the “free” trial with the “free” intact would be to send a telegram or “mail or deliver a signed, dated notice” to some Plano, Texas before midnight of the third day (a holiday, of course). Unlikely, even if you could find a telegram.

After

The change came clearly in response to the broad reach and active readership of Gawker’s Consumerist which blogged my little SEO experiment of a post. Labor Day’s promo from Match.com was virtually identical, but for the changes in the small print allowing online cancellations and leaving off any mention of telegrams.

Net loss: A summer romance.
Oh, and a Fall one too. I didn’t sign up. And i should have done this update sooner. Sorry. Others on the way.

(Addendum: Although Google search listings indicate Western Union still sends telegrams, as does a still-posted Staff Report at Straight Dope from 2001, The Western Union site notes, “ffective January 31, 2006, Western Union discontinued all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.” Not surprisingly, one can send a telegram at ITelegram.com, SendATelegram.com, and SendTelegram.com.)

Though i’m pretty familiar with the homo timeline, current events put it in my head to expect insight into the early days of our current fight for civil recognition of our relationships. That turned out to be a bit of an anachronism. In 1963–six years before Stonewall, 43-years before now, ten years before i was born (uh, ok three years)–it was so impossible to contemplate the

state recognizing our relationships, that it’s not even mentioned in passing, flippantly, or with sarcasm in the course of this long piece.
What was the priority? Convincing themselves and others of the generation that some facsimile of hetero marriage was a viable option for some portion of the community that wanted it.

And it was a particularly hard sell. Nascent homo activists, experimenting with feeling good about themselsves found these discussions to be critical of their lives, and of the furtive, one-time, sexual hook ups that defined the homo culture. The prevailing heterosexual attitude was disdain for the promiscuity with which “they drive us underground and force us to live 95% of our lives “passing” as heteros with so little time left to socialize with other homosexuals ….To find a marriage partner, one must meet many prospects on a social basis, not on a furtive and desperate wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am basis.”

Lloyd has the zeal of the recently converted, (which he is, not always having been the marrying type.) and keeps plugging and encourages those who might find it interesting to go forth, meet as many men as possible, but “don’t fritter away your sexual energy while you shop around. A play gets its notices, reviews, reputation and advance sale from opening night.” Among his other guiding rules for a successful homophile marriage:

• “If you don’t cook, look for somebody who can.”
• “Don’t expect to be continually amused.”
• “Don’t be afraid to go into communal debt.”
• “Keep the gut down.”
• “Don’t worry in advance aabout what your heterosexual mother, father, sisters, brothers, or neighbors “will say” about your homophile marriage….The chances are they will never “say” anything. And you will probably be so happy that you will be the one who wants to speak up. But keep your big mouth shut.”
• “Go to a private M.D. and tell him you want a Wasserman cause you had a few too many…in a hotel bar…picked up this girl…Phoebe…VD.”
• “Keep clean. All over.”

I came away feeling that the the ambivalence many of us are so uncomfortable feeling at this exciting time is nothing new and in fact connects us to those who came before. Whether it’s the messed up result of the trauma and damage growing up gay or the beginnings of an evolutionary track toward higher-order structures for humans to live by, we won’t know for a while.

And, critiques and ambivalences aside, it’s pretty clear that most of our own people have come to agree that as flawed or wonderful as it may be, we should have just the same rights as anyone else to make the choices about how we want to organize and structure our lives for ourselves. We’ve spent probably a decade each working throgh issues on by being raised in a heterosexual family, of being forced to lie about who we were, and worse.

We’ve all done the work, as a shrink once told me.

(Warning: zombie writing ahead. Poker. A search engine optimizing test. Just testing techniques in a story I read. Viagra. One-time only. Cheap mortgage. Promise. Gambling.) For research purposes i made an internet dating profile a few months ago, but never paid or used the service. I mean, when i made a Match.com Profile a few months ago, I didn’t pay Match.com to Join Match.com though i heard about the Best Dating Site Match.com. And, I assume that’s why i got the email from Match.com this afternoon with the Match.com discount, Subject: Someone Wants to See Your Profile!

While there was no potential date in the message, there was a Match.com promo discount with legs: “Just For You…Find love this Memorial Day with a 72-hour FREE trial!”

Cancel Match.com? I’d remember to cancel Match.com. I’m not doing much this weekend, and like many others, i would like to find love. (Again.) And of course, there’s always more research. I clicked through the forms as I ran a few calls. I put “cancel Match.com” on my calendar, and was about to hit “send,” with my credit card number as required, when something in the back of my head said to be sure i knew how to cancel Match.com. The notice was on the last sign-up page, in the middle of 4 paragraphs of small type.

“…mail or deliver a signed and dated notice, or send a telegram” to an address in Plano Texas.

No email. No phone calls, toll free or other. No forms on the site, or the internet for that matter. And, not a single acceptable reason for this. (The phone rep acknowledged it and then went into lilting infinite scripted loop of, “The terms are there and you can decide not to take this promotion, but you sound like you are interested…”)

As with rebates, Match.com wants unearned, undeserved revenue.

Match.com wants handouts for being sneaky. It’s arguably something akin to a corporate welfare cheat.

And like other corporate cheats, they’ll keep cheating. (Many learned from their parents. And as a percent of GNP, this welfare cheating dwarfs the one you hear more bitching about.)

But back to Match.com cynicism. Match.com’s lame business model is based on entrapping people, technicalities rather than value, and forcing us to pay when they are basically letting on that they know they’re over charging for what they’ve got.

(I don’t know if info on how to cancel appears on the site. I might sign up just for the novelty of sending a a telegram. Actually, could this be a fiendishly brilliant service of the telegram industry?)

I think things are changing

I think i’ll see if Consumerist is interested. The site mixes shopping with the reality that shopping sucks, and it works. Business people of the future will have no part of this kind of thing. And, again

the San Francisco crowd is again crying “All the rules are off. The world is changing.” (See: Summer of Love; Gold Rush; Internet.)

But, even if Pinko Marketing ends up not quite a fist-raising revolution and what we get is a little more courtesy as consumers, well uh, the others didn’t exactly ignite glabal overthrow, though each had impact on the evolution of gender relations, western migration, and the modern economy.

Match.com is the best dating site? Match.com, the safest dating site? Match.com, the not free hottest babes dating sex site? (More of the zombie talk. I’ll be sure to report on the results.)

Playing these games puts Match.com in the gutter with sleazier sites. It makes me mistrust Match.com and suspect Match.com’s treatment of my personal information. (While I could still be fired in much of the country simply for being gay, their “privacy” policy reads like just about anyone can have access to my non-anonymous information.) There’s a lot of damage to be done by a company bent on exploiting technicalities for profits when users trust them with their private hopes, dreams and pecadillos.

“Bless her heart” paragraph: this is a bit unfair, this picking on match.com. A lot of companies do a lot of these things. They’ve been around a while and i worked with and have respect for a bunch of folks who work there. But this is messed up, and they hit me on a rare blog day.

Bottom line, I’d never date someone who treated me or anyone else like this. It’s manipulative, passive aggressive, and speaks to a deep inner trauma. I suggest therapy.