Dipping a Toe Into the Online Dating Pool

For several months, my friend Nancy has been urging me to try online dating. Recently, two other acquaintances have made friendly suggestions to this end, as well. Each time, I have hemmed and hawed over it, always letting my conservative (read: traditional) side win out.

Thinking about it this weekend, I decided that I maintain a digital life in many other areas: I connect with potential customers via the internet, I buy everything from books to antiques online, I am devoted to my Facebook page, I’m LinkedIn, I vlog, I blog... why not date? I’ve known a few people that have met their partners online and nothing traumatic seems to have come of it. So, I signed up for eHarmony during their Memorial Day “free communication weekend.”

Yes, that’s right; I said eHarmony, the online dating service that’s known for producing more marriages than any other internet dating site. This decision caused me much distress. Because I selected this distinct service, would I seem desperate? Would my matches think that my whole aim was to land a husband? Would I look like I couldn’t get a date anywhere else? And then I said, “Fuckem, the guys who’ll be seeing me are on there, too and I could ask the same things about them!!”

The idea was great in theory, but not so much in practice. In addition to the questionnaire taking literally hours for me to complete, I then had to answer essay-style questions about myself and what I am seeking in a partner. Compared to the average bear, I have a gift for written communication. What no one ever sees is how fantastically long it takes me to write anything of importance. You think I hemmed and hawed about trying online dating? You should observe me searching for precisely the word to transfer my thoughts into writing some time. Legislative decisions have been made faster. And despite how verbose I come across here, I assure you that the answers I produced for those profile questions were terser than terse. Genuine and to the point, but terse, nonetheless.

Predictably, “free communication weekend” was over before I was notified that someone wanted to correspond with me. And that means only one thing: time to pony up some cash if I want to respond. I was stuck in a conundrum. Not only did I feel sick to my stomach at the prospect of evaluating someone that I don’t even know over the internet to see if they could be a romantic match for me, I felt sick thinking about the cost and taking the hit for a minimum three-month subscription. Well, nausea made everything clear… I am not as committed to finding a soul mate as my friends had convinced me I was. At least not right now and not over the internet.

Nausea or not, chalk it up to self-consciousness. I see myself as the girl that’s a friend with all the guys, but never the girlfriend. I’m great for hanging out with. I like barbecue, I will match you beer for beer, I have a mind for trivia, I’ll spend all day in a canoe and I like to sit right up front at a hockey game. In life, I have a naughty librarian thing going on, but in my mind, I am much harder on myself than I should be. Truth be told, I am afraid that, in the end, I will be a disappointment.

That and I’ve reached a point at which nothing short of Norman Reedus will suffice. I mean, in addition to his uncommonly appealing hair, he’s been in TWO movies about the Beats and his son is named after Charles Mingus. I glean from this that he must know a little bit about Kerouac and he obviously likes jazz enough to honor one of the greatest bandleaders of all time with the soul of his first born - he’s got two of my three requirements down. And taking into account that he’s a photographer… well, what photographer doesn’t like to capture some sexy cemetery action on film? He could potentially be the perfect guy, but something tells me he’s not on eHarmony.

Alas, what’s a girl to do? It came to me, actually, as I drove around on this gorgeous late spring day, listening to Dave Brubeck’s Take Five and wishing that I had a Convertible so I could impose the genius of that album on every person in Lowell. Instead of coughing up $26 a month for an eHarmony subscription that might or might not get me any closer to being Sadie Sadie Married Lady, I’d prefer to have the money to spend on things that are… peculiar to my interests. In fact, I wasted no time resolving to place an order from Amazon for a very intriguing book called Assassination Vacation, about a woman who visits the memorials of our assassinated presidents, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Rip Rig and Panic, which I haven’t heard since I borrowed it from the library in the summer of 1997. Something tells me this will make me happier in the long run than some indiscriminate dude from Roxbury who wants to know if my idea of adventure is eating something I’ve never tried before.*

*In case you’re curious, the answer to that is no. I’ll pretty much eat anything you put in front of me. And that’s just one more reason why Mr. Reedus would be an ideal counterpart (see question #8 here); he probably wouldn’t complain about curry or a meat pie made with nutmeg.