The light from the Mac display was the only illumination in the room as Izzy did a search for dating websites. She was tucked into bed with Gus pressed firmly to her side, his head on the pillow beside her, and her cats Fat Bob and Prince on the other. It was a snuggle fest, and it was a good thing she was single because there wasn’t enough room in the bed for another person.
Earlier that evening at bowling league, the team had given her a ton of advice on the ins and outs of online dating. Like Hector and Audie, they had been a little too eager to provide her with guidance. What was it with her friends wanting to hook her up? She took a deep breath and entered the criteria in the web browser.
Holy crap! She found so many sites, and some were pretty wild. She pulled up the first website that didn’t look like a foray into kink. Not that anything was wrong with kink, but it wasn’t her particular cup of tea. The site didn’t make it easy to just look around. They required a profile before she could even see what the website looked like. She didn’t want anyone to notice her while she checked things out. Would she be a fraud if she created a fake profile? Well, yeah. Fake was the very definition of a fraud. She groaned. Okay. She’d create a profile so uninteresting, she’d fly under the radar.
First things first. A username. Should she use her real name or a pseudonym? She couldn’t think of a good pseudonym to suit her. TechChick was taken, and NymphoHoney was just not her style. Feeling like a total bore, she considered several derivations of her full name before she settled on “I. Treadway.” It didn’t give her true identity away, and she wasn’t required to load a picture, so she didn’t. The bare minimum was the name of the game if she was just there to poke around. A message popped up telling her a profile without a picture severely limited her chances of finding dates. Good. That was exactly what she wanted, so she ignored it. Next, she had to fill out a questionnaire. The first question irritated her, and it only got worse as she read the next ones. Who cared about the color of a person’s eyes? She liked both athletic and curvy women. How could she pick just one? Each question drove her irritation level higher. When she reached the end and hit save, she felt judgmental and shallow, but, finally, she could progress to the browsing section.
She’d chosen the free option, so she was allowed to scroll through the database with restricted access. She could wink at people, but she couldn’t message them directly unless they initiated contact. She also couldn’t see full profiles, only the first five lines of their “About Me” section. She also found, unless she paid, she couldn’t really communicate much with anyone, not that she wanted to. But this was research. The site had a monthly fee option, or she could go a full year for seventy-nine dollars. She had to admit it was a good deal, but how many people did this for a full year? She decided to fork over the monthly fee to see more of the profiles.
An hour later, Izzy was still scrolling through profiles, the experience strangely compulsive. She learned which of them drew her in and which ones didn’t. Some were written well; others were barely legible. Others were so charming she wondered why they were still on the site. Her digital notepad filled up with the notes she took.
A small eye with long eyelashes appeared in the corner of her screen. A wink! Someone was winking at her! She didn’t even have a picture up, and someone was winking at her. Should she ignore it? The user name, FemmeFatale, seemed somewhat ominous, but she was curious. With an apprehensive tickle in her stomach and reminding herself this was all for the book, she clicked on the profile and saw a photo of a woman with her dog. She looked friendly enough. She hovered the cursor over the wink button for a moment before she winked back. Seconds later, a message appeared in the instant-messaging window.
Hi, there, I. Treadway.
Hi, she typed back.
FemmeFatale: I noticed you don’t have a picture. Are you shy?
I. Treadway: A little.
FemmeFatale: The cool thing about being online is you don’t need to be shy.
I. Treadway: How so?
FemmeFatale: You never have to meet the person you talk to if you don’t want to.
I. Treadway: True.
FemmeFatale: So, what are you doing right now?
I. Treadway: Talking to you.
FemmeFatale: Ask me what I’m doing.
I. Treadway: Okay. What are you doing?
FemmeFatale: I’m touching myself, thinking about—
Izzy clicked out of the profile and hit the block button. This was supposed to be the tame dating site. What had she gotten herself into? She closed her computer and placed it on her bedside table. In the shadows of her dark bedroom she thought about the interaction. Part of her felt bad for the abrupt way she had left the conversation with FemmeFatale, but what was the woman thinking? The internet brought people closer together but also introduced a virtual distance, making people feel as if they could do things they never would in person. She’d worked in technology most of her career. She used social media all the time. But this online-dating thing had revealed an aspect she’d never really considered. It took a while before she finally fell asleep.
* * *
There are countless ways to meet people. Ask your coupled friends how they met, and you’ll probably get different answers from each of them. Take my friends Rhonda and Jean. They met while skydiving in Dubai. Two years later, they were married during a jump at 12,000 feet above the California desert. I was invited to the ceremony, but the only way you could get me to jump out a plane would be if it was on fire, and even then, I’d take some time to consider the options.
Anywho—even though most people will tell you they go to bars or clubs to find romance, it’s usually not where people meet the people they end up with. Bars and clubs are noisy, and unless you read lips, it’s hard to get to know someone when you can’t hear what they’re saying. Before a bunch of you go running to flood my social media with your stories of meeting your Happily Ever After at a bar, I’m not saying it’s unheard of. I’m just saying it happens far less often than you’d think.
So, bars are out, and you don’t skydive. Where do you go to meet people? Unless you’re a hermit, you meet people every day—at work, waiting in line at the grocery store, volunteering at the pet shelter—all day, every day. Use this interaction to meet potential dates. Of course, you’ll want to make sure it’s appropriate because you’ll probably run into the person again. But it’s also a way to meet people with the same interests as you.