Highbrow smut purveyor Nerve opened a "dating confessions" section on its website today, and quickly drew a flood of scuzzy testimonials that confirmed what everyone already kinda knew about Nerve's audience: it consists of sluts of all sexes and sorts, along with people burned by the mostly-idiotic practice of online dating (who'd have thought??). Fair enough, their stories at worst are trainwreck-watching fun, and well timed at that. Here are some stories of sex, betrayal and sadness, with an emphasis on the latter, culled from the confession booth:

"A few years ago I got a call from a friend who said, "I just quit my job [as a magazine editor in New York], rented a car, and I am driving at 90 miles per hour towards Cincinnati. I am driving straight to a bar to meet a girl I met on Nerve personals. Tomorrow I am hitting Chicago for another date with another girl. I am f——ing my way across the country.""

I had been dating this guy for a couple of months and everything was going well- we had good fun, good sex and good conversation - except,he was a really annoying sloppy drunk. On his birthday we went out to a local bar with a bunch of his guy friends and he got particularly wasted and we got in a little argument that concluded with him running out of the bar in anger. Instead of going after him, I left with his best friend.

Even though I'd been dating someone for 6 months, I'd forgotten to de-activate my Nerve profile. I was reminded of this when I got a message notification in my inbox. I felt so bad- I logged on, changed it to reflect that I was looking for platonic friends only, and then wrote the poor guy back. He was pretty good natured about the whole thing, and we ended up emailing each other several times, because we actually did like a lot of the same things. We started hanging out as friends- the guy I was dating know all about it and was okay with it. But I started noticing that I actually preferred to hang out with the Nerve guy than with my boyfriend of 1 year! That was pretty much the beginning of the end... and me and the Nerve guy have been officially together for 2 years now."

Keeping these rules in mind, when Kay walked in and she was an easy eighty pounds heavier than the picture she had sent, I knew the date was a going nowhere. Her face, which had been so attractive in the photos was bloated and her eyes puffy, still the additional pounds made her head look small when compared with her girth. Her whole body rolled when she walked...So I stood up to meet her. When she was about ten feet from me I was overcome by the strangest aroma; an odor that I can only describe as being the result of a chemical accident in an apple orchard. It was coming from her. The smell was simply so overpowering that I immediately thought about attempting to escape, but the only way out was either past her or through a fire-door with an alarm on it.

"I have a boyfriend but I keep my nerve personal profile, secretly. Just to see who messages me. I've gone so far as to have brief, flirtatious exchanges but nothing serious,"

[Nerve: Dating Confessions]