On the Subject of Everlasting Shame

It started innocently enough.  I was curious.  More bored, really.  I just needed something to pass the time, an excuse to get out of the house.  I knew other people who were doing or had done it, so it seemed safe.

Still, I was worried.  I didn’t want anyone to know I was doing it.  The whole thing was, well, shameful, I guess.  It wasn’t the sort of thing that people admitted to in polite company.

It didn’t really take up much time at first, nor did it take much effort.  That’s how they getcha, I guess.  They draw you in.  I quick hit here, a wasted minute there.  Eventually, though, it took over my life.  I thought about it in the morning when I woke up and again at night before I went to bed and at many points in between.  I started searching for new and better ways to get my fix.

Eventually I realized I wasn’t actually having any fun and wasn’t actually getting anything out of it.  But even at that I was wasting time that would have been better spent without knowing why.  Worse, I was starting to do it in public, too, desperately trying to make sure that no one saw me.

Admitting you have a problem is the first step to dealing with it.  So here goes:

I…

(Fuck, man, I can’t do this.  No.  Be strong.  You’ll get through this.)

I…

(Deep breath.)

I am an…

(Oh, god, it’s harder than I thought.)

I have engaged in activity related to internet dating.

There.  I said it.  It’s out there for all the world (or, y’know, twelve people who read this blog, some of whom know that already) to see.

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Okay, so in all seriousness, there’s a question that I started wrestling with about a year after I graduated from Western Illinois University.  At the time I was twenty-six, working a dead-end job, and in the process of pulling away from the whole church thing.  It was beginning to occur to me that I had no clue how to make new friends in this weird adult world.

Then I lost my dead-end job.  And things ended with the one called Her.  Y’know, they ended officially and with prejudice, as opposed to the kinda-sorta unofficial end of fifteen months or so prior.  But the thing was that I’d had a good year or so to use her as a crutch and keep myself from having to think about friends and girlfriends and a life after church and school made some of that stuff more-or-less automatic.

I had one shot at something right after that stuff ended, but I blew it without even realizing that I was blowing it (as opposed to now, when I blow it intentionally and for the lulz, but we’ll get back to that).  So I figured I should figure out some way to practice dating.  I thought, “Hey, the internet!”  I suppose it helps that I’d just been Best Man at a wedding that was facilitated by a meeting on Match.com when I made that choice.

Thus began the online dating adventures of me, the least-equipped guy in the world when it comes to dating.  Or going on dates.  Or having conversations, really.  Basically, I’m a giant mess.

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I suppose we need some background for that.

I am, shall we say, socially awkward.  Growing up I was the fat kid who got picked on and never felt like he really belonged.  So I did what the outcast does in situations like that: I tried way, WAY too hard to make up for it and went way over to annoying and loud and totally not on the same social wavelength as the rest of the…universe.

I never really outgrew my inner fat kid.  I remain socially awkward, but now it’s usually more of a cultivated, intentional thing.  I don’t want to deal with people at least 75% of the time and the easiest way to get rid of other people is to come off as an asshole or someone who is really weird.  I can do both.  Asshole is the easier of the two, but weird is an art form.  And it amuses me, so there’s a bonus.

There’s a trick to weird.  You don’t want to just show up, crap your pants, and ask your date if she’s willing to change your diaper.  You don’t want to start talking about your collection of left arms from 1980s action figures.  At that point you’re just trying way too hard to come off weird.  Or serial killer-y.  And you might run in to someone who has a diaper and scat fetish and find yourself having freaky first-date sex.  And I don’t mean freaky like Rick James freaky.  I mean freaky like, “Why the hell would anyone find that arousing?” freaky.[1]

I do weird by channeling my inner fat-kid-who-tries-too-hard.  See, back in the day I used to try really, really hard to get people to like me by being the funny guy.  But I have a rather twisted sense of humor.  Not in the, “I find death hilarious,” sort of twisted way, but in the, “I find wordplay based on homonyms of archaic uses of common English words hilarious.”  Quite frankly, most people are more put off by esoteric wordplay than dead baby jokes.  I don’t know why.  But I’m okay with that.  Because I can totally use it to my benefit.

Online dating gave me a whole new test audience for my complete and utter bullshit.  It was brilliant, really.  But there was always the possibility that I’d run in to someone with whom I was compatible[2] and I wouldn’t want to actually alienate her.  I mean, it’s also possible I’ll find the TARDIS in my front yard tomorrow, but we can all imagine for a moment.[3]

So about half of the conversations I have with people where I’m not just trying to asshole them away become a game.  Specifically, a game of, “How long can I go before this person looks at me like I’m completely bugnuts?”  For me that’s a win-win.  If they are also amused, then I get to have a random conversation.  If they are not amused, then I get to go home and watch TV or read a book or something.

Either way, there’s a reason why I don’t go on too many second dates.  Or first dates.

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Oddly, my social awkwardness isn’t my only major obstacle.  It might not even be the main obstacle, compared to my other problem.

It simply does not occur to me that a woman could find me attractive.  This might sound like some sort of compliment-fishing sort of thing, but it’s not.  I don’t pick up on signals more subtle than walking up to me and saying, “Hi, I find you really attractive.”  In the absence of such signals I assume there’s no interest.

Now, you might think this isn’t a problem with the internet thing.  After all, you’re on the site for the same reason and agreed to go out because of said reason, right?  You’ve obviously never met me.

If I’m not into it whilst on a date, I work with the assumption that it means she’s not into it, either.  I mean, duh.  In general, though, if you’re doing the internet thing there has been some communication, so she probably is into me going into the date.  This never occurs to me.  Ever.

Did I mention I’m fairly dense?  Well, I am.  Allow me to explain.

Last October-ish I went on a date.  From my perspective, the date was something between a train wreck and a waste of time.  It started with her suggesting that we go for pizza in a misguided attempt to prove that Dallas was capable of making pizza a Chicagoan would eat.  We went to some place somewhere I’d never been that served an extremely crispy thin crust pizza I compared to nachos.  Bad start.

We were at the pizza place for a while whilst I pretty much ran through my entire bag of tricks.  By which I mean, “I said awkward shit for my own amusement, I played the ‘Way too Honest’ card, and I started at least one argument.  About the nature of atheism, as I recall.”  It was a decent enough conversation and she obviously hadn’t had enough of it yet, so we went to a bar.

A gay bar.  Where I met her gay (male) friend and her lesbian sister.  That was, by far, the most interesting part of my night.  The bit where no matter where I was I could turn around and see two dudes making out (and the same two dudes, it was like they were following us around or something) was deeply amusing.

Mr. Gay Best Friend was pining over lost love.  I found that cathartic in an odd way, so I’m reasonably certain I spent more time talking to him than the person I was ostensibly on a date with during that part of the night.  And after all was said and done I assumed that would be the end of that.

Until she begged me for a second date via text message.  I had no idea what to do with this turn of events.[4]  So I probably passive-aggressived[5] my way through it based on the theory that people hate it when other people are passive-aggressive jackwagons.  I didn’t hear from her for a month.  Then she stalked me down on Facebook[6] and proceeded to try the “let’s be friends” routine.

I was feeling charitable, so rather than just ignoring her I decided to at least try to be nice about it.  So I responded and said that I’d been in that position before, so I knew it would only end in pain and resentment.  She then tried to amateur psychoanalyze me and told me that I was letting my past pain get in the way of my future happiness and I should give her a chance to help me be happy.

That was when I went back to Plan A: back slowly away, then turn and run like hell.

And that’s not the worst of it.

About a month ago I was telling someone random stories of my stupid dating experiences and my dating stupidity.  All of the sudden I remembered that I had been on a date once where the girl had insisted on texting me a topless picture she took of herself with her camera phone.  Then I remembered it was the gay bar date.  So, yes, there was an incident involving the transmission of topless pictures that was so completely not interesting to me that I forgot about it for nearly a year.

Now, to be fair, the picture was poorly lit and on a super-low-quality camera phone.  And she initiated the whole affair over my objections (it pretty much went, “Wanna see a topless picture I took of myself on my camera phone?”  “Not really.”  “Well I’m sending one to you, anyway.”  “Huh.  So there we are.”  “You don’t like it?”  “There’s nothing to see here.”  “Well then delete it.”  “Okay.”  ::Delete::[7])

Now where was I going with this?  Oh, yeah, subtle clues: I don’t pick up on them.  Also, non-subtle clues: I don’t pick up on them.

Also, too, I will never get laid.  Apparently even the internet cannot help me with that.  But at least I can now speak openly about internet dating.  Because I have many thoughts on the subject and I know y’all are just dying to hear my insights, since I’m obviously a modern day Don Fucking Juan.

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[1]So, the internet.  Weird place.  I know so little about sex from personal experience that I can’t help but assume that I’m extremely vanilla in my tastes.  Yet I know about all kinds of freaky shit that gets people off and I don’t know why.  I mean, I came up with the diaper thing on the spur of the moment, then I was like, “Oh, shit, some people are in to that.  What the fuck?”

[2]As long as she wasn’t an uggo.  My heart hates uggos.

[3]So how cool would that be?  Except for the bit where the Companion is generally a woman and I’m definitely not a Time Lord.  So that’s potentially awkward.  And I’d definitely be a ratings sink compared to Karen Gillan.

[4]Turns out that, “Assume she’ll never want to see you again and get the fuck on with your life,” is a post-first-date strategy with a shockingly obvious flaw.

[5]It’s a verb now.  Because shut up, that’s why.

[6]Geds’ Official Rules of Dating:

1.  Don’t Date
2.  Don’t Date Co-Workers
3.  Don’t Give a Last Name Until the Third Date
4.  Don’t Give an Address Until the Fifth Date

Now, you’d think that Rule 1 would really work for on its own.  But obviously it doesn’t.  So I needed to come up with less catch-all rules.

[7]Man, I am an asshole.  I mean, seriously.  I am a horrible person.