WARNING: This is a long personal essay. Get out now while you can.
Since yesterday, I have seen this article and snippets of it circulating on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet. Someone I know on Facebook posted a screen cap that they had found online of this "person's" profile saying that this was possibly the worst person he had ever seen on the internet. One of his friends recognized the profile as being the one created by the writer of said listicle, and linked him to it, at which point he was briefly relieved. However, this apparently had already opened up the floodgates for people on his thread to vent about the general awfulness of online dating. I was pretty convinced that I had some special stories to share, and weighed in to tell some of mine. However, I feel that I must offer you a disclaimer: I don't know much about dating. I never "dated" before the internet. I had relationships. I didn't go on "dates." This was like an experiment that went horribly awry for me.
I was in a 10-year committed, monogamous relationship until March of this year with a perfectly nice person who was not suited to me. The relationship had grown very dysfunctional, argumentative, and unhappy, and I decided to end it, even though I still liked and cared about my fiancé. He was devastated but ended up being very adult about it, and we were stuck living together for another month and two weeks before he could move elsewhere for the summer. He ended up going out of town. I resolved that I was going to be single for awhile and take time to heal from the breakup, etc. I did that for a few months. I went out dancing with girlfriends, had dinner parties with girlfriends, went to concerts with girlfriends and their boyfriends and husbands, went hiking with a girlfriend, read a lot of books, wrote songs and a scholarly article, wandered around a lot by myself in Hollywood and West Hollywood, and got lots of unwelcome attention from men wherever I went, because LA is a place where people are very forward about sex. I realized that I had not, in fact, shriveled up into a husk and blown away. In my relationship, I didn't even look at other people for nearly 10 years, other than to think, hmmm, he or she is attractive, oh well, that's moot, I'm in a relationship! It wasn't until near the end of my relationship that I even realized that maybe I was still attractive, or anything like that, to other people besides my partner. So, after ending it with him and being single for a bit, I began to wonder, what is dating all about?
I have never been a dater; I tended to form friendships with people, hang out a lot, and just end up with them eventually, or just fall head over heels for someone after spending a very long first meeting, talk to them for a long time, and end up with them quickly, and that's how I was ever in any of the relationships I'd ever been in. People kept saying, "Dating! It's fun! You go to dinner and just talk and you do it a few more times and see if you like them or not!" This sounded like an awful lot of work to me, to be honest, but I wondered if I wasn't missing something. It seems like a lot of my lady friends did this "dating" thing in high school, when I was busy mooning after my guy friends and eventually ending up with some of them, or just mooning after them to no avail. No one asked me on "dates." I never went to a school dance, not even my prom.
My luck with guys in high school was not amazing. I was every guy friend's best friend, the girl he went to to bitch about girl trouble, except for if we were alone and ended up making out, then avoiding each other for a few weeks after that out of awkwardness. I had a real boyfriend when I was a freshman, then I had no worthwhile boyfriends for awhile, just Guys to Hang Out With, then a great boyfriend my senior year and a couple of Serious Relationships as an adult. For this reason, at the age of 33, I was like, "Dating! I have heard of this before. I might as well see what it's like." That was in late July, after 4 months of the single life. I seemed to remember that POF was this free dating site that someone I knew had used and said was okay if you were willing to sift through a lot of uninteresting messages. The idea that a lot of people would write me uninteresting messages seemed almost too good to be true, because that would mean that there were actually people out there that might want to date me! What did I have to lose?
I generated myself a POF profile and realized I had no idea of what to say about myself, especially since characters were limited. How do I encapsulate myself? What did people really need to know about me? I took a personality test and was frustrated that it came up with "sapiosexual" as my personality type. How can my personality be described by a neologism saying I'm attracted to smart people? Are there people out there who find intelligence repellent? I did my best to give the people out there a decent idea of myself and went and looked at other profiles. I looked, and I looked, and I got more and more discouraged. There was something wrong with everyone! Anyone who liked good music didn't read. In fact, where were the readers on POF? I saw a couple of people who said they liked to read, but noticed punctuation and spelling errors in their profiles, which was discouraging. Finally, a guy wrote to me who had very few errors in his profile. He said he was planning on going back to school to become a doctor and was an old punk and rivethead. I thought he seemed pretty nice. I chatted with him a bit. He was quiet and respectful when I talked to him on the phone, so I agreed to go on A Date with him.
This led to me driving out to Burbank, where he took me to dinner, but he had already eaten, so he was just sitting there talking to me as I ate, then we had a drink at the bar near the restaurant and talked and no sparks flew. He asked to kiss me at the end and I said "okay" because I didn't want to seem unfriendly. He asked me on another date, and I "let" him kiss me again after another no-sparks dinner together, while staying stiff as a board and then pulling away. Why did I let him kiss me? Dating is horrible. I tried to pay my half of the ticket and he wouldn't let me. I drove myself home and ignored his texts for a few more days before working up the courage to say, hey, I think you are trying to move too fast and I'm not ready for a relationship, which was neither a lie nor true, because I really just had no particular urge to be near him again. I told him he was really nice and deserved a girl who was more suited to him, which was true. He told me what a nice person I was and said to have a happy and fulfilling life and to take care. Everything was nice. We were very, very nice to each other. It was terrible. I felt so depressed after that. He had glommed onto me and I just wasn't into it. That was the first date I ever went on, and I figured I was just having trouble getting used to dating, so I went on a second one before realizing I just wasn't into that guy. That strategy wasn't a very helpful one, as it turned out.
Then, I was asked on a date by a guy who said he was a skinhead, a punk, and a gentleman. We went on an okay first date. He asked me out again. I went out to visit him in Whittier, bringing my Trivial Pursuit game with me, and the whole thing was a fiasco. We got along poorly. I crashed over there, and in the morning, he had nothing to eat for breakfast, so I ate a Clif Bar that I'd brought with me, and he showed me how to make coffee in his Keurig when I asked him for a cup. His enthusiasm for the Keurig led him to enumerate its virtues to me in a way that resembled an advertisement, which made me remember that he wasn't a real punk, and that he was a compromised artist, because he worked in commercial art and made ads for a living. I left and never spoke to or saw him again, except to text and say that "I think it didn't work out" and that I wished him the best.
I gave POF one more chance and went on a very dull date with a man much younger than me who had pursued me. He was a graduate student at Pepperdine in public policy, so we had a conversation about politics, then he walked me to my car. I was irritated that I had driven out to Santa Monica for that. Dating sucks!!! I quit POF and whined to my friend Vanessa, asking her why I wasn't just going for it with a guy friend. She told me to quit mooning over guy friends and just try dating. I said POF made me die inside, so she persuaded me to join OKCupid by telling me that it had personality tests and quizzes and questions and other entertaining junk to help you find matches. QUIZZES? That's the magic word right there. I joined immediately and started taking quizzes. I wrote a very elaborate profile.
Here, for your perusal, are some messages I got on OKC. I sent these as comments on my friend's page on Facebook because he seemed to think that women were going about interaction on online dating sites all wrong, based on his experience. I was trying to let him know that nobody was really doing it right.
Thought I'd drop in and say hello, you look like someone cool : )
Instead of reading all your profile, let me ask you a question:
If you have to use three words for describing yourself, what words would you use!"
Let's see. I'd go with "READ MY PROFILE." Here's another:
It seemed presumptuous to suggest I would like him anyway in the way that he did. I ruled that out. No more bad dates. Besides, if you don't know the music I know, you probably don't know what I like or think about anything, because I've been part of a subculture for the majority of my life now, in a way.
So. Here I am. Now I'm 34. I have heard people (well, my friends who are biased about me, anyway) say that I'm a good catch, so apparently the problem isn't either that I'm an unappealing person with a nasty personality, or that people don't like me. I have cogitated a lot on why I am single during the time that I have been single, and have come up with a few theories.
1. My standards are high. I don't think that's bad, it just means I won't find a lot of people I want to be with, which has always been true.
2. I don't like dating. I tried it. It wasn't much fun. I have a better time going out with friends or just being in a relationship, or sitting at home alone writing on my blog about how I hate dating.
3. I'm bad at people.
4. It's the wrong time.
There is also the matter that I think that most people just don't have their heads on straight about relationships and dating. I have had to hear a lot of sad things from my friends about their love lives over the years, and it seems to me like people are allergic to things like respect, patience, empathy, communicating honestly and openly, being considerate, and not immediately getting what they want. It is astonishing to me how many women, including me, have had guys that don't seem to notice or care whether we are into physical interaction with them and just seem to like trying to go as far as they can before we say no and make them stop. I really wish I'd just said "no, I don't feel like it" when POF Bad Date #1 put his arm around me or tried to kiss me. A lot of women seem to have the idea that we are being impolite and bitchy when we just say what we like and don't like, and this leads to an awful lot of problems with consent, because we sometimes seem to be giving it by not saying "no" when our body language is screaming "I'm not into this, I'm cold, I'm stiff, I'm freezing up, I'm turning away from you, I don't want that" but we're not actually saying anything. This sucks. I mean, good that my date didn't push me into anything once I got up and moved away, but I am mystified as to what part of my radical feminist brain burst into a chorus of "Don't be unfriendly! Give this guy a chance!" and stopped me from saying "No, thanks" when a guy I wasn't attracted to tried to kiss me, and why I was inclined to let him do it for a moment. If my dad (rest his soul) knew I was doing that, he'd tell me, "I don't understand why you're putting up with this shit. Tell that guy 'no.' Who cares if he's perfectly nice; you're not into him. You have agency and a right to say no. It's not impolite; don't let sexism tell you that your role is to be quiet." I resolved after that date never to be wishy-washy about consent ever again, and to be sure I give it and deny it when I want to, always.
But really, this listicle (which was barely written as a list at all, and makes me think that Cracked is really just insisting that everything be a listicle now for no reason other than marketing, even when the article was never intended as one, which is very frustrating to me!!) had a very valid point: some people go into dating looking mostly for sex with someone they think is attractive. They don't care if sparks fly. They do not give a fuck about relationships, compatibility, honesty, candor, supportiveness, romance, or any of that other stuff I like. Apparently my notion of sparks flying and currents of electricity passing between you and someone else because of your emotional and intellectual connection is one of which most people are unaware, or one in which they aren't the slightest bit interested. People seem to be very lonely and eager to find a warm body to spend time with, go to bed with, or spend their life with, as long as everyone is nice and things are okay, or even if no one is nice and things suck.
I mean, we all compromise a bit with a partner, right? Sure. That's normal. You see them when it works with your schedules. You agree on a place you both are okay with eating at if you don't both feel like eating the same thing, but want to go to dinner. Your partner isn't in the mood when you are, so you cuddle. you pick out a movie to watch together rather than one you would have watched by yourself automatically. Maybe you move to a place where your partner has found work and you just go along and find your work and be there with them for awhile, living, working, being okay with life. That all makes sense to me. I can make compromises. I have made them before and been fine. I refuse to compromise on other things, though, like someone who has different values than me, or vastly different ideas about what they want from their future than I do.
Some people, though, apparently don't even care if the person they are with has a brain in their head, or a heart or a sense of compassion and empathy. They will compromise everything and never speak up for what they believe in, if they have convictions of any kind, so they can be with someone. This article seemed to show that there were a lot of people out there who were just gonna go for it with this garishly caricatured psychopathic girl they met on an online dating site. The attitudes that people have about who they will spend time with are terrifying. I don't want to go out there if those are the people who are out there, and they will write to me, and I will become frustrated. I'd rather not try, honestly.
So, that's the conclusion. This listicle made me glad I finished my little experiment with dating. I think that I might not be alone forever, but I will be fine if I am for a while, I suppose. I'd like to blame the internet, because this is online dating and it's tempting, and people have very unfortunate behaviors on the internet these days. They act as though it is a vacuum for words and actions, where you say something and it disappears, you never suffer any consequences, and if someone is mad, you either tell them they are wrong for having a reaction ("butt-hurt," as they say) and feeling something, or you apologize and all is forgotten forever. It is really tempting to say that the problem is the internet.
But I'm afraid that the problem is something deeper, a thing I can't address satisfactorily here, something that eludes my words and my theories, something that is hard to put my hands on, slipping always from my grasp as I reach out. It's something about how the world works now, how people see each other, what they will do in it, a thing I've never been quite able to understand entirely, and I have been thinking about these things for a long time.
But I'm afraid that the problem is something deeper, a thing I can't address satisfactorily here, something that eludes my words and my theories, something that is hard to put my hands on, slipping always from my grasp as I reach out. It's something about how the world works now, how people see each other, what they will do in it, a thing I've never been quite able to understand entirely, and I have been thinking about these things for a long time.
I can tell you this: people would be a lot better off if they put work into re-learning the value of the words "yes" and "no." Say no when you don't want something. Say yes when you do. If you want a relationship with someone, or to kiss them, say yes, and say no if you don't. Don't equivocate and expect anything but your words to stand for you when important things are on the line. Your actions back up your words, but try to put your words first, because they're much easier to interpret. Don't do what the people in this listicle did and give a yes that you will regret down the line. I hear a whole sea of yes's that mean nothing and no's that no one else hears coming from the people around me. Stop it. Use your words correctly. A "date" is dinner where you see if sparks fly, and if they don't, don't keep trying with that person. Say no to them so you can find someone else who makes you want to say yes. If sparks fly, then yes, yes, that's great! Find someone who asks you things you like saying "yes" to and try to be around them.
That's what I've got. I hope it was either helpful or amusing or somehow good for you to read. My next blog will not be personal like this one was, but this listicle really got wheels turning in my head.
