On Disappointment

There are basically three types of internet dating profile introductions.  There’s the introduction that attempts to make sure everyone knows how embarrassed the would-be dater is, the introduction that attempts to justify itself, and the introduction that says, in effect, “Fuck this, let’s get to it.”  There are sub-categories of each of these intros, but in broad strokes you can pretty much expect to see one of these three[1] and, at least in my observation, you’ll probably see them in roughly equal proportions.

I have very little to say about the embarrassed people.  I mean, I get that it’s possible to be genuinely embarrassed to do this, as it’s regarded as weird and the thing that creepy or desperate people do.  Our main cultural touchpoints for internet daters are the older brother on Napoleon Dynamite who was talking to hot chicks on the internet all day, random episodes of To Catch a Predator, and the urban legends of people who do the internet thing as a way of meeting potential victims to behead.  The message that much of our culture attempts to send to people who do much of anything online is, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”  The whole internet dating thing just turns it up to eleven, since the notion is that there must be something wrong with you if you can’t meet people the old fashioned way: by getting engaged in high school or college, buying a little house with a white picket fence, and farting up a shitload of little anklebiters.[2]  But, really, we live in the goddamn 21st Century.  The internet has changed everything else, why shouldn’t it change dating?

I remember the first time Amazon popped in to my consciousness.  I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to buy a book over the internet.  I mean, why would I want to order a book, then wait several days to get it?  All I had to do was go to Borders or Barnes & Noble and, holy shit, I had a book.  Now B&N has shut down half their stores and holy shit have you been in a Borders in the last couple weeks?  It’s goddamn depressing.  That’s just kind of what the internet does.  It changes things.

My 10 favorite musical acts (in no particular order) are Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers, Mike Doughty, Over the Rhine, the Saw Doctors, the Waterboys, Matt Nathanson,[3] the Lost Immigrants, Idlewild/Roddy Woomble, and Local H.  The only reason I know that five of those things exist is because of the internet.  Most of the music I bought this year came in the form of bits of data transmitted over the internet.  A few years ago I would have stared at you blankly if you’d have told me about Pandora and I would have said you’d be crazy to think we wouldn’t still be buying music on little shiny discs.  And yet here we are.

So why shouldn’t the internet change the way we meet people?  I mean, no one is embarrassed to say that they bought a book off of Amazon.  No one is embarrassed to say that they have a Facebook profile.  So what gives?  Oh, wait, I’ve kind of answered that question.

Anyway, those who are in the “I’m gonna justify myself,” category are the ones who interest me here.  Because the big justification tends to be, “I’m doing this because I’m tired of meeting guys in bars.”

This is where internet dating is supposed to shine.  It’s like the world’s biggest bar, where the music isn’t too loud and you’re not particularly likely to get roofied.  What’s not to like?

And the first time you get on to an internet dating site it does seem pretty goddamn amazing.  There are hundreds, nay, thousands of people just there, waiting for you to send them messages.  But looks in this case can be deceiving.

If you stick around long enough you pretty much see the same profiles pop up about a thousand times.  It eventually becomes obvious that the internet can’t actually offer nearly as much variety as it’s supposed to.  All of the sudden you hear about a whole new website that’s supposedly this year’s killer app.  So you go running on over to that site to see where all the new people are.

You and a bunch of other people on the site you’re on now.  So guess who you’re going to be seeing in the new digs?  You guessed it.

I first experimented with internet dating back on the old Yahoo Personals in 2008.  Since then I’ve done OKCupid, Plenty of Fish,[4] and Match.  And I did eHarmony for a month, but that was just to see what the hell the deal was with eHarmony.  That might get a post all to itself.  I’ve seen a lot of profiles that ended up on several sites at the same time.  Hell, when I switched my location back to Chicago from Dallas one of the first OKC profiles I saw was one I recognized from my first stint on Yahoo Personals.

The sites themselves recognize this, too.  Match now owns OKCupid, but hasn’t really messed with it that much.  When I signed up for Match I got the option to sign up for Chemistry.com (at something like forty bucks a month.  Fuck that noise).  It’s all just an opportunity to diversify revenue streams.  Or, more accurately, get diverse streams of revenue out of a single wallet.

So that, “I’m just here because I’m tired of meeting guys in bars?”  It’s the great promise of internet dating.  But, really, it’s probably not going to get fulfilled.

But, hey, at least the creepy-ass motherfuckers on the web don’t have to know your real name and can’t follow you home.  So there’s that…

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[1]Admittedly, these introductions are painted in broad enough strokes that it’s almost impossible to visualize a profile that doesn’t fit in to one of them, especially if you think of the third as a catch-all.  In fact it really isn’t.  Basically, I assume a general population of people who genuinely want to date and see online dating as a valid option.  So the outliers are the, “I’m just here to make friends,” “I’m just here trying to get laid,” and the, “I’m doing this as research for a terrible book/rom-com/expose on the creepy-ass people you meet when dating online because I’m ten years behind the cultural zeitgeist and I want to reinforce the stereotype of internet daters as lonely, asocial weirdos who live in basements and don’t bathe.”  Oh, and then there’s the, “We’re a couple looking for a girl to have sex with.”  Those are…those are just special.

My approach, it should come as no surprise, is the, “Ah, fuck it,” approach.  I regard the others as being both insulting and a waste of time.  Hopefully the text between the little “[1]s” will have explained that in detail.

[2]One of the interesting counter-narratives of Christian “persecution” in this nation is that we’ve somehow decided we hate and revile motherhood.  It basically amounts to, “The damned feminazis aren’t shitting out a little bastard every year starting at puberty and choosing to work instead.  Why do they hate Jesus so much?”  Except there’s a lot less swearing.  And they probably switched out “little bastard” for “Jaysus’s pwecious widdle chiwdwen” or something equally faux-adorable (fauxdorable?).

In reality, no one hates married people.  No one hates mothers and fathers.  It’s pretty much the expected default state.  People are far more likely to look askance at single people, especially those single people who are theoretically old enough to have grown out of that sowing your wild oats stage.  Monogamous pair bonding for the purposes of reproduction is an expected response to growing old enough to be called a grown up, after all.  I’m not saying single people are persecuted, but the whole thing can actually be explained as a variation on the issue of complaining about the world while missing out on your own unexamined privilege.

The expectation, then, is that if you’re single and of a certain age then you can’t possibly be responsible or happy.  If you attempt to fix that by internet dating it’s because there’s something wrong with you or it’s a sign that you’re desperate.  Most people I’ve communicated with while doing the internet thing don’t fit the stereotypes.

Except this doesn’t necessarily hold true for Texas women.  Although I talked to a couple who were great, there was a strong stink of desperation about Texas women.  Circumstantial evidence indicates that’s related to being a single woman in Texas more than anything else, however.  And the women I met down there who didn’t stink of desperation tended to be transplants from elsewhere, which seems an important point.

[3]I actually picked up on Matt Nathanson back around 2006.  Beneath These Fireworks was out, but I don’t think that At the Point had arrived yet.  He then blew up like N’SYNC shortly after Some Mad Hope came out in 2007 and is now inescapable.  But when Pandora first pointed me in his direction he was an obscure singer/songwriter from San Francisco.

Also, memory is a funny thing.  I find myself attempting to triangulate when, exactly, I learned about Matt Nathanson.  I remember that my first wave of Pandora bands consisted of the Saw Doctors, the Lost Immigrants, the Lovehammers, and Nathanson.  “Wisdom of Youth” off of the Doctors’ 2006 release was the first Saw Doctors song I ever heard.  2006 was also the year the Lost Immigrants released …Waiting on Judgment Day and before that they didn’t, y’know, exist in any sort of easily purchasable form.  …Waiting on Judgment Day didn’t come out until late in the year, though, so that doesn’t matter.  My earliest saved Pandora stations go back to July 4, 2006, so that would seem to be a good place to say, “Yup, that’s where it started.”  However, I have a very strong recollection of listening to Beneath These Fireworks on the way home after having one of those conversations that went until the sun came up with a girl I thought would be super important in my life and I’m pretty sure that happened before the Fourth of July.  I know it happened during the summer of 2006.  In other news, in spite of the fact that I regard Beneath These Fireworks as Nathanson’s best album, I had a really hard time listening to it for years.

[4]That place is the internet dating ghetto.  Srsly.  It’s popular for reasons I can’t even begin to understand.