My first eDate was with Ray bon jovi*. Yeah, that was his first name. What kinds of parents name their son after bon jovi? I thought he was great when he came over to my place at the frat house. He insisted on being my boyfriend and spending vast amounts of time with me, even though we had just met. He ended up staying for three days! The problem was I didn’t want him there. I would go to class and he would stay there. I didn’t get to see my friends or do any work. Sometimes I would make up an excuse to leave. I would say that I had to go leave my room and go to the communal bathroom down the hall. I would go hang out with friends for a while in a different room instead. He must have thought that I had habitual diarrhea with how long I would be gone. My friends would ask me how Ray Bon-Jovi was doing. I would tell them to go ask themselves, he was upstairs. At least I learned one thing: never let any guy tell you that you aren’t good enough, even if they are trying to make it a joke. He would say I looked pregnant, and that I was good looking other than my face. He would tell me at least five times a day that I needed to have my long brown hair back. My chin length blonde hair was apparently not what he was buying into when he set up our date. Apparently it as false advertising when I put on older pictures. He had agreed to meet the brunette beauty with the flowing hair not the bobbed blonde.
After he finally left I did the mature thing of unrelationshiping him on facebook. (Hey, I never said I was good at this shit either.) He called repeatedly until I couldn’t deny talking to him anymore. This is how my method of breaking up with guys was first developed. It was my first experience, having been the dumpee in the situations with my first two high school boyfriends. My Friend down the hall helped me list on a dry-erase board all of the reasons that I could not date him. I needed it to keep on track and not be convinced to stay with him. I almost laughed when he started crying! He turned down and denied every reason, until Lisa circled and underlined reason number 7: I am a lesbian! I don’t think I used that one, but the point got across. This was my last eDating experience in college, and it was not until the summer after graduation that I gave it another try.
Dating Philosophy
So here is the idea about online dating. You pick one out based on a couple pictures and a little bio. It is the ultimate example of human superficial-ness. The user searches for matches who are attractive, but not too attractive that you don’t have a chance. It is also an ultimate test of self-confidence. You can tell what kind of confidence a person has by whom they think they have the right to message and possibly date in the future. Someone who has extremely high self-confidence will blow off anyone who looks any less than a red carpet model. It seems only obvious from that reasoning that the eDater with low confidence will be too intimidated by attractive or slightly successful profiles.
If for some reason they pass the first “attractive- yet not too douch-baggary” test you scan the words for signs of serial killer tendencies, and send a message. Now not every eDater is the same. There are always exceptions to the rules. You often have the creepy guys who send out mass messages to every female seeking male on the site without a mustache. (Sometimes they even send messages to those depending on how desperate.)
Here is my problem:
When on a date with someone you meet online eDaters don’t hear what the other person is ACTUALLY saying. They obviously want it to go well. They wouldn’t be searching hopelessly through wifi waves for a soul mate if they had the time or social skills to wait around to sort through guys themselves. By looking for a significant other online it proves that you are either looking for sex or looking for “the one.” Everyone wants to think that the next one is going to be “the one.” We wouldn’t do it knowing that the next one is going to be a waste of time or will take your heart and rip it out leaving you a little less trusting towards the next. We wouldn’t bother (and would probably not let it happen in the first place), which leads me to my point. Every eDater goes into the date with at least a glimmer of a hope that this is the person you have been looking for their entire life.
So this is why we see our date in a far better light than they really are. We WANT them to be the great person they might be. This is how I know that in order for me to see these eDater guys as ridiculous, bad dates they must have been just that… bad. I have to admit that the stories I have taken away are something that have added to my life experience.
So what happens when you take out that factor? What happens when you don’t go in it for sex or marriage? You don’t go into it trying to dress up and impress? What happens when you eDate as many people as possible to learn about the opposite sex? What would you see once the bull shit curtain was pulled away? No one to try to impress, no false hopes or rose-colored glasses?
*names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
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