Getting Personal

I really never thought I’d find myself here.

I blame peer pressure. More specifically, I blame my friend JKeg, and I blame her hard. She managed to wrangle me into something that others have tried and failed to get me into for a long time: online dating.

The idea of online dating is not appealing to me. I guess the concept is an old one, since personal ads have been appearing in newspapers for decades. But my generation grew up watching after-school specials (and later, Lifetime movies) that made it very clear: the interweb is populated entirely with nasty, middle-aged, greasily mulleted, psychopathic men with handlebar mustaches pretending to be young kids so that they can scam their way into an assault charge.

Those ominous warnings about revealing any personal information on the internet have stuck with me; I don’t attach my real name or email to this blog partly because I want to remain a woman of mystery and intrigue, but mostly because I don’t want to be chopped up and put in somebody’s freezer. It’s a superficial sort of wariness, though, because I know perfectly well how easy it is to attain information on the web, and if someone wanted to find me, it would be a rather short distance from A to B.

I’m also aware that the use of the internet is now so widespread and ingrained in our culture that the audience has been diluted: more often than not, people are here for legitimate reasons. Not always, but odds are better than they used to be. (Unless you are Dateline, NBC.) Online communities are huge these days; I’ve met some extremely close friends on the internet (as weird as that still is for me to wrap my head around), and if you’re smart about it, you can usually avoid the sharks in the water.

All of this is to say that I recognize the problems inherent in online dating. There are creeps. There are nerds. There’s potential for murder. More importantly, however, opting to find a date through an online service makes me feel desperate. It makes me look around at my social life and say, “It’s come to this?”

Oddly, while I’m looking around at said social life, I realize with a shock that a lot of my friends are taking the same action, seemingly without a trace of desperation. I didn’t realize how many of my friends’ dates had been arranged through eHarmony or Yahoo! Personals or Match.com. It’s become a legitimate branch of the dating community, like going to a bar or fixing up a friend on a blind date.

It was JKeg that finally pushed me past my hesitation, though. We had gone to the movies for a Girls’ Night, and then stopped at a diner for some dessert and a heart-to-heart. She systematically weakened my resolve with pie and stories of how she met her fiancé on Yahoo Personals, and then when I was at my weakest she demanded that we return to my apartment that very minute and get me signed up for Yahoo. It was free, she said, and would be totally great! She ambushed me.

We did go back to my apartment, and we did set up a shiny new profile. I let JKeg steer me through the questionnaires, looking at her uncertainly every time I had to arbitrarily choose the features of my “ideal match.” This was online shopping at its most surreal. I felt like I was ordering shoes. Does anyone seriously have a preference for their date’s eye color?

When it was done, I had a profile and a picture (which I assume will be printed on my box if I am ever sold as an action figure), and we sat back and looked at each other. JKeg declared her work to be done and went home to her fiancé. I looked at my computer screen and wondered what I was doing. Then I clicked on the tempting little button that said “See Your Matches!” and was rewarded with a Sears-Roebuck catalogue of single people in Omaha smiling back at me. As I flipped through their profiles, I smiled.

Why not?

I’ve decided to shelve my pride and give it a shot. I have a couple of motivations: First, my dating record sucks. I can only go upward. Second, even if things don’t work out, it’s possible I’ll end up with a few extra friends that I wouldn’t have met otherwise. Third, if things really go badly, I’ll have a lot of blog material. This could be my Odyssey. My Journey to the Center of the Earth. My Men Are From Mars.

So, readers, you’re in this with me. You’re my justification for having nothing to lose. I’ll keep you updated if you allow me to fall back on the delusion that I’m a plucky undercover journalist when things don’t go well. Deal?


The Beginning:

The following is from my profile—the part where Yahoo told me to describe “Me and My Ideal Match” in 200 words or less:

Me:
I am a photographer, designer, and sometimes-writer. I train horses and own two cats who both need shrinks. I’m not scared of rats or snakes, but I could do without bees or drive-thru bank tellers. I value humor, intelligence, honesty, and selflessness. My movie tastes are fairly broad: I get a little antsy with war films and I can’t really get behind the Scary Movie franchise, but otherwise I could spend three weeks in a movie theater surviving on nothing but popcorn and Diet Dr Pepper. I am a limited cook and kill plants easily, but otherwise am very competent. I spend a little too much time with my TiVo and not enough time with my paycheck.

You:
You don’t write in “chat speak” or substitute numbers for words. You listen to and appreciate the opinions of others. You don’t mind that I hate mushrooms. You’re clean, and you’re patient, and you haven’t lied on your profile. You think it’s romantic to meet at midnight in the park. (In the classically romantic way, not the Jack The Ripper way.) (Also, not the “bring me $1,000,000 in unmarked bills” way.)

Also, you laugh at my jokes.

It has been posted for a week and Yahoo tells me that it has been viewed by 27 men. I have received 9 messages. Assuming this is an accurate sample, that means that roughly 1/3 of single Omahans would like to buy me dinner, or at least start up a conversation. I have no reason to doubt my math.

I haven’t responded to anybody yet, but I intend to do so tonight or tomorrow. A couple of the messages have been laughable, a couple have been interesting, and a couple I’m on the fence about. At least one is from a widower, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t freak me out a little. One man declared himself “speachless [sic]” upon reading my profile. Of course, this man also said in his own profile that he has “been called Tobey Maguire a few times,” so he may just be confused. I don’t really see the resemblance in his photo.

One especially intriguing message opened with “I work for a company that cleans burnt coal from power plants,” and proceeded to enlighten me on the company’s busy times of year, the hazards of working with water in subzero climates, and the state of his salary.

One guy with a very nice picture sent me a message filled with chatspeak (“Hi [Meldraw], I thought u were cute so I just thought I’d drop ya a line. I’d luv to get to know ya if ur interested…”). He didn’t appear to have written that way throughout his profile, just in my message, so I can’t tell if he was doing it intentionally as a response to my chatspeak admonition. If he was, then he’s either really funny, or kind of an ass. If he wasn’t, well, he writes in chatspeak.

Two guys who sent messages are weight-lifters (seriously?), another one has “I’ll Tell You Later” listed as his marital status, and one is rejoicing that there is another mushroom-hater in the world. One guy accidentally misinterpreted my profile and thinks I am a yoooge fan of war films and I don’t quite know how to burst his bubble.

So I have a lot of homework. I haven’t decided who I will and won’t respond to, but I need to make a decision soon. I also should probably contact a couple of people of my own accord. For now, though, I’m kind of enjoying being a semi-invisible online shopper.

It’s the follow-through that’s going to be tough.