Reflecting On-Line
May 7th, 2009 § 1 Comment
The first few dates I arranged to go on with people I met on line, I flaked. It was a mixture between not wanting to be judged, not having enough nerve and not wanting to face the fact that once I went, Pandora’s Box of random strangers and Internet dating would be opened.
My Match.com inbox was a virtual meat market, the kind of sleazy meat market that I use to go to when I was underage and witnessed a guy peeing on the dance floor. No joke, I saw a guy unzip his jeans and relieve his drunken self right there on the dance floor. It was disgusting and I vowed to never go to that club again…even if it was the only place in Orange County that accepted my blatently fake ID. So, you can understand my aversion to dive back into an atmosphere that brought drunken dance floor pee-er types to my doorstep.
The Internet dating population is heavy with men who have been shunned by society at large and reduced to channel their cat calls and derogatory pick up lines virtually.
For example, take this email I got from a stranger:
I like to make ladies laugh and climax. I am a typical man that thinks about your ass before anything else. You must be a comedy lover to be around a guy like me. I can make you pee your pants from laughing so hard.
And then there were emails from guys who were clearly pulling out all the stops and layed it on so thick, that I smelled bullshit even before I got past the first few words:
…you have the beauty that you only glimpse in a blooming flower…..so,….if i didn’t stop and say that i really like your profile ( and i only mentioned your true beauty, which is yours to share with the right man…)i know your pretty , beautiful and a very gorgeous woman!if you’d like we could share your ambitions, desires and dreams…..fun it will be and exhausting it can be…..”we can sit down dying or get up and start living”……..i know i can make you smile…or at least my two dogs will have your heart by days end…..lolmy name is John and i would love to meet up with you,and just enjoy a nice evening,day whatever …of conversation and see if we can prolong an initial introductory…..p.s. yes….you made my knees shake a bit….lolJohn –
And some guys had even less to say but were equally as poignant:
I’m 34, I live alone, I have a career, my house is clean, and I have a cat. And I’m not gay. Need I say more? Kurtis
No matter what emails my inbox would bring to me daily, I always knew that at the very least, if I kept my sense of humor, the on line dating gods would provide the material to keep me laughing.
Virtually Dateable
May 4th, 2009 § 1 Comment
My first exposure to “internet dating” was back when I was 12 and had opened my first AOL account. Immediately after picking my screen name I was prompted to chat on a message board with other AOL members. Eager to join my new found community, I sat quietly in anonymity watching the conversation hum along. I wasn’t in the chat more than a minute before someone typed my user name and said hello. Within minutes he was flirting with me and asking me questions that were well beyond my 12 years.
After that incident, it took close to 20 years for me to consider internet dating a viable and sane option.
Internet dating has evolved from a sketchy scene to a more reputable one that Dr. Phil even endorses. While I would have rather held out for Oprah’s seal of approval, I didn’t have that kind of time.
I had just gone through a bad breakup, traveled a lot for work and realized that if I wanted to meet someone, I needed to put the effort in to do so. I had focused on my career for the past 10 years and had been successful professionally, I reasoned that if I were to pursue dating with that same passion, I would be equally as successful.
Living in LA, it is difficult to meet anyone who isn’t obsessed with looks and themselves. The shallowness and hollow LA scene had messed with my head and I lost all hope to ever find “the one”. I hit rock bottom one morning while walking to get my Starbuck’s and a homeless man hit on me. For one split second I thought, “well, I guess he is kind of cute.” I knew something had to be done as my standards were dipping precariously low.
I looked for a dating website I thought had the highest probability for attracting guys I would find appealing. I reasoned that Match.com was the best choice as it required a membership fee. If a guy had the $99 bucks to drop on virtual dating then chances were good that he also had a job. Yes ladies and gentlemen, that was what years of dating had reduced me to, the minimalist criteria of just wanting a guy who posessed the ability to use a computer and had a job.
The hardest part about online dating, besides owning up to it publicly, was completing the ”About Me” section. I struggled with how to convey my casualness toward internet dating, my like ability and my wit all while sounding irresistible but not desperate. I read other girls profiles and quickly found hundreds of examples of what I didn’t want to sound like.
I quickly assessed that I didn’t want:
- To start my profile with hi ya’ll
- To mention anything about my cats, purse puppies or refer to myself as a princess.
- To make any reference as to my desire to find my “soul mate”
- To mention frog kissing, prince charming or finding a guy “just like my dad”
I made sure that each of the pictures were recent, which is a courtesy not always extended by the online community. Words to the wise, a profile search that returns mullets, big bangs and ray bans are red flags that the person you are talking to passed their peak level of attractiveness in the 80′s.
I searched for girls in my area so I could see how my picture looked in the lineup. I then tried to reason that my profile pic, sans me in a bikini making pouty lips, would still garner attention and hoped it wouldn’t be lost in the sea of blonde and boobs.
In one week my profile had over 500 views and I wrestled with 200 emails in my inbox. Within 7 days, I was incessantly checking my profile to see how many hits and new messages I had. I was hopelessly addicted. Granted 5% were viable leads to potential love connections but the other 95% proved to be valuable fodder at fluffing my ego.
In the real world I garnered a few glances from the opposite sex a month, but virtually, I was Cindy Crawford circa that Pepsi commerical she did in the 90′s.
I quickly learned that in order to survive the online dating scene you must adhere to 5 rules:
1. Be honest even if it is brutally honest. People go online because they are sick of the dating scene filled with games and elusiveness. If you aren’t interested in someone tell them as nicely as possible and move on.
2. Hone your douchebag radar There are a good many of guys online that are just looking to hook up, get laid or get their ego boosted. These guys are typically easy to spot as their profile pictures are primarily shirtless. You can also be clued in by looking for over stylized jeans and bedazzled Ed Hardy t shirts.
3. If it he is too eager…let him go One particular guy I met online texted me constantly. Before we even met he texted every hour, telling me he missed me, how much he liked me and asking me how my day was going . Even though the attention felt good, it was totally manifested. Although he never met me he already had me on a virtual leash. If a guy smothers you before your first date, chances are his attention is less about you and more about his need for validation. I am no relationship expert but I’m pretty sure this makes for a terrible relationship.
4. Go on dates, even when you don’t want to. When I first started online dating I would make up any excuse to avoid meeting someone face to face. I was terrified that if were I to meet someone and hate them, I would be stuck for a few torturous hours. After I got over my initial trepidation about going on dates, I realized that most of them weren’t so bad. I changed my mindset and thought of them more like casual conversations with someone I met and was just being friendly to. If I imagined it as a date, 9 times out of 10 I would turn my car around change out of my heels and spend the remainder of the evening clearing out the unwatched DVR shows.
5. Keep an open mind. It is easy to talk yourself out of it. After all, it requires time, is uncomfortable, you get tired of being “judged” and it’s exhausting telling people about yourself over and over again. Stick with it though and eventually you will find someone worth the trouble.
Not Hip Enough to Be a Hipster
April 27th, 2009 § 4 Comments
I wanted so badly to be tragic.
Moving from Orange County to Los Angeles was a tremendous change for me. The first time I heard the word hipster I wasn’t sure what to make of the term, but I was pretty sure it involved black converse.
I was familair with the terms goth, straight edge, and alternative but hipster-that was a new one. When I was nervous my tendency to smile and laugh meant I was ill fit for Goth. I also didn’t want to carry a lunchbox and, although I tried really hard to like Morrisey, I couldn’t listen to him for too long before all I wanted was for his incessant whining to stop. As a teen, I liked Red Hot Chili Peppers, would watch the punks skate the Irvine Bowl, and I could even pull off black leggings and a plaid flannel tied around my waist. The best I could hope for was alternative.
My move to LA, and my friends desire to show me all the trendy hip places hidden within, led me on a spiritual journey of late nights and lots of challah french toast. We frequented Swingers diner, a place where I am sure having tattoos is a prerequisite to admission. We went to Brass Monkey every Friday night for drunken karaoke. We spent a summer day at Sunset Junction listening to the indie bands in the hot LA heat. She took me to movies at the Grove, we went to the Hollywood Bowl, we saw small artistic productions at seedy theatres…and I tagged along like a good student making mental notes of my travels and the new vocabulary associated with it.
And then, to test my ability to really assimilate into LA lifestyle, I started dating musicians. It started off as a fluke really. The first musician I dated was far from the starving artistic type. He owned his own house in Long Beach, was gainfully employed and well adjusted. His music however, suffered the brunt of his stability, as it was terrible.
Then there was my short-lived romance with an old friend of a friend who started his own band. He was scruffy with poor hygeine, he was impulsive, erratic, tormented, and lived in a Silver Lake apartment cluttered with worn novels and music lyrics scribbled on walls. And his music was…beautiful. His passion helped me overlook his self-obsession, his need for stability made me excuse his erratic schedule and late night band practices. His hipster appeal helped me to rationalize his predisposition for being hammered by noon.
I knew I wasn’t his type, at most, I served as nothing more than a rest stop. I was the place where he could fuel up on food and drink, get a good night’s sleep and be gone by dawn so he could miss morning traffic. My apartment was fully furnished, with soft lighting and probably felt more like his parent’s house than it did, “the chick he was hooking up with’s.”
Hipsters want a tragic girl. Someone with smeared black eyeliner, waifish appeal and torn leggings. Not someone who was quick to utter, ” I really want to go out with you tonight after band practice, but I have a senior management meeting in the morning.” He was so cute and I wanted so badly to be tragic enough, frail enough and lost enough to hold his attraction. I longed to be a waif but my bone structure wouldn’t cooperate. How could I ever keep my indie band guy interested if he couldn’t fit into my jeans?
From all the VH1 I watch and from all the stories I hear, true relationships with rock stars end in fireworks, and passionate arguments that end only when the cops are called. Ours however, just slowly faded away.
As months passed my phone began to ring less and less at 4 in the morning. He stopped calling me when he was drunk in an alley. We stopped getting together for Chinese food on his living room floor when he was back home in between tours. My short-lived LA musician romance didn’t even have an interesting ending.
Sadly, I was too together to stay in the hipster scene long enough to be naturalized. Though I had emotional torment of my own, it wasn’t channeled into guitar playing, song writing and cigarettes but was more accurately marked by pints of Ben and Jerry’s and Netflix.
