Accidental Historian

Let's Talk Dating for Some Reason

I’ve had a The Single Life and/or a ZOMG! Teh Menz post a-brewin’ for a while.  The problem is that it’s entirely based on me responding to articles, several of which I read about a month ago.  So it’s all getting a bit jumbled about in my head.  That’s fun, though, right?

What’s going to end up happening here, though, is I’m just going to put up a bunch of links.

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People love writing about online dating.  I’m no different, I suppose.  I’ve written a bunch of posts about online dating.  I haven’t written any lately, though, mostly because my ability to care about the whole thing is rather limited at the moment.  Still, I’m always interested when other people write about it online dating.  Mostly because about half of the articles end up being hilariously wrong or misguided.

Peter Ludlow wrote an article in The Atlantic as a follow-up to a different article written by Dan Slater.  I read Ludlow’s first.  That matters.

See, Ludlow’s article was all about how online dating has commoditized dating.  I actually wrote about that exact same thing many, many months ago.  One of the big problems that humans have is dealing with a situation where there are too many choices.  One of the other big problems that humans have is dealing with a situation where several of the available choices are pie-in-the-sky fantasy, at best.  Too many pie-in-the-sky fantasy choices could be the name of the next big online dating site.

I would never make a claim, however, that online dating destroys commitment, either in theory or in practice.  I think I was pretty clear in my own musings about online dating that I was going in with incorrect attitudes and presuppositions and that I was pretty damaged.  All online dating does is allow damaged people to meet other damaged people they wouldn’t otherwise meet and spread the misery farther and faster.

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I read the Dan Slater article next, pretty much in the spirit of an anecdote that Ludlow then jumped off of with a sort of detached journalism.  As such, I didn’t immediately notice that there were…shall we say, problems with the Slater article.

Amanda Marcotte and Alexis Madrigal sure did.  This is the introductory paragraph from Marcotte’s article:

Last week, Dan Slater at the Atlantic wrote what may be the worst piece on online dating I’ve ever read, which is a truly remarkable feat in such a competitive field. Slater’s theory is that because online dating sites are a magical wonderland where men can meet and fuck an endless array of women, it means men will have no desire to get married and thus will be the ruin of marriage. If I were married to Dan Slater, I would get a lawyer on retainer now, because there’s projection all over this thing. And let’s be clear: Slater means men. He claims “people”, but as Alexis Madrigal (who, if you’re rushing to disagree with him, I should point out is male, so you might want to slow your roll, trolls) points out in the same publication, Slater didn’t bother to interview any women, much less any men that have a different experience from his buddy Jacob.

This is the second paragraph from Alexis’s article:

Narratively, the story focuses on Jacob, an overgrown manchild jackass who can't figure out what it takes to have a real relationship. The problem, however, is not him, and his desire for a "low-maintenance" woman who is hot, young, interested in him, and doesn't mind that he is callow and doesn't care very much about her. No, the problem is online dating, which has shown Jacob that he can have a steady stream of mediocre dates, some of whom will have sex with him.

That pretty much sums up Dan Slater’s article in a nutshell.

One of the real big problems with anyone who writes an article about online dating that’s primarily from one person’s perspective is that that one person might be wrong about a lot of things.  I include myself in this.  I don’t offer myself as a paragon of people who have experienced online dating, since I freely admit that I was kind of being a major asshole a lot of the time.  Yeah, I might have just met some crazy people, but I probably didn’t do a damn thing to help myself, either.

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So yesterday Amanda Marcotte offered up the diametric opposite of the “guy who just wants to get laid” article with the “woman who desperately wants to get married” article.  Those are also fun.  Amanda offered her thoughts as a counterpoint to Jill over at Feministe and, for the record, I can’t be arsed to read the original article, since I really don’t care.  What I want to highlight is something Amanda points out that is a fascinating underlying assumption of all of these sorts of articles:

Now, I’m not married and don’t want to be, in no small part because the institutional nature of marriage leads directly to this kind of thinking, wherein “spouse” is a job you want filled instead of an outgrowth of your love for another person. But there’s definite ideological argument of gender underpinning these stereotypes of why women and men marry. Basically, the implication is that real love between men and women is a myth. This fits into a larger sexist belief that men and women are “opposites” who put up with each other out of necessity, but who don’t really like each other very much. Believers in this believe that women need men, who are their social superiors, to choose them and validate them. (Being unchosen is considered a fate worse than death, which is why so many conservatives think that it’s a game winner to “argue” that feminists are just unchosen women who are bitter about our lack of validation from men—validation that is our sole purpose in existing, apparently.) In exchange for validating a woman’s right to exist by choosing her, a man gets someone to look after him and his home, provide him regular sex, and have children that will be named after him.

A while back I went on several dates with a woman.  She was intelligent and accomplished.  She also seemed to be quite well prepared for the whole settling down thing and decided that I was the one to do that.

My problem there was pretty simple: I just wasn’t that into her.  I tried to convince myself to change my mind, but I couldn’t[1] bring myself to that.  One of the interesting things about the way my mind works is that I draw pretty quick and accurate conclusions and then I spend about six months ignoring those conclusions until everything shakes out.

So what happened was I walked away from the first date, which went pretty well, all things considered, with Sons of Bill’s “So Much for the Blues”[2] running through my head.  I then proceeded to not really think about her much and act like kind of a dick the next time I saw her.  In spite of that, though, she kept trying.  It eventually hit the point where every interaction we had came down to a conversation about how we couldn’t get along.

It was pretty much awful.

This particular story is a bit different from the “women planning their weddings even though they’re single and will probably be single for a long-ass time” thing in that I don’t know that she was planning to plug me into a five-year plan in a marriage binder filled with clippings from Modern Bride or whatever.  I bring it up, though, because it’s pretty obvious she had a plan, she decided that I was the ideal person to fill in that part of the plan, and she didn’t notice that I was very much not on board.  Then, even though I pretty much played the role of major dickhead, she still tried to get me to play that role.

I think this is the danger of seeing relationships as a job and the potential job applicants as being interchangeable.  You ignore the person in front of you for the person who is in your head filling the role you think they should fill.  It’s a good way to get yourself hurt and end up developing extremely negative opinions of your fellow humans.

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[1]Protip: don’t do that.  Seriously, if something isn’t right, even if you can’t figure out why, just go with that.  Life is easier that way.

[2]For those who don’t know, it’s basically a song about a guy breaking up with a girl and not giving a shit.  Because he’s a total dick.  And now he’s going to write a song about it, because breaking someone’s heart to write a song is a worthwhile trade.  It also includes some of my favorite lyrics ever:

Yeah I wish I could write a song like Townes Van Zandt
Then I could be a son of a bitch and no one would give a damn
And I just keep telling myself that no one understands

Because I Can't Leave Well Enough Alone...

If I’m going to stop doing this, at the very least I don’t want to leave on a note of, “Here’s a shitty post and because I wrote this shitty post I’ve decided to stop writing posts altogether.”  That’s just friggin’ sad, really.  And it kinda reeks of sour grapes or giving up or something, so there’s that.

Anyway, there’s this shitty post.  Now, the post is, in and of itself, fairly poorly written.  Also, too, it’s not intended to just say, “Hey, look at me, I’m an asshole,” but it’s exactly the post I would have written if I were trying to do that.  So at least I’ve learned that all-important lesson.  The idea behind the post, however, isn’t something I have a problem with.  As such, I have no intention of walking it back, but I do feel the need to contextualize the point and, in contextualizing, hopefully make the point I wanted to make but without writing yet another shitty post.  Because, y’know, craftsmanship.

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One of the questions I stop and ask myself from time to time is, “Why?”  I find I tend to do things on autopilot a lot, so if I’m just doing something for the sake of doing it I occasionally re-evaluate.  This is especially important to do when I hate what I’m doing.

When I started my Online Dating series I started asking the, “Why?” question, since it’s pretty freaking obvious that I hate online dating.  This is a corollary to the larger issue that I hate dating.  So in asking, “Why the hell am I doing this online dating thing,” and getting the answer, “Because it’s the easiest way to engage in the act of dating,” the next question is, “And why am I trying to engage in the act of dating?”

That question is far more interesting, since the answer is, “Fuck if I know.”  The follow-up, then, is, “So why are you doing it?”  My standard answer is, “Because I want to stay in practice in case I ever decide to take this seriously.”

And here we have a problem.

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I like being by myself.  I’ve basically built my life around being isolated, but adjacent to humanity so that I can wander out of my isolation from time to time and say hello to the world.  One of the reasons for this is that I don’t really much like Public Me, which is a problem that has stymied me for quite some time.

Public Me is loud, obnoxious, self-serving, and tries way too fucking hard.  He’s a throwback to my old days as the Fat Kid who was trying desperately to be accepted and approved of by the rest of the world.  I don’t like him very much, but I’ve never really been able to get rid of him.  I have toned him down quite a bit, which is nice, but, again, I want him to go away.

The awkward, baffling thing here, though, is the other people seem to like Public Me.  He’s apparently funny and personable these days, and memorable in what seems to be a good way.  I can’t really go too deeply in to this as, again, I despise Public Me, so I have no idea what people see in Public Me.  I think of him as someone who tries way too hard to force jokes that don’t work and dominates conversations just because he doesn’t know how to shut the fuck up.  I regard (possibly as a bit of wishful thinking) myself as someone who is easily forgotten, but I’m apparently the only one who does so.  I suspect there’s a reason for that.

Public Me spends his time at war with Private Me.

I like Private Me.  Private Me is quiet and contemplative.  Private Me can go weeks without talking to anyone outside of required interactions.  Private Me really would be forgotten in a crowd, since he’d probably show up, talk to no one, then leave having made no impression on anyone.

There are a few people in this world who have met Private Me.  He basically only comes out in one-on-one interaction with people I know well and manifests as a guy who can sit in the corner and talk about basically anything for hours on end over coffee or beers.  For the most part, though, he hangs out and watches the world.  This is the nature of being private, after all.

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Public Me and Private Me share interests and experiences.  I can’t imagine how they wouldn’t, really, since this isn’t an issue of multiple personalities or any such thing.  One of those interests, it should surprise no one, is Trickster.  The difference is that Private Me wants to study Trickster while Public Me wants to be Trickster.

Trickster, when it gets right down to it, is kind of a dick.  He is selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel.  All he cares about when interacting with the world is the question, “What can I get out of this?”  If it helps someone then that’s great.  If it hurts someone that’s great, too.  What matters to Trickster is that he gets what he went out to get.

This is why I was fascinated with N.K. Jemisin’s treatment of Trickster as a young boy.  Ultimately, Trickster is immature, interacting with the world on a circumscribed level where all that matters is how everything stacks up in the win-loss column.  He’ll play fair, but change the rules.  Imagine Trickster as playing an endless game of Calvinball with the world.  Calvin is, for all intents and purposes, Trickster anyway.  Hobbes is the adult world, gaining the occasional upper hand but never actually winning because he’s always trying to win the last game or even the last minute of this game.

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I never took the whole online dating thing seriously.  It was all just a way to actually avoid dating entirely.  Basically, I was playing a game and the rules were, “Meet crazy women, use them to justify not making any sort of commitment. “  Unfortunately, from time to time I managed to run across women who didn’t understand that was the game I was playing and were actually decent human beings.

How does someone who is operating from a disingenuous position deal with someone who isn’t without causing a great deal of destruction?  The answer to that, I do believe, is, “That’s not possible.”  While I recognized that this was both a possibility and a problem, I continued to play my little game of Calvinball with complete strangers.  The only explanation for this behavior that makes a lick of sense is, “I am selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel.”

I do not like thinking of myself as a person who has such qualities.  The only way to stop being an asshole is to stop being an asshole, I suppose.  So the only way I can stop that in this specific case is to stop all dating-related activity completely.  All I’m doing is using the women I meet as story fodder, after all.

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That might seem extreme, absurd, even.  But when the question, “Why?” leads to unexpected places the follow-up inevitably must be, “What do you want, instead?”  I answer that question overwhelmingly with, “To be left alone.”

It’s a mug’s game, then, if you’re the sort of woman who makes the mistake of deciding you want to date me.  Chances are good that you’ll meet Public Me.  If you, for reasons that completely escape me, decide you like Public Me, it won’t end well, since you’ll be attracted to the me that I can’t stand.  The more time you spend with Public Me the more I’ll see how far I can push before you push back or leave.  This probably seems remarkably immature.  There’s a reason for that: it’s the whole Trickster/child thing.  On one level I’ll want to push your buttons to amuse myself.  On another level I won’t know how to break it off and I’ll basically try to make sure you leave because that’s a win according to my bizarre little game of dating Calvinball.

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There’s another follow-up question that must be asked: why don’t I just get rid of/redirect Public Me?

Believe me, I’d like to.  Private Me, it shouldn’t be surprising, doesn’t do well in public.  Public Me simply manifests when the need arises and I have very little recourse in dealing with that other than saying, “I’m never going out in public again.”  When it gets right down to it, Public Me is a big ol’ defense mechanism fueled by insecurity.

Fighting that by never going outside again seems like a lousy option.  By the same token, it doesn’t seem like a lousy option, since I don’t mind being alone.  Thus I live in tension.  At the moment I simply do not know how to resolve that tension.

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A friend of mine who knows me well enough pointed towards an alternate and/or complementary explanation for my conundrum.  It basically boils down to the notion that I have a pretty long history of running afoul of manipulative and controlling women.  He also pointed out that I’ve been mostly seeking stability for the last few years and women are not at all a source of stability for me.

I find the latter part of that fascinating.  I instinctively want to avoid the former, though, since it basically sounds like an Argumentum ad Bitches Be Trippin’, and the Argument from Bitches Be Trippin’ is usually the first (and last) resort of the misogynist scoundrel.  It has a certain amount of explanatory power, however, especially when combined with the Public Me/Private Me dichotomy.

I don’t have a good history with women who don’t treat me as a child or like shit, basically.  The ones who haven’t have historically also not really wanted much of anything to do with me.  As such, this has left me with a fairly binary categorization of women as either interested in me and not worth it or uninterested in me and possibly/probably worth it.  The interested and not worth it category then breaks down to cynical and manipulative or crazy and desperate.

Thinking on it, I’m not surprised in the least that my two somewhat long-term relationships, Ashley and Amy, were with the cynical and manipulative type, while my abortive dating attempts since 2008 have mostly been with the crazy and desperate types.  Ashley was the first one who seemed to give a shit, but she was also a cheater who flagrantly manipulated me and even after I broke it off with her and said some astonishingly horrible things in the process still tried to reconnect with me on a schedule I could almost set my clocks to every year for the next nine years.[1]  Amy…meh, I’ve talked about her enough.

After that there’s a collection of oddball characters I’ve enjoyed telling stories about from the safe remove of time and space.  Tossed in there, though, are a few genuinely good women who didn’t seem to care much for me or who were unavailable for one reason or another.  On some level it’s bad luck or bad timing.  On some level, though, it’s also self-fulfilling prophecy.

In this theory, then, Private Me becomes the only real person I can genuinely trust when the chips are down.  So Public Me’s games of relational Calvinball are just there to protect me and keep me solitary while I attempt to figure out how to make it through life.  This creates a whole new set of problems.

Basically, I’ve been running around and creating chaos in the lives of others.  Either I can decide to stop being a giant dick and actually try to meet someone with best intentions or I can throw my hands up, say, “Fuck that noise,” and go with a life of solitude.  The latter is actually rather attractive, but it’s really something that requires a certain level of commitment.  Otherwise I’m just playing games and it’s other people getting hurt by them.

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[1]The final (I hope) round of that came with her trying to start the dialogue by telling me that no one knew me better than she did and no one cared about my like she did.  NINE FUCKING YEARS OF ALMOST MINIMAL CONTACT AFTER I TOLD HER TO FUCK OFF AND DIE.  Let that one sink in for a minute.

Being Trickster

I am selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel.

There are few things that are pleasant in self-admission like that.  But there are many things that are honest in such self-assessment.  I suppose, in the end, that there is something pleasant about honesty, even of the least pleasant variety.

It occurred to me while I was reading N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy.  They’re fantastic books and if Jemisin ever offers a master class on worldbuilding I want to be there for it.  Her most inspired decision of all, though, was her decision to incorporate Trickster as a primary character and have her Trickster choose to be a child.

I will admit that as a student of Coyote and Raven I hated that choice at first.  But the longer I was with her character the more I appreciated the choice.  The more I appreciated the choice the more I realized she was revealing something about Trickster that I’d never before considered.  The more I considered this new notion of Trickster the more I realized that part of my reason for identifying so strongly with Coyote is that underlying assumed nature of Coyote: he is selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel.

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“I’ll tell you a story if you want,” she said, “Later, in private.  So you won’t be embarrassed.”

I’d never met her before, so the idea that any story she could tell embarrassing me was almost entirely outside the realm of possibility.  It helps, too, that I am almost entirely shameless anymore.  There are things I’d rather people not know because I don’t want to talk about them, but that’s not the same as something I’d rather people not know because I’d be embarrassed.  I realized something not long before I started the Online Dating series right here on this blog: only I have the power to embarrass me.  If I don’t care there isn’t a damn thing you can do to make my face red.

This goes double for strangers.  “How would it embarrass me?” I asked.  “You don’t even know me.”

“You’ll find out why soon enough,” she said.

I suppose you want some staging.  It was a party.  I’d wandered away from the knot of guys I knew reasonably well and was sitting between a guy named Stave and a cute woman who I’d decided I liked just fine but who I’d also decided I didn’t even begin to want to consider dating.  She was sitting next to the would-be storyteller, who was next to another woman I didn’t know and a guy I’d met once or twice before.  Oh, and there was another guy.  So…basically this wasn’t a group of my closest friends.  I’m dangerous in groups like that, since I simply do not give a fuck.

“Whatever,” I said.

“I saw your profile on Match.com and sent you an email and you never wrote back.”

Have I mentioned the bit where I’m selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel?  Because, um, that third part kind of comes in to play here.  I couldn’t fathom why that mattered.  I’d be surprised to learn I had a better than 10% rate of response to emails on online dating sites.  Part of the reason I stopped doing it was because I hate wasting my time.  Most of the reason I feel I was wasting my time is because I’d send emails and never get a response.

In short, my best response to this was, “Welcome to my world.”  I don’t think that was what I said, though.  Honestly, I don’t remember what my immediate response was.

Cute girl on my left decided she was going to try to make fertilizer out of this particular load of bullshit.  “You turned this down?” she asked, gesturing at the spinner of the so-called embarrassing story.  She was, admittedly, not particularly unattractive.

Here’s the thing, though: if I didn’t respond there’s a 99% chance there was a good reason I didn’t (well, maybe not 99%, since there’s always a chance that, “I just plain forgot,” is an option.  Seriously, try an experiment.  Send me an email.  See if I respond.  Chances are 50-50 at best that I will.  Even if it’s a fantastic email and I want to respond there’s a decent chance that I’ll read it, think, “I should respond to that,” and then never get around to it.  Why?  Repeat after me: selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel.  The first two matter in this context).  In fact, I’m pretty sure I know who she was and I know when she emailed me and I can hazard a guess that, yes, there’s a good reason I didn’t reply.  Right now there are two possibilities in my mind and it might be both.  They don’t matter, though.  Not really.

“Maybe this can be a make-up,” said cute woman.  “A do-over.”

“No.”  I said.  There’s that cruelty.  It’s not intentional.  I think, on some level, the cruelty comes from a place of kindness.  Honesty, in my book, is the best policy.  I’m not about to change my mind, so there’s no point in playing games or pretending in anything.  And if she thinks I’m an asshole she can decide she ended up better in the deal, anyway.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for my particular brand of cruelty, though.  I think it’s partially a Midwestern thing, as those of us who are from around these parts are conditioned to not be honest when it might hurt someone’s tender sensibilities.  Basically, if you’re from the Midwest and you’re dating someone your family and friends hate, you’ll know your family and friends hate that person, at least as long as you’re, y’know, reasonably aware.  They just won’t say it.  The moment you break up with that person, though, you’ll get a flood of, “She was such a bitch, but I didn’t want to say anything,” or, “He was totally bad for you, but I knew you had to figure that out on your own.”  It’s a bullshit cop-out your friends and family are engaging in.  I hate to tell you that, but it’s true.

I, of course, have pulled that routine in the past.  I’m a Midwesterner, after all.

Now, though, I am cruel.  I am honest and without tact and honesty without tact is not kind.

Or something.  I doubt that anything would have happened even if I hadn’t said, “No.”  My intended audience wasn’t my jilted wannabe internet dating companion, after all, it was the one in the middle advocating for some sort of Happily Ever After that wouldn’t be happening any time soon.

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Every once in a while I wonder if I’m not engaging in some sort of elaborate revenge fantasy.  All the pretty girls ignored me in high school.  Now every once in a while I get the attention of some woman or other and shut her down.  I have to admit that on some level it amuses me.

If I had a nickel for every woman who ignored me I wouldn’t have to go to work.

Okay, that’s not true.  But as far as hyperbole goes, it ain’t bad.  I’ve been shot down and rejected a shitload of times, after all.  I don’t think a lot of women know what that’s like.

In the sixth grade there was Gwen.  In the seventh it was Erin.  Sophomore and senior year in high school it was Katie.  Junior year it was Heidi.  In my post-high school years there was Amy and Abbie and Angie and Amy and Erin and Emily and Anne and Amy and Jamie and Michelle.  And those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.  There are dozens more out there somewhere.  None of them were from my abortive attempts at internet dating, either.  None of them even matter, really, except for the three or four women I’m actually friends with on some level after meeting them through internet dating sites.

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There is one aspect of my decision to stop dating that I try not to think about and that my little story here illustrates.

Basically, I’ve realized that there might be, somewhere in this world, decent women who actually do care about things and who run afoul of my selfishly self-absorbed cruelty and get hurt by it.  In the end I can’t really help it if that happens, especially since my general default view of the world doesn’t actually include that as a possibility.[1]  The fact that I can’t help it doesn’t mean that I should actively seek the opportunity to make it happen, though.

When it gets right down to it, I apparently see myself as diseased.  I’ve quarantined myself off from the world to avoid infecting anyone else.  In a more reasonable person that would probably be sad.

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[1]My general attitude is that everyone forgets about me if I’m not in the room.  As such, being hurt by something I’ve done is completely impossible, as I don’t matter enough to anyone to actually do anything they’ll care about long-term.  I’m intellectually aware of the fact that the world doesn’t actually work this way, but by the same token the world of internet dating really fucking should work this way and I’m somewhat surprised to learn that it apparently doesn’t.  The internet has a memory that only lasts until the next meme, after all.

The Series Shall Continue Indefinitely

I put a semi-snarky Facebook status up yesterday[1]:

[Geds] has decided on a 2012 New Year's resolution. He won't go on a single date over the course of 2012. That should save him three, maybe four evenings.

Statistically speaking, four evenings is pretty much dead on.  By my recollection, I went on four dates in 2011 (three with the same person, which is basically a goddamn record, by the by).  I went on five in 2010 (I initially said I went on three, maybe four, then I actually recalled the “maybe four” and remembered a fifth.  These count as “the least memorable dates ever,” which is odd, since one very nearly involved The Dude himself, Mr. Jeff Bridges and the other included the very worst excuse to get out of a date I’ve ever heard.  Hell, maybe there’s a sixth or seventh out there and I just totally forgot).  I kind of have to put a composite 2008-2009 timeline together with the caveat that the first four months of 2008 don’t count due to a pre-existing condition, but between 2008 and 2009 I can think of six dates, one of which might not have actually counted.

Fifteen dates.  Forty-three months.  That adds up to an average of 4.19 dates/year.

Of those fifteen dates, meanwhile, thirteen happened because of internet dating sites (and one happened because of Facebook, but that’s a whole ‘nother story).  The breakdown of that adds up to 3.63 dates/year due to internet dating-related shenanigans and .56 dates/year due to not-internet-dating-related shenanigans.  Also, both non-internet-dating dates came in 2008.  It can be said that internet dating is a statistically significant portion of my statistically insignificant dating life.[2]

So, really, what that Facebook status was about wasn’t a decision to not date, it was a decision to delete my internet dating profiles.  The use of the specific word “delete” is significant.  See, the profile that I put the most work in to was my OKCupid profile.  That puppy started out nearly at the dawn of my pointless odyssey and has evolved over the past three plus years.  On top of that, the OKC profile served as a template for my Match profile and whenever I’d start a random profile on POF just to remind myself how fuck-stupid that place is I’d just copy paste from my OKC profile.  All told, it was at least as important in terms of my overall web footprint as Facebook and Accidental Historian.[3]

Now it’s gone.  On OKC there are two things you can do if you want to get off the site.  You can “disable” your account or you can “delete” your account.  The primary difference between the two is one of permanence.  Basically, if you disable you go inactive.  All you have to do to get the profile re-started is log in and, boom, everything is there and normal and whatnot.  I did that several times over the life of the account, most recently at Thanksgiving.  If you delete it’s gone.  It ain’t coming back.  My only choice now is to start over from scratch, which is kind of a giant pain in the ass.

And yet, here I am, about 22 hours after doing exactly that (also deactivating my Match profile, which is less of a big deal due to the fact that it was going to expire on Christmas and I was absolutely not going to give those bastards another dime) and I kinda-sorta want to make a new one.  This brings me to an interesting conclusion.  I can no longer talk about internet dating without invoking the language of addiction.  I was, for all intents and purposes, addicted to internet dating.  Maybe we need some sort of Internet Daters Anonymous.  Actually, now that I think about it, that seems like a really good idea.  Like, a bunch of people who can’t find relationships but kind of want to end up all hanging out in the same place and possibly decide that someone else there is a good match.  What could be bad?

Oh, wait, they have a site that facilitates exactly that.  It’s called Meetup.com.  Meetup is good.  Why?  Because it forces you to get the fuck out of your house and actually meet people.[4]  And you don’t even have to DATE them.  Hell, they might even be people of your non-sexually-preferred gender with whom you share interests or people or people of your sexually-preferred gender who you would actually not like to date but would like to hang out with.[5]  That’s fucking crazy, right?

Anyway, where was I?  Oh, right, I was jonesing for a goddamn internet dating profile.[6]  Here’s the problem:  I put a shitload of work in to that thing over the past couple years.  That work paid off in exactly no way, shape, or form.[7]  And yet, I have this strange urge to do it all over again.

Why?  Because I’m a fucking internet dating addict, that’s why.  Is that not the definition of addiction?  I habitually (you might say obsessively) devoted myself to that whole internet dating rigmarole.  It got me absolutely nowhere.  I didn’t enjoy it the vast majority of the time I was doing it.  And yet here I am, wondering what I’ll do without it.

That’s sad.  I’m sad now.

I’m going to go contemplate the uselessness that is my life now. Maybe I’ll go make some pie charts that depict the overall sadness that is my existence.

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[1]Yeah, there’s nothing dumber than talking about Facebook statuses.  BUT THIS ONE HAS A POINT!

[2]By my calculations, 1.2% of my days over the previous 43 months included a date of some sort.  If we assume that each date took three hours (which, actually, might be a slightly low number), then that means that over the past 43 months I spent 0.15% of my time on dates.  If you’d like, I could put that in a database for you.  It’ll be really, really small, though.  Maybe a spreadsheet or pie chart would be more appropriate.

Eh.  Fuck it.




[3]That’s really sad, when I put it in those terms.

[4]Also, if you think I’m even remotely joking about it being Internet Daters Anonymous, I did a thing a couple weeks ago and it partially involved several guys standing around talking about internet dating experiences.  That was the second time that a Meetup-based event turned to talking about internet dating.  I also have one friend that I actually talked to on an internet dating site, then ended up meeting at a Meetup thing.  She’s good people, I like her, I’m glad that I met her that way rather than on a date, since there was no interest there to speak of and it would have been super awkward.  We probably never would have spoken to each other again.

[5]Possible.  Probable, even.  That’s kinda the point.  Except for the groups that are specifically designed to help single people hook up with each other.  I keep thinking of joining the speed dating group because holyshithaveyoueverdonespeeddating?It’ssuperawkwardandatthesametimehilariousanddumb.

[6]For the record, I do kind of want to do a bizarro internet profile.  Basically, I was a giant sloppy tub of lard a couple years ago.  Now I am not.  I kind of want to set up a profile where I use pictures from that period, then warn people that the pictures are kind of old.  Then if I actually do end up going on a date I’ll show up and be all, “Sorry to misrepresent myself.”  Why?  Because the idea of doing that amuses the hell out of me for some reason.  Also, I need a hobby.  And making pie charts probably doesn’t count.

[7]The breakdown, as best I can remember it: 3 dates from Yahoo Personals, 5 from OKC, 2 from POF, 3 from Match, and I know that only adds up to 13 when there should be 14, but fuck if I can remember the last one.  Interestingly enough, I paid something like a hundred bucks for that Match profile to get three dates.  Was it worth it?  Fuck, no.  Sorry, person who probably hates me.  Although I suppose I made a couple friends out of that deal, so hey, at 50 bucks a friend…that’s actually kind of sad when I put it like that.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh, yeah, so, like, three and a half years of working on the various internet profiles.  Approximately fourteen dates.  That’s an atrocious ROI.  Add to that the time to actually look at other peoples’ profiles and the hundreds of emails I took the time to actually write and the dozens of email exchanges that literally went nowhere and you’ve got a giant clusterfuck of uselessness.

Question and Answer

Firedrake asked a question in the comments on the post Two Questions (appropriately enough):

Seems to me that a woman might very easily get lots of responses by looking at the "standard" profiles women post and aiming not to match them. So why don't they? (a) They worry that the responders would be weirdoes; (a.1) they don't want to seem too different from the boring mainstream; (b) they don't think of it; (c) ?

The most likely reason for women not doing this unfortunately pulls double-duty as both the most likely and the most boring.  Odds are pretty good that they’ve simply never looked at another woman’s profile.  It’s fairly easy to think about an internet dating profile as being like a Myspace or Facebook profile.  While this is the case there’s one key distinction:  there’s no real reason to look at a profile of someone you’re not at least potentially interested in.  So if you’re straight you’re probably not going to be spending too much time looking at other people of your same gender.

There is a fascinating dynamic at play that can be brought up: in general the standard dating websites are terrible at options.  In general you’re got the option of “Man seeking women,” “Woman seeking men,” “Man seeking men,” and, “Woman seeking women.”  Most sites aren’t even going to go out of their way to accommodate bisexual people, let alone the genderqueer.

This isn’t better exemplified than that flap from a couple of years ago where eHarmony wouldn’t even acknowledge gay people.  They claimed that it messed up their ever-so-brilliant matching technology, so there was no possible way that the service would be fair to people who enjoy the presence of other people with the same shaped genitalia.  This is an explanation that sounds good if you don’t know anything about, y’know, people.  Or dating.  Or how internet dating sites work.

Basically, the whole matching technology thing operates on the time-honored, “Throw some shit up against the wall and see what sticks,” approach.  Everyone answers some questions.  A computer program then crunches people’s answers to said questions together and says that Man A has an 80% match rate to Woman B, so Man A and Woman B should be introduced to each other.

This would be fantastic and brilliant if only people had the common decency to actually be questionnaires and computer programs instead of, well, people.  It’s stupid.  But it persists based on two things: we tend to only remember the things that support our arguments and we tend to believe that things that come with a percent sign afterwards are somehow more valid because math.[1]

The takeaway from this, though, is that as a man I’m only going to see women’s profiles.  Women, similarly, will only see men’s profiles.  You could always go and look for same gender profiles, but there’s really no reason to do so unless you’re specifically looking to date someone of your gender or you want to somehow improve your profile.  But most people don’t think like that.

Beyond that, there are hints and tips.  These are functionally useless for setting yourself apart, as they’re designed as general, aggregate guidelines.  So if you’re not the sort of person who can actually think for yourself already, you’ll just do what they say.  And they basically say, “Tell people what you like to do and what makes you unique.”  At this point you run right up against that most basic authorial maxim: “Show, don’t tell.”

Most people don’t know what that means and they don’t know how to do it.  So they see, “Tell them what makes you unique,” and, following the instructions to the letter they spit out, “I’m the most unique person you’re ever going to meet.”  They are, basically, a novice actor reading the stage directions off the card alongside the dial.

So then you get to the, “Tell them what you like to do.”  Well, most people like to hang out with their friends and go to concerts and read books and play with kittens and hang out on Facebook all day.  So they write that.

“But what about specifics?” you ask.  Well, that’s pretty bland, too.  Everybody on the planet has read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Harry Potter.  About 50% of the women out there are ever-so-willing to make the embarrassing admission that they’ve read Twilight.  So that’s no good.

Music, too, falls under some pretty easily-defined categories.  Everyone claims to have widely varied tastes and will then prove it by listing off a bunch of bands that you can pretty much guess at after reading the first two names.  Basically, the women fall under four broad categories: pop shit, indie hipster shit, girly music shit, and conventional ‘90s alternative/classic rock/mentioning every jazz musician you can think of in order to sound cultured, all of which falls under the, “Music usually seen as acceptable to men” category.[2]  Then there are regional variations.  Texas Country, for instance, was big in Texas.  Try not to act surprised.[4]

The specific favorite music choices then blur together.  So, basically, if you start off with, “Lady Gaga,” you’re probably going down the pop shit rails.  If you start out with “Iron & Wine” you’re probably going down the indie hipster shit rails.  If you start out with Louis Armstrong you’re probably lying to cover your embarrassing love of terrible pop music.  It’s really that simple.

Anyway, I guess the point is this: it takes a certain amount of effort to stand out.  People generally fall under broadly defined categories and the whole, “If you like this you’ll probably like this and won’t like that,” is pretty spot-on once you know a few variables.  Most people also don’t realize that they’re just blending in with the rest of the crowd, especially if they can’t see the crowd.

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So I guess there’s an additional follow-up question:  How do I know I’m not just one of a thousand profiles?  I don’t, actually.  And I’m okay with that.

I do, however, have two distinct advantages.  First, I know what “show, don’t tell” means and I follow it.  Second, I have enough bizarre, esoteric interests that I have to explain to people in real life that I’m pretty sure that I do actually stand out.  Nobody seems to know who Lawrence Weschler, Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers, and Mike Doughty are.  Nobody knows what a storyteller does.  So, y’know, it just kinda works.  I think.

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Then, too, we get to another follow-up question: how do you, person who is combing through these profiles, decide?

There’s kind of a two-fold strategy I use.  It’s fairly simple and based on years of combing through random, similar looking profiles.  First: I look for indications that the woman in question does, in fact, have things to say that aren’t blandly similar to what everyone else says.  They don’t necessarily have to be earth-shatteringly unique things.  It just needs to be a profile that doesn’t simply run on rails to bland cliché town.  Second: I (almost) never email someone the first time I see a profile.  If I go back to that profile later and remember who that person is, I then ask myself, “Why do I remember this person?”  And if there’s something interesting enough, then I send an email.

At that point, of course, whatever I have to say will most likely be ignored.  But sometimes doing my due diligence pays off.

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[1]You can make up statistics to prove anything.  14% of all people know that.

[2]This is not to say that there aren’t women who enjoy music from those categories.  But it becomes pretty obvious when someone is trying way too freaking hard.

That actually brings to mind a dating advice article I once saw that was a list of things every single woman needs to own.  One of them was “an Eminem CD.”  The reasoning behind this was that the first time a guy came to said woman’s apartment he’d be confronted with her chick music and freak out.  But if he saw that copy of the Slim Shady EP he’d be all, “Oh, this chick digs Eminem.  Aight.”  There’s a word for this.  Two words, actually:  fuck stupid.

Basically, it insults everyone involved, full stop. 

The face-value problem is that it says, “Men are really goddamn stupid.”  Because, really, if a guy is sitting there looking at a rack of CDs that consist of Adele, Ingrid Michelson, Sarah McLachlan, Regina Spektor, A Fine Frenzy,[3] Jason Mraz, and a Lillith Faire Best of collection you know what he’s thinking?  “Oh.  She listens to chick music.”  He’s not thinking, “Oh, fuck, she listens to chick music!  How will I survive?”  However, if he sees all of that and that one copy of a random Eminem CD, you know what he’s thinking?  “Wow.  She must think I’m stupid.”

The secondary problem is that is says to women, “The men you date are stupid.  They’ll assume you like Eminem and will, therefore, allow themselves to be ensnared because their guards are down.”

The tertiary problem is that it says to women, “You are pretty much fucking worthless.  Men only date you because you exhibit socially acceptable music preferences.”

I gots news for you, random internet advice columnist: I know that the women I date will have different tastes in music.  I know that I’ll probably find some of it terrible.  I’m okay with that because I’m not dating a Pandora station.

For that matter, I once dated a woman who didn’t really care one iota about Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers and thought the Waterboys were terrible.  Did I dump her for that?  No.  Should I have dumped her for that?  No.  Should I have broken things off with her for about a thousand non-music-related reasons?  Hell, yes.

Music.  It’s subjective.  I’m okay with that.

[3]Interests of full disclosure: I have a digital copy of A Fine Frenzy’s One Cell in the Sea.  Various songs off of said album kept coming up on my Female Vocalists station on Pandora and I was all, “Hey, she’s halfway decent.”  I also have a copy of Sarah McLachlan’s Mirrorball.  I also don’t mind Ingrid Michelson when she pops up on Pandora.

[4]Sadly, though, not the Lost Immigrants.  Why?  Because people are fucking stupid, that’s why.

Not to Sound Jaded or Nothin'...

I keep feeling like there’s an overarching point I want to make in my cavalcade of criticism of online dating that I’m just missing.  It’s one of those things where I feel like I’m nibbling around the edges of a BFD of a problem and saying enough to make it obvious, but I’m not actually getting to the point of the problem.  I think it has something to do with intent, purpose, and seriousness.

It should surprise no one who has actually read anything I’ve written on this subject (or, really, anyone who has read much of anything I’ve ever written) that I am profoundly unserious about the idea of online dating.  I was profoundly unserious about it at the start.  At that point I just wanted to find a couple dates and, well, practice.[1]

Since then I’ve been on a bunch of dates.  None of them have really gone anywhere.  Sometimes that’s been because the woman has been fuck crazy.  Sometimes, I’d assume, it’s been because she decided I am fuck crazy.  Sometimes it’s just been because of a lack of interest.  I’ve actually made several friends because of the whole thing.  So it’s not a total loss.

The thing about online dating is that it’s really not as bad as I’ve made it out to be.  I simply find the horrible stories hilarious, in addition to the fact that I find the commercials for online dating to be offensively happy and insipid.  It’s a product they’re selling, this idea of love and romance.

Love has, of course, always been a product, sold with a smile and a sly wink.  It’s not a fairy tale with knights in shining armor and beautiful damsels and dragons standing between them.  It’s just a thing with regular people who sometimes play the role of knight, sometimes the damsel, and sometimes the dragon.  Who is doing what at any given moment is often a matter of perspective and interpretation, too.

See, I don’t pretend that I’m the good guy in my stories.  I don’t pretend that I went in to all the dates I went in to with a pure heart that was then viciously crushed by a random succession of crazy chicks.  That’s stupid.  I figure there’s a pretty good chance that I’m the bad guy in a couple stories a few women out there tell, too.[2]

I’ve got my own set of issues, my own baggage, my own desires, and my own needs.  There’s nothing surprising about this, as I am a human.  Internet dating didn’t create my problems, but by the same token internet dating wasn’t going to fix them, either.  It is, I’ve learned, likely to exacerbate them.  I can only speak for myself on this issue, but I’ll bet that comes up an awful lot.

We present an idealized form of ourselves to the world.  I want everyone to think I’m smart and funny and capable.  Fortunately I actually do tend to be all of those things.  But I’m not as smart as I think I am.  My jokes fall flat from time to time.  There are a lot of things I can’t do or, at least, can’t do well.

If I meet someone out in the real world they might be impressed by who I project myself to be at first.  But with enough contact they’ll probably figure out pretty quick that I’m faking my way though certain things.  They’ll figure out where my insecurities lie.  They’ll find out I can be a total jerk for no damn good reason.

That’s okay.  That’s who I am, too.  I am a product of my good and bad in equal measure.  I am at times the person I strive to be and at other times the person I wish to avoid.  Everyone is like that.

On the internet, though, I am a persona, an avatar.  And I am talking to a persona.

A reasonably intelligent person who’s paying attention can cut through my BS in about five minutes in real life.  I’m not nearly as hard to figure out as I want to think I am.  I can maintain my ruse with someone with whom I am only communicating via email for a good long while, though.  It’s pretty easy to edit myself, after all.

The thing is, the other person can do the same thing, too.  So you end up with two personas communicating with each other.  If the first actual meeting is drawn out by a few weeks or a month or whatever there’s time for irreparable harm to be done before anything can even happen.  And that’s without one other wrinkle.

Projection becomes a huge problem, too.    If I want to believe the person on the other end of my email exchange is the product of all my hopes and dreams, I can do exactly that.  You can do that with a real person for a while, too.  But it’s way easier to do with an imaginary friend.[3]  That person is a blank slate.

When you finally meet your dream match in person, then, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll be disappointed.  Reality has a hard time matching up to fantasy, after all.  When that happens you have a choice: try to find out if you can handle being around this other person or go back in search of the perfect person.

This, of course, is nothing new under the sun.  The Golden Haired Woman is as old as literature itself.  The new twist with the internet, though, is that there’s always the promise she’s just one click away.  You don’t even have to get up off the couch.

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Given all this, my other major complaint and point of jadedness is almost ironic: eventually everyone kinda starts to look alike.  There’s only so many times you can see a picture of a random person you’ve never met and read a profile where they say, “I like puppies,” or something without deciding there is no difference between people.  It’s especially hard when well-worn cliché comes in to play:

Drama free.
Fun loving.
Work hard, play hard.[4]

It all just kind of blurs together after a while.

So then you finally find that profile that stands out in the crowd.  You take the time to figure out something they seem to really care about from the way they wrote it or something you both have in common or you come up with something really witty and your write them a note.  The next day you see they’ve looked at your profile.  You’re all excited.

Nothing happens.  You never hear back from them.

Well, fuck.

That’s not even the worst possibility.  Sometimes they do write back.  Like, once.  Or a couple times.  Then they just…stop.

That’s not even the worst possibility.  Sometimes it really seems to click.  Then they write to say, “Oh, I’m sorry.  I just started seeing someone else.”

That’s not even the worst possibility.  Okay, actually it’s kind of up there.

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Basically, online dating encourages its practitioners to be jaded.  You’ll probably have to deal with a lot of messages from people you don’t want to talk to.  You’ll probably have to deal with rejection from a lot of people you do want to talk to.  And you’ll always have to do it with the knowledge that the other person is probably talking to several other people at the same time they’re talking to you.

This, again, is nothing new under the sun.  But in the past you at least had to get up off the couch to do all of it.

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It seems that I tried the internet dating thing in order to learn about dating.  I suppose at that I was successful.  I just learned all the negative things about dating.

I’m not sure I like that.  I think I’d like to have at least a tiny shred of my former romantic notions intact.

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[1]Dating, as I may or may not have mentioned at some point in the past, is not a skill I possess.  By the middle of 2008 I had dated exactly three women and all three of those things had happened entirely by accident.  One of those had resulted in exactly one date, while the others had turned in to brutally emotionally damaging “relationships.”  I’d decided I really needed to get a lot better at dating so as to know what to do when I did finally meet someone great (see, I’d kinda blown a shot with someone great and not even taken a shot with someone else great right after the end of the whole debacle with her.  On some level that was just a rebound/broken heart/wrong time thing, but on another level I literally had no goddamn clue what I was doing), so I decided, “Hey, internet.  Why not?”

There was a point in my life, believe it or not, when I was a hopeless romantic.  I’m not saying the internet took that away, but I’m also not saying it wasn’t driving the getaway car.

[2]Hell, there might be a couple READING THIS VERY BLOG who are nodding sadly.  Ruh roh.

[3]The term “imaginary friend” is one I learned from the esteemed Michael Mock.  It means “person I only know over the internet.”  I love it.

[4]I cannot tell you how much I loathe that phrase.  More than, “I’m drama free,” “I work hard, I play hard,” will convince me to look elsewhere.  Because what it says is, “I’m completely unoriginal.”

Two Questions

So we’ve (well, I’ve) discussed the central issues of online dating as a systemic thing.  While the system is inherently interesting and ripe for parody, the prime fun comes from exactly where you’d expect: with individuals themselves.  People are, after all, an endless source of entertainment.

There are two basic questions that everyone must ask when approaching an individual via the online thing: the first is, “Should I message this person?”  The second, then, is, “How should I go about doing that?”[1]

The first question should be answered, of course, by the profile itself.[2]  This is the first place where the profile becomes a liability.  Five minutes of browsing an internet dating site will tell you a few things:

1.  Every person on the planet is “laid back” or “chill.”
2.  Everyone likes their family.
3.  Everyone likes to have fun.
4.  Everyone likes to have fun whilst hanging out with their friends and family.
5.  Everyone likes to laugh, preferably while having fun with family and friends.
6.  Everyone has a wide variety of tastes.
7.  Every woman is totally in to sports.  Unless she hates sports and anyone who likes them.
8.  Practically every woman is drama free.

Also, I don’t know what the majority of pictures posted by men look like, but the majority of pictures posted by women indicate that they spend, like, all their time wearing sundresses and hanging out with three or more of their friends in super-dark bars with some sort of creepy-ass dude lingering in the background.[3]  Either that or they spend all their time riding bikes or lying in grassy fields reading books or riding bikes to grassy fields whilst carrying books, presumably that they then intend to read.

Then, of course, there are the group pictures.  These are the freaking worst.  There’s at least a 50/50 shot that the pictures aren’t captioned, with the additional chance that they’re not captioned with any sort of useful spatial information.  So you get a picture of multiple women (who, odds are, look at least vaguely similar enough to be confusing), “In Vegas last year with my girls!” or, “Me and Jen at Lollapalooza.”

It’s fan-fucking-tastic that you and your collection of blandly photogenic friends had a great fucking time in Vegas or hiking in Banff or at the Gavin Degraw concert or whatever insipidly generic white person thing you were doing, but, holy fuck, TELL ME WHICH PERSON IN THAT PICTURE IS YOU.  I cannot read minds.  I cannot guess who you are based on some zen mind trick based on the fact that you also claimed to be 5’6” and of average build in the initial questionnaire, either.  Why?  Because about 75% of the female population is about 5’6” and pretty much everyone claims to be “about average.”[4]  It gets especially bad when there are, like, ten pictures, each without proper captions, each with multiple people, and a rotating cast.

I have a policy: if I can’t figure out who the fuck I’m about to email, I don’t send an email.  Now you might be saying, “Hold on there, Sparky.  What if you’re passing up the golden opportunity to meet the woman of your dreams because of a dumb, superficial policy?”  I’m glad you asked, hypothetical detractor.

First, I refer you to my initial assessment of internet dating: it doesn’t work.  So I pass up yet another opportunity to waste my time composing an email an email to someone who won’t respond.  Whoop-dee-do.

Second, posting a shitload of pictures with multiple people in them and not bothering to say which of those people you are indicates one of two possibilities.  The first is that you’re someone who pays zero attention to detail, at which point I am already annoyed by you.  The second is that you’re expecting me to read your mind through the goddamn internet, at which point you and I will not get along.

Third, it usually is actually possible to figure out who the person is if you really care enough to try to figure it out.  So if I really do find the person interesting enough to waste my time doing that I’m probably finding her interesting enough to bother sending an email even without having a concrete idea of what she looks like.  Especially since I’ve found that I tend to be at least slightly surprised upon meeting them in person, anyway.

So, basically what I’m saying is that if you’re going to make me work for it, you’d better be someone I find worth working to meet in the first place.  It’s really that simple.[7]

Anyway, yeah, here’s what I’m saying: pretty much every goddamn profile is the same.  This, I believe, contributes mightily to the whole, “Internet dating doesn’t work,” thing.  Because, when it gets right down to it, everyone is pretty much the same.  So when you put them all right next to each other they kinda blend together.

Oh, and the whole, “I’m drama free,” thing?  Um, how do I put this?  That sends one message and one message only:  “I am about to drop a drama bomb on you.”  Hell, if they insist it early and emphatically enough they’re saying, “I am a goddamn drama bomb factory.  I make the United States’ rather impressive ordinance production from WWII look like nothing.”[8]

This, by the way, is why I still do the internet thing.  It doesn’t really work, in my estimation, but the whole thing is still endlessly entertaining.  It’s a bizarre way to armchair psychoanalyze and otherwise anonymously judge random strangers.  Who actually wants to meet people when you have all that going on?

Anyway, that’s not actually what I set out to write here.  I was talking about two questions.  Let’s pretend that you’ve answered the first question in the affirmative because, um, otherwise I don’t know why I’d be talking about the second.  So you’ve seen something that makes you say, “Yes, I do want to email this person.”  Now you’ve got the problem of, “How do I do that?”

Now your best chance (I think) is to attempt to initiate a conversation.  I mean, people like talking about things, specifically things that interest them.  So, y’know, that seems like a good approach.[9]

This is the inherent problem of the internet dating thing, though: there’s only so much you can say to start a conversation with a complete stranger.  So you’re reduced to combing through their scanty lists of interests in an attempt to come up with something.  Anything.

Chances are good that you’re about to say all the same things that someone else said last week.  So, basically, the whole thing boils down to hoping that you say something that makes them at least think about you long enough to actually want to respond.  Which means that all but the most well thought-out original email[10] is, in effect, “Hey, you’re cute.  Check out my profile and get back to me if you like what you see.”

But you can’t say that, because that’s completely and totally unoriginal.

This is the aggravation of internet dating.  You’re pretty much damned if you do and damned if you don’t.  For some reason no one talks about that in the commercials, though…

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[1]Well, for most.  There are plenty of people who don’t seem to ask either question.  For them the answer to the first question is seemingly always, “Yes.”  The answer to the second then runs on rails.  Their victim then gets a “wink” (which is a diabolical device that says either, “I’m too lazy to come up with something to say,” or, “I can’t be arsed to actually pay for this service, so even if you wanted to respond it wouldn’t get us anywhere.”  I have responded to two winks in my three-ish years doing this.  One was because the winker was, well, hot.  The other was because I was thinking of sending a message, anyway, and she beat me to the punch), a fairly obvious form email, or your basic, “UR hot.  Wanna see my penis?”

[2]Let’s get one thing out of the way: the primary arbiter will most likely be the picture or pictures.  Let’s not pretend that people are doing this for some noble purpose or that they’re ultimately actually looking for someone who shares their interest in 18th Century Latvian folk art or whatever.  If you’re doing online dating you’re ultimately asking yourself the question, “Do I want to see this person naked?”  If you don’t, chances are you won’t message them.

And let’s not pretend this is a, “Guys are pigs,” thing, either.  Women and men may have a different way of justifying it and might have different scales to answer that question, but ultimately if you don’t find someone attractive you probably won’t be dating them.  Internet dating is an extremely superficial exercise, anyway.  You’re deciding whether you would want to potentially date someone based on a few words in a survey and a couple pictures, after all.

[3]In Texas a cowboy hat is practically mandatory, too.  Also, at least one picture shooting a gun.  I was the worst Texan ever, in that I did not bother to own a gun, a cowboy hat, or cowboy boots.  That said, I recently briefly lamented the fact that I didn’t bother to procure cowboy boots or a tattoo whilst in that state.  I’m better now.

[4]The “body type” self-descriptors are goddamn ridiculous, by the by.  You generally have a continuum of options: slender, athletic, average, a few extra pounds, curvy, BBF/Big & Tall.  These are all pretty meaningless and pretty much everyone lies about them.  Why?  Because it’s human nature.

That said, some of this shit is ridiculous.  “Athletic” covers such a huge range of body type as to be useless.  If you’re looking at, say, a swimmer, a gymnast, a professional softball player, and a body builder there’s a good chance they would all say they’re “athletic.”  And there’s a good chance they’d all look very, very different.

Moreover, “curvy” is a stupid term.  I tend to take “curvy” to mean, “Woman who isn’t a stick figure and possessing of traditionally proper feminine appearance.”  Y’know, the traditional hourglass figure.[5]  Online dating, however, seems to have resulted in that particular descriptor meaning any damn thing the person using it wants it to.[6]

[5]I have little or no patience for the idea that women need to be stick figures, by the by.  If my first two thoughts upon seeing a woman are, “Oh, honey, have a sandwich,” and, “I’m pretty sure I would break you,” I’m pretty sure that I’m not thinking, “Man, she’s attractive.”  But that’s neither here nor there.

[6]Kinda like “decimate.”

[7]Fuck.  I just realized this could read as an argument in support of ten pictures with multiple people and no captions.  I…um…

Okay, new plan.  For anyone who reads this, if you do that I’m going to send you emails with shit like, “Hey, that brunette that’s only in a couple of your pictures is hot.  She single?” or, “So are all five of those hotties sitting around the table going to be in on this or what?”

Also, um, I shouldn’t be allowed to access the internet.  There’s just no excuse for me.

[8]Probably not in so many words, though.

[9]It is, of course, best to take this with a grain of salt, as I have been doing this for more than three goddamn years and have ended up with one second date-esque thing out of the deal.  Although, in my defense, that one that ended up at a gay bar had the potential for a follow-up date, since the only way that story could have gotten better is if I’d ended up going on a date with her gay friend and I’m always willing to consider taking things way too goddamn far just to have a good story about them.

Also, yeah, I am currently thinking, “Hmm, that would have been one hell of a story…”

So, yeah, something’s telling me it’s a good thing it took me nearly a year to come up with this one.

[10]I occasionally pull off a truly bizarre and memorable first email, apparently.  I think my best, which has long since disappeared down the memory hole sadly, was to someone who had a picture up of her dressed like a pirate and painting a child’s face and who lamented in her profile that she never met guys anywhere she went.  It had something to do with suggesting that hanging out with midget pirates probably wasn’t a good method for meeting new men.

That one got a response.  Then, predictably, it went nowhere and fizzled after about four emails.

Barriers to Entry

Back in the day the dude in charge of writing posts on the OKCupid (OKC) blog, known as OKTrends, wrote a brilliant takedown of the pay dating website model.  The argument basically amounted to the simple fact that your basic pay for play site games their statistics.  They claim membership rolls for people who never actually sent in credit card numbers or have stopped paying and, as such, could not communicate with anyone.  The upshot is those 15 million single people Match claims on its rolls aren’t going to be able to talk to you, assuming they’re even willing.  The takeaway, then, was to use the free sites, as you’re going to get your money’s worth that way.

The article was brilliant and insightful.  It’s also gone now, as it mysteriously disappeared a few months ago when Match bought out OKC.[1]  That seemed like the sort of thing that indicated Match’s embarrassed admission that OKC was right about that particular issue and Match was simply wasting everyone’s money.

It’s really too bad that the blog post was wrong.[2]

It completely and totally focused on perceived value as a cost/benefit analysis.  If I recall, it used a lot of statistics that went well beyond the simple idea that only, say, 10% of the advertised site population actually exist.  I think it even went in to response rate to indicate that you didn’t stand a significantly worse chance of getting a response to an email on OKC than Match.  The OKC sabermetricians are huge on that sort of number crunching statistical analysis.

Such numbers, however, are basically leading indicators and aren’t actually particular useful for understanding anything beyond a rather basic and uninteresting question.  The cost/benefit analysis completely ignores one of the biggest questions of actual value: barriers to entry.  Those barriers are a value in and of themselves.

In my last post on this subject I made a reference to Plenty of Fish (PoF) as a “ghetto.”  To extend that metaphor, Match operates as more of a gated community.  OKC operates, then, as a middle-class neighborhood.[3]  The difference between them can basically be explained by the barriers to entry.

I’ve had three different tours of duty on PoF.  My most recent started a few days ago when I slapped a new profile up for the purposes of research and to see if I could figure out how to explain my distaste for the site.

The most notable issue is that it’s an ugly site.  Shit is just scattered haphazardly up on the page, the navigation sucks, and it’s overloaded with random widgets and tools that don’t actually help anything.  Also, most of the pictures are at least a little distorted, which indicates that the picture uploader sucks ass.

This is the sort of thing I could live with.  I mean, it’s annoying, but if the value of the site is greater than the problems associated with it, then the site is good.  But in the case of online dating the value comes from the clientele.  And that’s where PoF’s problem shines through.

There are no barriers to entry to speak of.  Slap up your profile, answer a few basic questions, add a picture or eight, slap up a minimum-100-character self-summary, and go to town.  This means you get a shitload of profiles with, “lol I dunno just ask me omg is this stupid thing up to 100 characters yet lol.”  And, holy fuck, do I wish I was joking about that.

Odds are good, too, that this expression of brilliant human ingenuity will then be accompanied by a half-dozen Myspace and bathroom mirror pictures.  If it’s a guy’s profile, said pictures will probably be shirtless, too.  Or, at least, that’s what I’ve gathered.  A disturbingly large number of women’s profiles also include something like, “I have a JOB.  And a CAR.  If you don’t have those things, don’t even try talking to me.”  So, y’know, wow.

This isn’t to say that there’s absolutely no one of value on PoF.  I’ve run across a few profiles by women who seem intelligent and possessing of at least a modicum of class.  But the amount of shit that’s necessary to throw out of the way to reach that potential diamond is almost completely overwhelming.  It goes double when you’re also receiving emails that say, “hi how are today”[5] from that person who couldn’t be arsed to tell a potential romantic partner anything about herself.  It’s enough to cause true despair for the future of humanity.

The barriers for entry on Match, meanwhile, are fairly obvious.  You can’t play if you’re not willing to pay.  Money has a wonderful ability to focus the mind toward an end, after all.  And there’s a definite point where saying, “Is this really worth $X to me?” brings your desire to engage in an activity in to focus.[6]  Now, I don’t know that the monthly/six month/yearly subscription thing is necessarily the best model,[7] but it is a useful thing to consider.

OKC, meanwhile, is just as free as PoF, but isn’t nearly as low-rent.  That’s because they operate on a different barrier to entry: effort.  You have to jump through a lot of hoops to set up an OKC account and it’s pretty goddamn obvious to anyone else if you haven’t.  There are nine different sections that you need to fill out and a whole shitload of match questions they want you to answer and tests that you can take.

I recently set up a new OKC account as an experiment (I literally wanted to see how the set up is now.  I took it down the next day after doing nothing but poke around for a bit).  Back when I set up my actual account it was more of a carrot approach.  There was a stupid little bar and a bunch of tasks and if you did whatever silly task they wanted you to do you’d get 5% more completion on the bar.  It was kinda fun and also kinda useless all at once.  When I set up the experimental profile I discovered that they basically lock some functionality unless you’ve jumped through their seemingly arbitrary hoops.  There’s enough going on to keep it interesting, but it gets better the more work you put in to it.

I’d be willing to bet that’s annoying to the uninitiated.  But, at least in my humble opinion, it’s a good way to create a barrier for entry that doesn’t involve money.  The people who actually have filled out profiles and have answered a bunch of questions seem to be actually invested.  And you know that if you message someone and they don’t respond, it’s because they don’t like you.

So that’s nice.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t jackasses on OKC.  For that matter, Match isn’t terrible person free, either.[8]  But both are certainly better than PoF.  Not that it takes much.

Anyway, I feel like I’ve gotten the logistics of internet dating out of the way.  Now I can move on to the other bit of fun and games: how people interact.  After all, that’s kinda the reason for being for all of these things…

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[1]Sadly, I the Wayback Machine also seems to have missed the post.  It originally showed up on April 7th, 2010, but was not the front page article by the next date the WBM has for OKTrends.

[2]And I say this as someone who completely and totally agreed with it at the time.

[3]eHarmony is a walled compound.  And Fling and Adult Friend Finder are brothels.  That should pretty much exhaust the extended metaphor.  Oh, wait, ChristianMingle and its ilk are church picnics.  Desolate, somewhat depressing church picnics (I may have to slap up a post on that one, too.  Damn).

[4]There is, however, a pretty easy four-step process to using PoF to feel like a goddamn ladies’ man.  Step 1: be decent looking.  Step 2: set up a profile.  Step 3: indicate you have a job.  Step 4: post a picture taken by another human being in which you are wearing a shirt.  It’s pretty much that simple.  For reasons I don’t fully understand the women on PoF are far more aggressive than the ones on the other sites I’ve used.

[5]I discovered, quite by accident, that one of the things you can do on PoF is set a minimum length for messages.  The options are 50+, 100+, 200+, and 300+.  I chose 50+, figuring that it would only act as a deterrent to, y’know, people who can’t write more than three words.  A couple days later I got a message that said (and I paraphrase), “ha ha, this thing says I have to send you more than 50 characters.  I didn’t even know it did that.  Is this enough yet?”

I did not respond.  I don’t understand why so many people would put so much effort in to not actually saying anything.

I suppose that’s the female equivalent of the, “Hey, UR hot.  Wanna see my penis?”

[6]This is actually a fascinating conversation that storytellers have amongst themselves on a fairly regular basis.  It basically comes to a question of, “Do we tell for free, ask for donations after, or charge in advance?  And if we charge in advance do we ask for $5, $10, or even more?”

It’s an interesting question and the answer always boils down to, “People value things that they pay for more than they value things they don’t.”  Psychologically speaking, “I had to pay for this,” is another way of saying, “I am invested in this and, as such, I want to enjoy it.”

[7]In fact, I think this is the sort of thing that pay dating sites could potentially borrow from the smartphone markets: micropayments.  How many times have you looked at a 99 cent iPhone game and thought, “Sure, I’ll buy that?” then looked at a similarly interesting game prices at $2.99 and thought, “Nah, I’m good?”  I do it on a fairly regular basis and I’m pretty sure that I’m not alone.

Similarly, the idea of paying $40/month or $15/month for six months (paid up front) or whatever Match’s current structure is probably costs them in the long run.  That’s a pretty high hurdle for entry.  If you’re just poking around and happen to see someone interesting (which is almost a certainty, really), chances are you still won’t want to pay $40 just for the privilege of maybe getting to exchange a couple emails with them.

However, say that you have the option of sending an email for free and the other person has the option of responding once for free.  After that you can then have the option of paying a buck to continue the conversation.

This then allows a second tier of people who want to pay for unlimited membership.  If I then want to pay that standard monthly charge I can communicate with anyone I want and they can reply to me for free.

Chances are that the site will lose some income from people who no longer find it necessary to pay the hefty up-front fee.  But they’ll probably make it back and then some from people who are accustomed to making micropayments on iTunes and think nothing of seeing those 99 cent charges all over their statements.

Also, if you need me, I’ll be starting a dating site.  Check back in a few years when I’m filthy goddamn rich.

[8]For one thing, I’m on both.  And I’m a jackass half the time.  For the lulz.

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.

On the Tyranny of Unmet Expectation

Online dating sells itself based on one, simple theory: volume.  This, again, goes to the Amazon model of dating[1] I mentioned in the last post.  But here it shows the potentiality of the model.  Your local bookstore can only hold a finite number of titles, while you could theoretically purchase any book ever written through Amazon.  If you’re willing to sacrifice immediacy for access, then Amazon is absolutely the place to go.

There are three basic deficiencies to the Amazon model, however, that apply to online dating.

First, you have to know what you are looking for.  Quite simply, you cannot go to Amazon and tell the search engine, “I’m looking for a book.”  You have to tell it that you want a book about American history or a book by Lawrence Weschler.  Dating sites are pretty good at limiting the selection in the obvious ways (geographic area, physical characteristics, etc), but they’re not good at figuring out the secondary reasons people choose what they choose.  So, for instance, if a non-religious person doesn’t want to spend time with a religious fundamentalist but doesn’t mind someone who is a liberal Christian or a self-identifying but not-really-active-at-all Muslim, they have to weigh the risks of being matched up with a bunch of super-religious folks v. missing out on that great person who still says, “Eh, I’m Hindu, but whatryahgonnadoaboutit?”  This leads directly to the next problem.

Second, you can’t really browse when you’re dealing with online purchasing or dating.  I once saw an episode of the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson where he was talking to an author about said author’s book.   I ran to the bookstore at lunch to get the book, which wasn’t there.  I did, however, end up going back to the office with a copy of Craig Ferguson’s Between the Bridge and the River, which is one of the most wonderful books I’ve ever read.  It just kinda happened that way.  Other times I’ve gone to buy books, but then decided I didn’t want the book I originally intended to purchase, but walked out with a few different books.  Maybe some were new discoveries and maybe some were books I’d forgotten about, but the act of going to a book store caused me to notice things I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.  Even the best search engine cannot make the connection between, “You saw this author’s non-fiction book on Craig Ferguson’s show,” and, “You should buy Craig Ferguson’s novel.”  We simply notice things that are deal-makers and deal-breakers that computers cannot notice and cannot duplicate.  And, as such, we get to the third big problem.

The, shall we say, purchasing decisions, for online dating have to be made on incomplete and often incorrect information.  This is the tyranny of unmet expectations.  Online profiles contain the other person’s best (I’d hope, I suppose) attempt to sell.  Then there’s the extended conversations before a meeting when there are plenty of opportunities to build the other person in to something that they are not and are not attempting to be.  We create the image of the other in our minds, anyway, and in this situation it’s almost impossible to create a realistic image, unmarred by the intersection between desire and reality.

It is, in short, almost entirely impossible not to be disappointed by the person who arrives the first time you meet someone with whom you originally connect via internet dating.

Now, this isn’t the standard tale of finding out that hot chick you’ve been talking to is actually a 56 year-old trucker or a weirdo living in his parents’ basement.  Such people, I’ve no doubt, exist.  But you’re probably not going to run in to them on match.com or eHarmony or OKCupid.[2]  People on internet dating sites are usually pretty honest.  They’re just honest in the way that anyone is honest while dating and that’s a large chunk of the problem.

Any time we go out on the internet we use an edited persona.[3]  Any time we go on dates we use an edited persona.[4]  This combination is, y’know, bad.

So you choose only the pictures that flatter.  And try to say only the things that make you seem interesting and intelligent.[5]  And since the whole sending emails thing allows for edited thoughts, then you could potentially cause the other person to only know exactly what you want them to know.[6]

Now, chances are that they’re going to be making up shit about you, too.  So by the time you actually meet that means that they’ll be super surprised when your shit don’t smell like fresh baked cinnamon rolls and your smile isn’t a goddamn rainbow what lights up the sky and makes unicorns smile.[7]  You will, instead, be an ordinary human being who is awkward and makes mistakes and says stupid things and occasionally snorts when you laugh.

 This isn’t usually a problem.  People have been saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and snorting when laughing for as long as humans have been around and yet humans have managed to survive and procreate for at least, oh, two or three hundred years now.  So that’s a pretty good track record.

But, then, back in the dark ages of the early 1900s that person you were trying to impress when you accidentally farted didn’t have an entire internet full of additional potential dates hooked up to a small device in their back pocket.  They also hadn’t gotten used to an edited version of you that was half reality, half imagination, and half careful presentation in the period before you finally met in person.  They weren’t, in short, expecting the world of you.  So if you couldn’t deliver the world, they weren’t as disappointed, nor were they probably so prepared to run and try for Option B.

Disturbingly enough, this is the ideal potentially disastrous scenario.

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I suppose it doesn’t help that I started the whole internet dating thing at the same time I was engaging in that other great, dehumanizing internet-based activity: a job search.  The activities, I quickly realized, were remarkably similar.  You create a document that attempts to list off all of your strengths and make you seem really great.  You search for the perfect job so that you can best use your talents in a place you will love.  Then you prepare a cover letter to let them know how much you’d love to work with them in the future and you send the whole thing out.

You sit there, waiting for the email response that says, “Yes!  Come in!  Say hello!”

But nothing happens.

And nothing happens.

Then some more nothing happens.

So you move to Ideal Job 2.

Then 3.

Then you eventually discover you’re on Random Job You Applied For Because It Was There Number 34,286.  You.  Just.  Want.  A.  Fucking.  Job.[8]

So, basically, what I’m saying is that if you do the internet thing long enough, those profiles you just ignored the first time you looked start to look pretty good after a while.

When it gets right down to it, “I decided to email you because all the awesome people wouldn’t email back,” is probably a somewhat worse thing than, “Wow, you aren’t nearly as awesome in person as you were in my head.”

At least, that’s my theory.

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[1]Well, the second Amazon model of dating.  The original Amazon model of dating was, “Wait until a tribe of warrior women drag you in to the woods and drain you of all your reproductive fluids.”  This has a certain appeal, I will admit.

[2]Okay, I’ve run in to one.  But that particular incident was odd and I never did figure out what the hell the other person’s game was.

That said, there are still scammers.  But they’re rather easy to spot.  They usually have exactly one picture that looks a little too much like a modeling shot or it came from stockimages dot net.  They also can’t usually write well, but not in the way that a large number of people can’t write well.  It’s not terrible text speak and third grade level grammatical mistakes, but obvious English as a Fourteenth Language stuff.  And, at least for the women, the profiles are way over the top in ways that I can’t really describe to people who haven’t seen them.

[3]On the internet I’m brash, loud, and kind of an asshole.  In real life I swear slightly less and spend way too much time forcing jokes that really aren’t funny.  But the brash, loud, and asshole thing is right on.

[4]Even me.  Weirdly, it’s usually because I’m trying to be combative and unlikable.  Erm, more unlikable than usual.  For science or something.  Seriously, I get asked why I even bother to internet date on a regular basis.  By people I’ve met that way who seemed to think getting to know me was a good idea.  I think from now on my answer will be, “I wanted to piss you off.”

My goal is either to single-handedly destroy internet dating, turn every woman into a lesbian, or make every other guy look better by comparison.  I haven’t decided, really.

[5]Any time a person’s list of favorite books is an unimaginative list of Great Books I know that’s someone who doesn’t read.  Also, there’s some weird correlation between “My favorite book is by Chelsea Handler” and “Geds doesn’t like you.”  I can’t decide if that’s a causal thing, though.  I just think that Chelsea Handler is the female Dane Cook.

[6]Which makes some things baffling.  Like when I recently got an email from someone who decided I needed to see a YouTube video of some chav singing Solja Boy[sp?] on the X Factor.  So it was chav + terrible source material + Simon Cowell.  I responded the only way I knew how: with Mike Doughty and Andrew “Scrap” Livingston covering Mary J. Blige.



[7]Of course if you are like that, call me.  I’d love to ruin your life.

[8]You’d think, then, that I’d be prepared for the whole house search thing.  In reality, I was simply already completely and totally turned off by the process.  But, basically, the lesson is that I hate job, house, and relationship searching via the internet.  It’s supposed to make things easier.  It doesn’t.  I’m officially pre-disillusioned for, well, life.  It’s nice to get that out of the way, really.