Author: Michelle

Dating game redux

Last Friday night
We went streaking in the park
Skinny dipping in the dark
Then had a ménage à trois
–Katy Perry/Friday Night

In my fairly long foray into the world of online dating, I had a lot of time to look at people’s user profiles. Obviously, I looked at the guys most often, but I also looked at the other women’s profiles as well. Curiosity killed the cat and all. I wouldn’t want to be a dead cat.

I think my profile read a lot like my blog. It was conversational, and gave a lot of information about me without going into a lot of specific personal detail. There was even a song quote. Yes, it was Elvis Costello. A line from “Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes” I think. I put a fair amount of time into my profile, and I wanted it to be as much like me as I could make it. It was a surprise to me that a lot of people didn’t put any effort into their profiles at all. There’d be an age range, maybe a brief physical description and that’s it.  Hint to people trying to do online dating:  women do not respond to messages if there is not a picture and if there is not a profile filled out.

What was equally surprising is what kind of stuff some people put in their profiles. I’m not even counting the ones that were obviously only looking for sex. That wasn’t surprising at all. Entertaining, but not surprising. I often wondered how awkward those first dates were. Do you suppose they were more or less awkward than regular dates? If anyone has ever been on some of those encounters, please let me know. I mean, I have had dates that have ended up that way, but it wasn’t the sole purpose of the date.

Many women would include desired ranges not only for age, but also for height, weight, hair quantity and income. Occasionally you’d see “must drive a car less than xx years old.” Most of the women who included  income limits were blonde, and appeared to be surgically altered. Some would call them trophy wife material. Some of them who were more extremely enhanced were more like trophy mistress material. Author Christopher Moore more unkindly referred to them as Fuck Puppets.

Both men and women included age ranges, but some men were looking 20 years younger to 5 yrs younger and wouldn’t even  consider dating someone their own age. Usually they would include some sort of bullshit about how they were soooo excessively young for
their age that no woman their own age could ever possibly keep up with them.  I normally read that as “I am the King of all Douchebags. Do not date me!” and kept looking.

Most women included age ranges that were fairly large. I think mine was about 10 years younger to 10 years older than I was at the time. Most of the guys who asked me out were much younger than I was. That was at least partially due to the lack of computer users over 35 at the time.

A  lot of women were only willing to date men with a full head of hair. This is, in my opinion,  possibly the single most moronic dating criteria you could ever possibly have. Don’t get me wrong–I love a good head of hair as much as anyone. Dave Grohl is my imaginary boyfriend. But I’ve dated guys with receding hairlines. It just isn’t something important. It’s just as stupid as a height requirement. What’s wrong with a cute short guy?

Men would sometimes include strict weight  or dress size limits as well as a required hotness level. Usually 8 or above. The men with these requirements were typically roundish, balding and not that great looking. Double standard? Interestingly, the women with similar standards about looks were usually good looking. In a high maintenance sort of way.

Men and women who featured sporty attire in their profiles often included some sort of fitness/activity requirement. Sometimes it read as a fat check, but often made sense. Someone super fit who spends every weekend mountain biking and skiing would probably not like dating someone who likes to do nothing but read and write. And vice versa.

So, basically, some people are just as asinine in the online dating world as they are in person.

That’s probably not a shock to anyone.

Questions about how many ménages à trois I have participated in commence in 3…2…1….

I will always be lame

I will never be safe
I will never be sane
I will always be weird inside
I will always be lame
–Everclear/Father Of Mine

This time I’m mistaken
For handing you a heart worth breaking
–Nickelback/How You Remind Me

Seriously, a quote from Nickelback?

Well. Please don’t think I am a fan. This is the only Nickelback song I like, and it fits what I’m going to post about. I think. I never quite know at the start. In this case, of course, it’s not anything good I’m reminded of, so I guess Nickelback is appropriate.

The thing I wondering about today is:
Are we all broken?
Are we all weird inside?

I am going to speculate wildly here, based on years of observation, self loathing, reading and extrapolation:
Yes. We are all broken.
Yes. We are all weird inside.

At least, all of us worth knowing. Anyone who isn’t at least a little banged up in the vicinity of the heart clearly hasn’t ever cared about anyone enough to leave their hearts open to breakage. I don’t think that applies to anyone I care about.

Some people don’t seem to be, but I bet they are, too, most of them.
It must be tiring for them to pretend to be happy shiny people all the time.

Some people manage to really put the damage behind them and be genuinely happy. I am, most of the time, and don’t get me wrong–I have not undergone anything really traumatic. I have had a pretty lucky life so far emotionally speaking. Just the usual heartbreak and weird stuff from childhood. Most of it is well in the past, but there will always be certain people who leave me metaphorically bruised and bloody around the edges. Unfortunately, they know who they are because with time I’ve come to operate under the belief that it’s better to be vulnerable and open to hurt than it is to be closed off and numb. So they know how much damage they can do, and they know I am trusting them not to.

So there’s of course the fucking B word to deal with, as there is with everything. You have to find a balance between the vulnerability that makes you so open and trusting of people that you’re taken advantage of, and being so closed off that the only thing left of you is a cartoon facade like a politician.

Early in life, my personal disequilibrium started as a skew to the doormat side, until an excess of hurt led me to the total shutdown side. Now I seem to be veering back into vulnerability as the lesser of the two evils. At least if you are vulnerable you get to feel something. There is a point, though, where a certain saying comes into play. You know the one. About the definition of insanity being when you repeat the same act over and over while expecting different results? You have to learn the difference between second chances and twentieth chances and figure out how many chances your heart is comfortable giving. Because every chance you give someone really hurts when it turns out the person didn’t deserve it. Or maybe they deserve it but are too broken and weird inside to respond.

If you skew to the overly guarded side, especially to the point where you spend your life living in an artificial exoskeleton of a personality? Well. I relate to being reserved. I relate to being shut down emotionally. I don’t understand how someone can live with a personality that isn’t entirely their own. My natural personality is reserved and reticent, so it’s not much of a reach for me to shut down emotionally. It’s “me” on steroids. It’s me wallowing in too much me. I’ve managed not to stay in that mode in a permanent manner. Some people live that way forever, and it makes me sad. And if the Plastic Person is someone I care about, it’s almost unbearable to me.

I’d even take it further and say that I could never care about someone who came into my life as a Plastic Person. There are people I got to know and love when you could still get to the real human inside. It’s painful for me to be around them. I don’t feel like I ever know where they stand. I don’t know if they really want to be in my life, or if they just want me to want to be in their life. It feeds into all of my biggest insecurities when I am around a Plastic Person who I love. You never know what they really think or feel. They deflect emotion with whatever their personal armor is.

It might be humor, or logic or sarcasm. It might be a refusal to talk about anything personal. They might reveal deeply personal feelings in ways that are so oblique and obscure that you have no idea they area even talking about themselves.

If the only way you show how you feel is through Facebook likes and retweeting inspirational quotes, then what the fuck is the point? The point, to me, is:

Love.

And I’m putting it on its own line because it’s kind of the only thing in life. Along with having food and shelter, love is what life is. It’s the only thing not actually required for physical survival that matters much. It might be the love of your family or the love of your friends, or it might be True Love….but if you are living your life as a Plastic Person? No one will love you. They might love Plastic Man, but they won’t even fucking know you. And you know what? They probably won’t love Plastic Man for long either.

You can’t love something that isn’t real for very long.

Even the Plastic Men started out as Real People at some point, right? I have to assume that they turned to plastic as a result of some sort of life damage. It would take a lot of Bad to make a person hide himself that completely. It’s probably hard to slip back out of it. As hard as it is to keep handing your heart to people year after year. Probably harder. Maybe they’re doing the best they can.

I keep reminding myself of that,
but Plastic People are hard to feel sorry for because they don’t seem real.

They can inflict a lot of damage through that shell.

The rest of us aren’t shielded as well as they are.

I wonder if they care about that.

Really. I don’t know.

That’s the whole problem with Plastic People.

You never know.

Side note, because someone was asking: the fact that I am apparently comfortable sharing very personal emotional stuff online does not negate my natural shyness. In writing, I am a lot more “talkative” than I ever am in person. I can also edit what I write a million times if I want to. I can’t do that with the spoken word.

On the other hand, the written word is very durable.
It can get me into a world of trouble.
And has.

The dating game

There was this guy?
And he looked like he might have been a hatcheck clerk
In an ice rink.
Which, in fact, he turned out to be.
And I said oh boy.
Right.
Again.
–Laurie Anderson/Let X = X

It has always been really hard to connect with new people for me. I have friends who have been with me forever, but I’m not one of those charmed (or is it charming) people who collects new friends easily. College was an exception, there are so many people around, and classes give you a common point of reference, and you’re all the same age and have so much in common–it’s easier then. As an adult? It is much more of a challenge. You have work. Maybe you have church if that’s your thing. But dating people at work can be…hmm…problematic for some of us. In my case, I worked with one man and about 40 women. I’m more or less straight. I wasn’t going to meet Prince Charming in the workplace.

So what does a single person do to meet people if she is both verbally challenged and shy like I am?

She puts up a profile on an online dating service. If you follow some basic safety rules and are of at least average writing ability, it’s a pretty good way to meet people. If you just want to hook up, it’s apparently even better. You might not meet the person of your dreams, but then again you might.

My handle was ImPerfect, a name which I blatantly stole from a friend because of the clever ambiguity. (Good band name)

It’s all very simple. Basically, you post a profile and wait for people to contact you. I would guess that the number of messages roughly corresponds to a number that equals your external physical attractiveness multiplied by how good you make yourself sound in your profile, divided by Pi. Shazam! Dating science!

If you are new to the site, you have a multiplier for being New Meat as well.

I didn’t make it up. Dating Science plus my own purely anecdotal evidence means this is as empirical as it gets.

When you get messages, you read them, and look at the sender’s profile. You can answer or not. I was surprised at how little thought most people put into their profiles. In most of them, you get no sense of who a person is at all. In others, you feel like you’re having coffee with them. Others still are clearly just looking for a hookup.

You could also initiate a message rather than waiting for one to arrive. I only did that a few times. Once, when I thought I had already met the guy in the Real World. As it turned out, out we’d taken the worst Computer Science class ever together the previous year. We sat next to each other the whole time. I was very surprised he never asked me out, and was even more surprised when he told me I was too intimidating to date even though he had a huge crush on me when we had Computer Science together. Yes. Intimidating. I get that sometimes. I have no idea why.

Anyway.

My profile was funny and charming, and I’m absurdly photogenic, so I got a lot of messages in spite of the fact that I posted my actual height and weight in my profile. In spite of the accurate vital statistics, a few guys I met in person voiced concern about my size. As in “you’re smart and funny and I had a great time tonight but…gee you’re fat.” Had they read my own description of myself? Yes, but they didn’t believe it. Apparently I sound much thinner in writing. Ah, well. There is only so much a fairly attractive but large sized woman can do to keep men from being douchebags.

I have no idea what it’s like for men, or for other women, but online dating was simple for me. Kind of like ordering off a menu. You exchange a few messages, if that goes well you escalate to telephone calls. I suppose these days it’s texting. After a few phone conversations, you at least know if you’ll get along well enough to spend a few hours together.

Like ordering off a menu, sometimes you don’t get exactly what you are expecting in both good and bad ways. I had someone get pretty upset with me for ordering asparagus risotto in an Italian restaurant, Apparently ordering adventurously was important to him. I really like fresh asparagus. Shrug.

Another guy was clearly gay. I’m not going by gaydar, he made a few comments about not normally dating women much. He was very funny, acerbic beyond the pale and neither of us found the other even remotely sexually appealing. It was a quick, but entertaining date.

Then there was the guy I went out with once, had a really good time with. A Really. Good. Time. Who then felt compelled to break up with me the next day. I told him we were not in a relationship, so I didn’t require a full-fledged breakup. I’m guessing he may have been married. Quirky date.

Then there was the red head I’ve written about before. It didn’t work out, but we had a great time until he dumped me for that 12 year old lesbian girl. I just can’t compete with that.

One guy I met was just like a smart version of Tigger. One of the smartest guys I’ve ever met. We also had a great, great first date. We went to the 24 hour Church of Elvis, and wandered around down town. Watched some fireworks. Then 2 days later he called and told me he’d met the woman of his dreams and wanted to be friends. In the ONLY recorded instance of that EVER actually being true, we did become friends and had a standing weekly date to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the next several years. The woman of his dreams? He eventually married her.

And then there was this one guy with bleached blond hair growing out all wonky. Gap teeth. Dorky Elvis Costello glasses. He played the bass. Liked to take pictures of rusty crap. We had coffee together. That worked out pretty well.

I kept him.

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