The end of JDate (or, the most bitter essay on dating you'll ever read)

I've wasted too much time on a Jewish dating site not to find a husband on there.

Illustration by C.M. Duffy

Hi  JDater! You have 131 unread message(s)! What’s more fun than meeting interesting new people who are interested in YOU? For the best results, respond right away to their note–while you are still fresh in your admirer’s mind. Now, go on. Make it happen.

Best wishes,

Your friends at JDate.

I’ll tell you what’s more fun than meeting people from JDate. Anything. Anything is more fun than meeting a (not) perfect stranger for an interminable drink that inevitably stretches into a dinner at which I am sharply digging my nails into my thighs both to keep myself awake and to distract myself from the pain at hand.

That’s why I am loath to sign on again to JDate, the international portal for Jewish dating that boasts about half a million users worldwide (Match.com has 20 million by comparison). When the site started in 1997, Internet dating was a little-known and somewhat scary phenomenon; somewhere after the millennium, it became the only way to meet someone.

But here’s …