This Can Only End Poorly

I'm so cheery with my titles, aren't I? Oh, didn't want to type that, did you, Firefox? Look, I don't care if you are the it browser of 2005, because if you cross me, I will break you like a goddamned Kit Kat bar the day after Halloween.

I won't even do it along the factory recommended lines, such will be my wrath.

Anyway, rage at my browser's slowness aside (DAMN YOU, SPYWARE!), I figured I'd write (see? I can avoid extreme synesthesia sometimes. Didn't even say I'd talk to yo- goddammit.) about (sigh) online dating. Yes, yes. An overdone topic, I'm sure. I've already written one thing about how absolutely absurd it is to meet people in person someplace (or at least to do so in the way that movies say you should), although that may be exactly what they want us to think.

I'm on to you, Gosling.

I've had lots of friends. No, really, I have. According to some sources, I currently have over one thousand. ONE THOUSAND. That's a lot of friends, and it doesn't even account for former friends lost in the great war. I know it's hard to believe, what with my mediocre dentition, asocial tendencies, and near-encyclopedic knowledge of obscure cartoons that hardly anybody remembers (to say nothing of my obsessive tendency to come home and write almost two thousand words a night each November. Seriously, why can't he do something normal, like grow a moustache?).

We tried that. Didn't stop him.

As I was saying before I took out my contacts and decided to run with where I had stopped, I've had a lot of friends who have tried online dating. I can think of at least two cases in which things ended very well (as in one of the couples is married and the other is engaged), along with at least two others where there seems to be some reasonably happy cohabitation going on.

Not entirely sure what's going on here, but it came up on a Google Image search of "living in sin." Sure?

Even before these success stories, I've been a fan of this whole Internet thing. As shown in one of the above pictures, and as I've mentioned before THIS VERY MONTH, I have a tendency to get glued to computer screens. This sometimes made socialization... difficult. Talking on the Internet meant that I didn't have to worry about being painfully awkward or striking up a conversation with someone new. I kept up a profile in college, even though there was no realistic way that I was going to do anything with it. I did start up some solid correspondences that lasted for a few years before petering out. It was super handy in France (oh, wait, no- make that three people who are engaged. Congrats, Büchna!). It's been even more handy in Charleston. Let's crunch the numbers.





For online, in France there were three meetups with one that went anywhere beyond that "Hey, let's meet in person." One was just not particularly personable, one was WAAAAY too Bohemian (as in, "Let's hitchhike to Berlin!" Fun date, but wasn't going to go anywhere), and one was Büchna. I give Büchna an actual name partly because I've somewhat blanked on the other two's names. Mostly, though, it's because I got the greatest message ever from her (no, seriously. It was the best lead-in I've seen. Aside from the one my current girlfriend used, of course), and we probably had the most substantial online correspondence. (That was mainly because we lived a few hours away from each other by train and didn't have much in terms of other means of communication.) She also showed me around a couple of cities. Plus, she recently got engaged in perhaps the most adorable way possible, because her fiancé is a far more imaginative person than I could ever be. Yes, I hold up proposal ideas as the measure of my fellow men. No, I don't find that weird at all.

Oh man. This is a thing. This is a thing that is so a propos. Well played, JDate. (No, not JDatE, which is entirely different and will one day be dealt with.)

I would like to pause a moment and take an aside. It is cold as fuck in here right now. Yeah, I know I mentioned this last year as well. It dropped about 30 degrees over the past two days (okay, maybe more like 20), and my room continues to have terrible insulation. I'm wearing wool socks and a sweatshirt, and I'm still friggin' freezing. Anyway, yes. It's cold. Back to the point.

In Charleston, I've met, what, three people via online dating? There were at least three or four more where messages dropped off before we actually met. I dated one of them for a while, one of them was a terrible, terrible person and holds the distinction of being the worst date I've ever been on (mostly because the story isn't as good as Cheryl, The Cemetery Strangler), and the third is my current girlfriend. She's pretty fantastic and, this is IMPORTANT, isn't crazy. You'd think that'd be faint praise. It's not (but more on that later). This is someone who met me while I was studying for boards (AKA the worst test of your life, and if you didn't take it, well, it was twice the worst test of someone else's life. Thanks, asshole.), AND SHE DIDN'T RUN AWAY. Okay, maybe she didn't think that was an option, but it totally was, and she didn't flee for her life. She has also managed to put up with my Novemblog antics so far. Okay, fine. She sleeps through most of them. Can you blame her, though? These take a long time to write, and I'm sure I'm not particularly interesting while writing them.

"Kinda walked into that one, didn't he?"   "Exactly as planned." "DO HO HO HO HO HO HO."

And, yes, all of those hos count towards my word count. Now, let's do the numbers on meeting people in person.

College- in terms of actual dating or longer term correspondence, we'll call it three. They were all, in their ways, lovely, but, as happens at small colleges, there was a hint of crazy in each of them. No, I don't mean "She did something that wasn't entirely rational, so therefore she's crazy." I mean that there were diagnosed (or undiagnosed in one case) mental illnesses that required treatment (that I believe all were or are now receiving in such a manner that they may continue with their every day lives). But, hey, it's college, and they had their moments. I didn't know better, and we all grew as people (I hope).

France- One? Yeah. One. She was pretty sane, and I think we had a lot of points on which we related. Nice lady. Cheesemonger, which is possibly the greatest job title ever.

Charleston- Hoo boy. Well, we've got Cheryl, The Cemetery Strangler, about whom you've already heard. There was another young lady early in my time in Charleston who played with her phone the entire date, which I took as proof that I'm not nearly as bad as my parents sometimes like to claim I am about electronics. There were a couple who seemed nice, but one wasn't interested in me and I wasn't particularly interested (romantically, at least) in the other.

(Apparently) like this man, I am an utter cad.

Now, we'll get back to the point of those numbers eventually (or not, depending on how well my focus holds). As I said before, I've had a lot of friends try the online dating scene. One young lady in particular kept going on and off of it, which led to minor disputes that I think get to the core of the good part of online dating (by way of the bad part).

In my case, I signed up on a dating site that had other significant functionality. I tended to leave it pretty dormant in college or when I got into a relationship (like you do). Whenever I got into a flurry of activity, I'd send out three to five well thought out messages to people I deemed worthy.

Okay, fine, I sent them to people I thought would like me. Emperor Norton would have, right?

If I were lucky, I'd get a reply from one or two of them. There MAY have been a momentous occasion in which all of my missives were met with responses.

My friend, on the other hand, would sign on and be bombarded by messages. See, on a free dating site, there will be lots of creepers. And whether it's because they're more interested in sex (Aristophanes disagrees) or just conditioned to think they need to speak up about it, a substantial portion of the creepers are guys. Specifically (fine, more selectively), straight (or at least interested in women, for which I'm sure there is a more appropriate term that escapes me) men. Rather than wade through the mountains upon mountains of creeper messages, she would deactivate her account.

And apparently, it only takes three. Admittedly, that's like three atom bombs of creep.

My take was to sort through the messages, weed out the folks you're not interested in, and just ignore them. It's part of the online system, and while it can suck, it happens. To her credit, she wanted to respond to all of the messages, which was made more daunting by the realization that doing so encouraged them and perpetuated the terrible messages. See, online dating works because you can go for a low pressure message, see if you get a response, and keep relaying messages until you decide to meet up.

Back to my track record. You may have noticed a trend that the online instances tended to work out much better (or at least be remembered with less venom) than folks I met in real life. Online, it's easy to sort through the telltale phrases of awful. (I'm trying to temper my use of crazy because, while I have dated some girls with legitimate psychiatric conditions, there are perfectly lovely nutters and perfectly awful sane people.) Phrases like, "I hate drama," "Where are all the real men?" "I think I'm more intelligent than my peer group and am majoring in Underwater Basketweaving," "I loved Mind of Mencia," etc. You see those and you get the fuck out. I ignored that once on the offchance that the force of personality would outweigh it, and I got the worst date ever.

In person, though, you zone out. You get distracted, you get flustered, and you miss some of the cues. Okay, fine, maybe it's just me- we've already established that I'm a terrible judge of personality (although, perhaps, a great judge of personalities ahurrrrrrrrrr).

"I think vaccinations are terrible and that 9/11 was an inside job due to drama and contrails." Oh, absolutely. Please go on.