The Dating Minefield

There is something so incredibly damning about sending a message to a stranger through the aether of the Internet. The stripping down of masks and personae. That open, honest communication that people spoke of ten years ago in the dawn of the chatroom—the one that made online weddings so much purer and more intellectually honest—isn't entirely false. No one is truly surprised that we haven't seen the text-based dating world supplant nature's own, but neither do they have any reason to discount the very naked sharing that can happen in such a forum.

I won't lie about the fact that I respond to personals and pursue romantic interests through dating sites. I do. It's the more fruitful of the two ways I meet women at all. The second, dating friends of friends, has had a return of about two in two years. Once I met a girl in a public place and dated her, also unsuccessfully, but I'm beginning to regard that as a fluke, not a viable alternative. The fact remains that I'm usually drunk or otherwise impaired in public, and my decisions aren't realistic or wise. The pictures people provide of themselves on the Internet are enough to establish a modicum of physical attraction when your eye is seasoned to the tricks people play.

I just wrote an entreaty to a young woman in my area through a dating site that plays with the triumphs of social networking and the allure of user-created electronic “testing.” Surveys. These are something like Cosmopolitan's quizzes, injected with 100cc of anabolic steroids and the irreverent groupthink that is spawned by the odd wikismörgåsbord of ten-million-some lonely singles. I don't know yet if there will be any reply, despite my finely crafted missive.

I can tell right away that I've made some questionable choices. Like the pigeon in Skinner's box, I only have my previous examples to draw on, and the decisions made by the unsuspecting targets of my would-be affections may be completely random. Brevity seems to be a good way to open an exchange. Or, at least, the results of these previous successes imply this. So I've been brief. I've also tried to extract some kind of dream-like effluvia from the meager details this lovely young lady has lain out on her “profile.”

This is clearly stupid on my part. Would anyone who was actually interested in meeting a potential significant other actually lay out all the keys in their two hundred word essay? Wouldn't the most intelligent strategy be to wait for someone to come along who says the correct thing without prompting?

I feel this foreboding twist in my muscles immediately after releasing an inquiry like this into her waiting inbox every single time I do this. It leaves me unable to sleep, wracked with thoughts. Embarrassments. Would-have-beens. This is what was seen by those early pioneers of the e-relationship. My psyche is being stretched so thin that it hurts. My vulnerability is spread on the page like a mono-molecular layer of peanut butter on a pauper's sandwich. And this is all before any actual interaction has occurred!

Mind you, sometimes it works. And usually, after all the wall-building and self-effacing tosses and turns between the sheets, I'm no longer interested in the physical being who presents herself to me. Usually I can't wait to go home and laugh about it. But here, in the moment, I am a sheared lamb. All of my puff and valor gone the way of the sweater.

Every time I stand on the train, riding to work, and observe a young man or woman with an iPod turned up loud, earbuds assaulting their cochlear canals, I see the very root of human reproduction besieged. Constant public conversations on cell phones are a modern salvo against hook-ups or a thickly interlaced society of many cultures fucking and swapping memes in dark places. The conservative agenda has known no greater ally than digital hand-held technology in the fight against promiscuity.

All the classic avenues for breaching the thick sand-bag walls that surround my minuscule social circle have been barricaded and cut off.

So I try the electronic superhighway to love. And my inability to hide behind a smile or a carefully crafted appearance leave me the stepchild of the eighties and the naughts. No doubt my descendants will negotiate this javascript minefield in sashaying figure-eights, but I stumble like a half-blind eunuch at the senior prom.

(Thank you for reading as the stupid monkey complains about his inadequacies.)