By the time the final episode of “Sex and the City” aired in 2004, all four of the main characters were in committed relationships. But I’ve often wished that the show had lasted long enough to address online dating. It would have been reassuring, or at least entertaining, to see how Carrie Bradshaw et al would have fared in the alternately exhilarating and exhausting e-dating-universe of which most single people I know are, or have at some point been, reluctant constituents.
I made my first foray into internet dating back in 2006, a few months after the wrenching end of a long-term relationship. I was using the Web for just about every other facet of my life, I reasoned: I was employed by a digital media company and I spent a good deal of my leisure time online (and this was before I joined Facebook). Shouldn’t some of the e-nergy I was devoting to my fantasy baseball team be dedicated instead to cultivating a roster of potential dates?
I did have reservations — namely, I felt there was still a smidgen of a stigma associated with online dating. What if a coworker saw me on there? Even worse, what if word got back to my ex that I had resorted, in the aftermath of our breakup, to placing an electronic personal ad? “Not a concern,” said my friend Melissa, who had joined match.com when it was in its nascent stages, and had met her husband, a handsome investment banker, without even posting a photo with her profile — a strategy that was positively antiquated by the mid-2000s.
“I can’t promise you that you’ll meet someone great if you try online dating,” Melissa lectured me one day over a lunch of pasta and tough love. “But I can promise that you won’t meet anyone while you’re sitting alone in your studio apartment, watching Project Runway marathons.” I had to admit she was right (although, in my defense, that was a really good season of PR). At the very least, going on some dates would give me a reason to leave the house on the nights when my ever-patient girlfriends needed a break from the all-consuming project that the post-breakup me had become.
I took Melissa’s sound advice to heart, and told myself: Look, maybe doing some internet dating will be a good distraction, and a boon to your dating mojo, thereby improving the chances that you’ll meet someone in your “natural habitat” (e.g. at the gym, or in the bookstore, or volunteering, or … oh, who am I kidding, at the bar). And if you do end up meeting the love of your life online, you’ll be so thrilled that you won’t care that the original fairytale version of your love life, as it has existed in your daydreams since adolescence, didn’t feature a wireless router quite so prominently. So I swallowed my pride, uploaded a couple of photos, wrote my best attempt at an appealing and self-deprecating profile, entered my credit card information and, ta-da, I was on match.com.
(A quick aside about my squeamishness: As flimsy as my protestations of “stigma” were four years ago, they would hold zero weight in 2010. Last week, in fact, I had drinks with a group of friends at one of our favorite neighborhood bars, and noticed that all five of the married or engaged couples in attendance had met each other on match.com. And all 10 of the successfully “matched” happen to be fun, funny, smart, attractive, charming and gainfully-employed professional people. I had been completely misguided when I’d worried, in 2006, that online dating was for people who had failed at “normal” dating and had been forced, in surrender, into trolling for dates electronically.)
So after I’d signed up, my friend Will, a slick attorney and a self-proclaimed match.com expert, counseled me on my profile and my strategy. “You have to sign in to your account every day, without fail, so that you show up high in men’s searches,” he told me. (And who was I to question him? This is a guy who has been known, while out to dinner with friends, to peruse the newest match.com profiles on his iPhone while the rest of us are reading the menu.) Will also suggested that I add a full-body picture to the selection of close-up shots I had chosen, so as to “reassure” potential dates that I do not, in fact, have four stomachs. And when I told him that I had chosen “athletic and toned” from the drop-down menu of options for describing my physique, he was adamant that I change it to “slender.”
“But why?” I asked him, proud of daily workouts and my bench pressing prowess. “Athletic and toned is a euphemism for ‘chubby’ on match,” he told me. “Most guys know that, and they search only for ‘slender’ women. Change it to ‘slender,’ or you won’t show up in searches.”
The whole process was distasteful. I was trying to sell the best version of myself to an audience of unknowns, many of whom, it seemed, thought “athletic and toned” wasn’t good enough. Ever the editor, I tinkered endlessly with my profile copy, trying to make it sound like I was breezy and fun and appealing and didn’t care too much. “Don’t bother with that,” Will told me. “No one reads the profiles that carefully. It’s more about the pictures.” Great. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea — optimizing my profile so that I could most effectively compete with other women for the attention of men who were probably as superficial as Will. But I was online, and I was searchable. And I started to get some winks and some emails.
The early returns were mixed. For every promising and thoughtful e-mail from an attractive-looking suitor of an appropriate age, there were five outrageous or laughable “queries” from someone who was … not a good match. “It only takes one,” soon became my mantra. “You have to kiss a lot of frogs,” my therapist warned.
Within a few days of my profile going live, I’d gotten messages from a “frog” of a guy who wanted to correspond only in pig Latin (“i-way et-bay oo-yay ook-lay ood-gay aked-nay,” the charmer wrote to me) and a few “your pretty”s (flattering, but the misspellings of your/you’re and there/their/they’re are deal-breakers for me). My favorite you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me moment in my early days of match.comedy came when I received a long and glowing letter from a 70-year-old fellow Manhattanite who claimed that our mutual love of baseball and Beethoven made us a perfect match. Curious about what kind of gentleman would take the time to write to me even though he was 30 years older than the upper limit of my “desired age range,” I clicked on the septuagenarian’s profile. His answer to the do-you-want-children question: “some day.”
At least I wouldn’t have to worry that he would want to rush into anything. But that one gave me pause (after it gave me a good laugh). My friends and I were willing to accept that some of our male peers were enjoying a sort of extended adolescence, a desire to postpone significant commitments. But was it not just the 20-somethings and 30-somethings who were susceptible to this “some day, but not today” attitude? Could the dudes who were born during the Great Depression also be so afflicted?
I wasn’t really worried that my 70-year-old would-be suitor represented some disconcerting larger phenomenon. I had a sample size of one; I wasn’t worried that there were droves of men, enabled by the Internet, who would be deferring partnership and fatherhood for decades and decades, preferring instead to keep waiting for the next, newest, youngest thing. But it wasn’t an altogether encouraging introduction to the e-meet market that is match.com. And the introduction got rougher a week later, when I went on my first match date with Bill, a 34-year-old gastroenterologist whom my friends dubbed G.I. Bill. More on the good-doctor-gone-bad next week.