Adventures in Online Dating: Part One

TODAY IS MY TWENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY, which means that I successfully (?) got to the point I thought I would when I started writing this book. I am single, still, having always been, forever. Lest you think this was some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, let me assure you: I didn’t have to try at ALL. I made it twenty-five years without so much as a short-term boyfriend, quite easily. Congratulations! I did it.

I could tell you how I did it, but you know that by now, don’t you? Lots of hopeful eye contact and then lots of running away. Lots of mild teasing. Many ill-advised pursuits. Too many potheads. And so on.

This time last year I thought this chapter in my life was nearly over, sort of. A week earlier I had spent my birthday party in an adorable outfit, making eyes with Spruce. The whole thing had seemed promising, relatively speaking. And then on my real birthday, though it was Thanksgiving that day, I waited around hoping he’d send me a text message or at least a Facebook post. Even though he’d told me happy birthday before, a few days earlier. Even though you can’t really expect everyone to be attached to their phones on family holidays, even though my birthday often falls under the radar that way. Even though he was forgetful about pretty much everything, and I knew that.

That message never came. And when I think about the timing? That weekend is probably right about when he met the other girl, and the two of them started dating instead.

Here is a good tip I’ve learned: Don’t like anybody who won’t tell you happy birthday on your actual birthday. It will only be downhill from there. Someone who likes you, I think, will remember to take the time on the day you were born to say, “Hey, happy birthday,” and in so doing, at least be willing to acknowledge that he is happier to have you alive than dead. Sure, you might be thinking, “Katie, just because someone forgets to tell you happy birthday doesn’t mean they actively wish you were dead.” And to that I guess I’d have to say, “Oh, sorry, I guess I didn’t realize you were secretly surveying all of my so-called friends to see whether or not they’d mind if I fell off a cliff.” And then I’d say I’m sorry, because this isn’t about you.

I’d be lying if I said that some little part of me didn’t think I’d have met my future spouse by now, and that we’d have been together for a year or maybe two. We would have already gone on a few vacations together—romantic ones, like Paris, or a cabin up north, or Harry Potter World or something. This is what happens when your parents married at the baby age of twenty-two and have been happily together for the twenty-seven years since. You start to think it always works out that way, or at least that it could. I mean, my dad always used to say that he saw my mom at the college cafeteria milk machine and knew then that she’d be his wife. The milk machine. How am I supposed to keep up with that?

I want to meet my true love that way. Not at a milk machine per se, because it would be kind of weird for that to happen now that I’m not spending any time in cafeterias, and I don’t think I trust a man out of college who still drinks milk with every meal. I do, however, want to be seen from afar, and admired, and then wooed. By someone I adore right away. Basically, I want to expend minimal effort and have somebody fall madly in love with me just by virtue of being near me for a handful of days, and then it will just work out that we’re perfect for one another. I do not see what the big deal is about that.

When I say things like this to my friends, they do these massive, comically exaggerated eye-rolls and tell me that it doesn’t work that way, and that I’ll never meet anybody just sitting around and waiting, and that if I’m such a feminist I should go make things happen for myself (like going out somewhere and yelling “I am a strong, self-possessed woman!! DATE ME!!” I guess), and that people don’t meet each other like that these days. Yes, they sometimes meet in school. But mostly they meet at work, or they meet through friends. Or, worst of all, they meet online.

Now, I’m not knocking online dating in general (or if I am, it’s only a little). I think it’s a great tool for people whose life circumstances just don’t afford them the opportunity to date very much or at all, or who just want another way to meet new people, and I know that many very happy couples meet in this way. I also know that almost everybody has got some level of hang-up about it and that nobody feels totally comfortable putting themselves out there on the Internet like that, and that there are tons and tons of normal, attractive, and great people with online dating profiles, and that the people I saw on there who looked like alien hybrids from The X-Files were the exceptions rather than the rule. I know that nobody should be embarrassed to try online dating. But I can’t help it: I find the whole idea kind of mortifying.

My friend Marie, who approaches most areas of life with the kind of severe and exacting practicality that most people reserve for filing income taxes or applying for a mortgage, met her boyfriend of two years through OkCupid. She is incapable of letting her hormones and her neuroses drive her decisions, which makes her both helpful and extremely frustrating as a sidekick. She’s also a few years older than me, so I like to pretend as though her wisdom and calm, focused demeanor are things I’ll be able to attain after living a bit longer. For these reasons, I value her input, even when I hate it. And sometime last spring, when I was still mopey enough about Spruce to want to date somebody but before I was done feeling bitter about the entire world, Marie told me I should just try OkCupid already, and I grudgingly agreed.

It didn’t go too well.

It was about 9:00 pm on a weeknight when I agreed to make my dating profile. I chose OkCupid because it was what my friends had used or were currently using, because it was free, and because it had the reputation of being the dating site of choice for urban twenty-somethings. Also, it had a nice blue background.

One of the things I hate about dating profiles is that it is nearly impossible to describe yourself without sounding either totally boring or completely insane. Very few people are able to sound like they’re somewhere in between, even though most people surely are. I hate the broadness of a profile section called “A little about me.” How is that possible? “I like happiness.” “I am hungry a lot, and I like books.” “One time I think I saw a UFO, but I was ten and it could have been anything and I don’t want you to think that I’m crazy so I don’t even know why I brought that up.” The profiles I first examined (through the comfort and secrecy of Marie’s profile) for “intel gathering,” as I considered it, either left far too much to the imagination (“I’m a happy guy and if you want to know more about me, just ask.”) or went all in to the point of recklessness. Describing ourselves, it turns out, is not something human beings are all that great at.

Still, I tried. With the assistance of Marie and Rylee, both of whom know how to make me sound better (or, at least, more approachable) than I do, I came up with something all right. I don’t remember now what-all I said, but it’s safe to say I made some stupid jokes, used too many exclamation points, and admitted too freely to my love of aliens. I activated the profile somewhere around 10:00 pm, and for the next hour the three of us sat on my couch and perused my options. We scrolled through twelve pages of matches, and I found just two of those people slightly appealing. I realize that might make me sound like an asshole, so let me clarify: It’s not that I’m some hugely elitist looks-judge or that I had a field day criticizing everyone’s music and movie tastes. I am no interests snob. I listed the Harry Potter books in order of how much I liked them in my “favorite books” section, for God’s sake. Still, we can’t help who we are and are not attracted to. Also, everyone was really short. I guess it’s probably terrible as a five-foot-eleven-inch-tall lady to direct most of my attention toward people my height or even taller. At least, that’s what my friends (five feet to five-six) tell me. Friends whose boyfriends, by the way, are universally six feet or taller.

I went to bed feeling dismissive of the whole thing, sure that I couldn’t feel any worse about online dating than I did at that moment. When I woke up the next morning to see if anything transformational had happened overnight, I proved myself wrong. Overnight, I had acquired three messages. Two were variations on “Hey what’s up.” One of these came from the boringest person ever of all time. Another came from a young man whose interests included “guns—the bigger the better.” The third message came from a twenty-one-year-old, whose existence outside the confines of my listed twenty-four-to-thirty-year-old age preference seemed not to bother him, and who told me, “Hey your really beautiful just so you know.” I could have written back “YOU MEANT YOU’RE,” but I guess it’s best not to look a compliment horse in the grammar. Still, we were not meant to be. His picture was of him flexing in the mirror. We were a 47 percent match. But at least he complimented me. That was nice.

I took one last trip through my matches to see if anyone perfect had showed up in the wee hours of the morning, and I did find someone new—we were a 90 percent match, which is a pretty phenomenal score considering I answered the majority of my match questions with “I don’t know,” because I sort of find it hard to say what I will and will not tolerate in a mate in absolute terms (well, except for the obvious will-nots: Bestiality. Adultery. Misogyny. Being a White Sox fan.). I clicked on his profile and found what must surely be the best/worst “about me” description given in the history of online dating. I won’t quote the whole thing (though I definitely did so in an email to about seven of my friends) because I feel like that would probably be illegal and maybe a little mean spirited since he didn’t ask me to read it. I will paraphrase, though, and say that he said that he lived the life of a broken music box from Thailand, made by “odious” and expensive child labor and mailed to America in “wasteful packaging.” He said that the journey from Thailand made “his” music distorted, and that now he plays “eerie and irritating” tunes. He said that he sits (figuratively, I hope!) in a dusty garage, waiting until the day when he’s sent to the garbage dump.

I mean, wow. What does that mean? I think he seems to be anti–child labor, maybe, so that’s good. He also sounds a bit environmentally conscious, with the whole “wasteful packaging” thing, so that’s good, too. But then there are the parts where he compares himself to a music box that is eerie and irritating. There was also a part about wanting to be like a donkey that I can’t even really get into without dying. Soooo.

This is who Cupid himself considers to be my match made in heaven.

I shut down my profile after a mere twelve hours. I think it was too much all at once. I wasn’t prepared for the guy who, in his “about me” section, described the entire scientific process of evolution and then ended it with “So here I am,” NOT in a way intended to be humorous. I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming number of people who describe themselves as “living life one day at a time,” as though there are tons of other ways to do it. (“Oh, me? I like to live my life eight days at a time. Really spices things up.”)

Most of all, I wasn’t prepared to put myself out there like that, because you know what I’m starting to think? I am just a big, huge, enormous scaredy-cat.