The internet provides some crazy services these days. I can’t check my email without being bombarded with offers for enlarging body parts I don’t have, to cutting down mortgage payments on property I don’t own, to dating services promising me the love of my life a few clicks away. It’s a little ridiculous. Personally I couldn’t imagine finding a potential boyfriend off the internet but I’ve always been curious about the kind of people who try. I tested the waters and posted an ad on Craigslist, a website whose services in the personal ad arena range from finding long term relationships to finding casual sex partners. I won’t get into the details of what I wrote to describe myself but the gist of it is that I am an 18-year-old girl who is perky, young, innocent, and adventurous. I even posted a fairly generic picture of myself to accompany the ad. Honestly I couldn’t have been less serious about this personal ad. I just wanted to see what the dating pool was like out there on the internet. I figured anyone with some sense would see right through my charade. My roommate and I had sat around snowed in on a Sunday afternoon trying to think of the most ridiculous things to put up on this website, we’re just a bunch of bored college kids going stir crazy stuck in the dorms. I had three pages of responses filling my mailbox in the first 15 minutes after my ad had been posted. Apparently this wasn’t a joke to the men who frequent Craigslist in the Boston area. My descriptions couldn’t even begin to give justice to the things these guys wrote to me. On the milder side I got cell phone numbers, requests to meet for coffee, dinner, drinks. I got generic responses from guys who replied with the same letter to every ad. I got photos of guys down the shore, at the bar, with friends. The milder responses were definitely far and few in comparison to the more extreme ones. I got emails from 49 year old men asking to photograph me, to guys who said they looked 25. One guy offered me lines of cocaine. Another said that as long as I had a passport I could go with him to Costa Rica the following Thursday. I received pictures of things I never wanted to see, with detailed explanations of things I never wanted to do. I got asked if 50 were too old or if marital status was a problem. Some of my most frequently asked questions were, “do you like it kinky,” and “how are you 18?” Forty-five year old men noted that they preferred girls ages 18-21. At one point I was averaging a response a minute. Days after I posted when my ad was a couple hundred ads deep in the back pages of the website my mailbox was still being stuffed to capacity. The average age of a respondent was 44. Out of the hundreds of replies I got I could count on my fingers the amount of respondents within four years of my age. So what does that say about internet dating? Obviously I didn’t conduct a study on all the different dating websites but from my not very scientific research I’ve come to the conclusion that the website I used is basically a forum for horny older men. I may have posted my ad under the long term relationship header but it was blatant that the men who replied to me were looking for sex. At first glance the responses are hilarious, but I cannot even begin to explain how disgusting I felt after reality set in and I realized that these people responding to me were real. They were living breathing human beings and they lived in neighborhoods and they had family, friends, even children. I had a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach, it’s weird but I felt sad for the middle-aged men who were so pathetic they were responding to 18 year olds on dating websites with obscene pictures and gross requests. I think I’m just going to skip out on the whole internet dating scene. I don’t know, I’m sure it suits other people just fine. Maybe all those people who have found their significant other off the internet have tapped into a great dating resource, I don’t know, and I don’t care to know after the experience I had and the conclusions I had to draw from it. Melissa Garber is a Collegian columnist.