The internet. Full of porn, endless timesucks, shopping sites, cat videos, and angry tweens tweeting for Biebs. Not a place where I ever thought I would meet people. I have seen far too many episodes of Law and Order: SVU (and don’t lie, so have you), and received chain email after chain email, about women who were smart, but none the less ended up being stuffed into dumpsters by people they met off the web. That being said, the internet has always held a particular thrall over me. When I was little I used to log on to AOL, and haunt chatrooms. I was smart enough to never want to meet anyone I talked to, but I got a strange thrill talking to people about sex. The internet was the place where I discovered my love of smutty stories, mostly dirty fanfic. I don’t think I am alone in my experiences- I’ve talked to enough friends that had the same awakenings, and can only guess how many more kids and teens learn the basics from porn on the internet. It may just be a hallmark of the Internet Age. So perhaps online dating, with all its stigmas and the general disdain it arouses in most people, it just another natural progression in the integration of our sex lives with the internet.
There were three reason I decided to try online dating. One- I met my last boyfriend at a bar and look how well THAT turned out. Two- A few good friends of mine were trying it and outside of a few awkward dates, had yet to be dumpster stuffed. Third- how the hell do you meet people after college? Having no friends in Charlotte outside of my aunt and her adorable dog, I was not likely to meet tons of people through them. And I prefer not to date people at work- that ends only slightly better than sleeping with your ex.
I chose to test my luck on OkCupid, on recommendation from a friend. And it quickly became like crack. I thought in the begining that it was just a bout of latent narcissism; I have a strangely good time answering questions about myself (And OkC doesn’t really make the claim that their questions match you on “deep compatibility”, but rather how you feel about guns, god, and/or anal), and I threw myself into making a profile with much enthusiasm, and was slightly flattered by the amount of emails that flooded my inbox. I started out by replying to all of them, some of them better than others. I went on some dates… ok, I went on a LOT of dates… some of them better than others. (For a really great article on the pitfalls of online dating see Jill Filipovic’s article @ GOOD- ‘No Crazy Chicks’:Eight Red Flags I learned from Online Dating ) All of a sudden I felt burned out. I was not the type of girl who had ever managed a crazy social schedule, juggled multiple boys, or spent late nights on dates every night of the week. No, deep in my heart I am a lazy grandma. I knit, I go to bed at 9. I kvetch about loud music and have a hard time working my iphone because it is just too newfangled for me. But in the end I enjoyed my time on the dating circuit- It got me out of a much needed rush and was, for a time, a safe, easy environment from which I could experiment with what I was looking for in a relationship.
And luckily, this all has a happy ending. I ended up meeting someone, just as I was reaching the very end of my dating rope, who is awesome and sassy and makes me happy. Even if he does live hours away, (although I fear that is something for another post).
Tags: dating, goodmagazine, internets, john waters, sex
