I've noticed that there are a lot of women online who prominently list the requirement that their potential suitors lie about where they met. There's usually a lot of embarrassment to be reckoned with in dating, especially when you've got to pitch your most alluring romantic qualities to an anonymous rabble with a series of Rorschach questionnaires. Insisting that your mysterious future intimate never tell anyone that you once stooped so low as to advertise for the otherwise quite discriminating charms of yourself as a lover is alarmingly shameful. If meeting people online is so disreputable, then why bother? Why would a woman ever want a partner to be a willing accomplice to her palsied shame?

 

When I got back from Peace Corps a few years ago, I went to a wedding with a bunch of old friends I hadn't seen in a while and was surprised to find that most of the men folk were dating online. Before I left for Peace Corps I was still in my early twenties and the internet wasn't a necessary tool for meeting people in my day-to-day activities. There's something magical about dating life when you're in your early twenties. You don't need to send winks and come up with clever email one-liners, you just get talked into going out to the neighborhood bar on a Wednesday night, inadvertently drink four shots of tequila, and by the time network television has shifted from real shows to infomercials you're naked in a strange new bed.

At the most basic level, dating online seems like a less stressful and efficient way to go about meeting people for a man. You don't have to fret about approach anxiety or competition with others. You just put up a metaphysical store front that says what you're about and those that are interested will respond to your soundings. You could spend a night out oozing money on drinks and tossing around one-liners to women in bars and not meet anyone. Online you can send out ten come-ons in ten minutes. If men are the formalized pursuers, then online dating does for their needs what the advent of the computer did for secretaries.

But women are not, by culture and tradition, pursuers (I realize this doesn't apply to a great many women, more than a few of whom I've met for myself, thank you very much – but I'm generalizing about a lowest common denominator). I imagine for many women, the upper-class, over-thirty group, judging by the demographic of people who've listed this particular requirement on their profiles, there's something dispiriting about acknowledging their availability. Knowing that you're pursuable must be a fantastic boon for the ego, and, likewise, there must be a bitter vulgarity in having to solicit pursuit as age sets in and more of your peers begin to disappear down the social vortex of marriage.

I don't see why meeting someone online should be any more or less embarrassing than meeting someone after four shots of tequila or through friends. We all want companionship. The world is a big and overwhelming place and there's no need to feel ashamed about the impulse to find companionship with someone outside of the normal grasp of your own social circle. All stories of how people first met wind up being silly and innocuous in the first place. You meet someone by accident or through some carefully crafted sequence of pick-up lines, then decide you want to spend more time with that person. Feeling embarrassed about having met online is like feeling embarrassed about the line your partner used on you the first time you met.

I remember the first time I met the last woman I was seeing. We met through friends and wound up spending a whole day together until we finally found ourselves alone in a deserted corner disco on a Sunday night. I knew from the second I saw her earlier in the day; there was an instant familiarity before I even saw her face. We spent the rest of the day trapped in a rictus of small talk. I remember one point, earlier, sitting next to her on a couch with a People magazine and wondering how I was going to come up with something interesting to say about random celebrities caught leaving Starbucks all around the country. How are you supposed to be honest and intimate with someone who is, objectively, still a stranger? I slid across the surface of our conversation all day like a foal on ice.

 

Then we wound up sitting on a long vinyl bench against a wall, staring at a red and silver strobe light as it bounced off a disco ball and intermittently lit up the empty cement dance floor in front of us. A Motown song was playing. She asked me if I believed in theme songs, and said that if she had one for her life this would be it ("Is this a line," I wondered). I told her my favorite song, which I decided when I was nineteen should be played at my funeral, is "This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)" by the Talking Heads. She nodded. I wondered if she knew the song. No one under the age of thirty knows that song, at least not by name.

I looked at her. I was terrified. We had been drinking all day, but I was sober now and adrenaline was making my body feel like a slowly inflating helium balloon. I tried to catch her eye, but she looked down again when she saw me looking. I looked away too, my palms breaking into a cold sweat. It wasn't the idea of rejection that was so scary. I was dizzy because I sensed, somewhere underneath it all, this was the last moment I would look at her without anything else between us. These were the last few seconds without expectations, semantics, complications, or heartache. This was an embarkation point, a blind leap onto a vessel whose course was unknowable. "There you are," I thought. "It's you."

I looked back at her. She leaned towards me and half raised her head from her lap. The music had changed, it was all bass and silver lights across the coarse cement and cheap vinyl. Then we kissed.

 

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: Why Women Are Great In Bed 

Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed 

Date Night: All By Myself on a Saturday Night 

Sex Machine: Spank My Ass 

Love Machine: Infidelity or How Long Can You Go Without Cheating? 

Date Night: The 45-Minute Walkout 

Date Night Redux: H's Version of Our Night Out 

Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?

Sex Machine: My First Muff Dive 

Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders 

Sex Machine: Masturbating Upside Down 

Date Night: Two Women in One Night 

Hooksexup Confessions: Rate My Penis Size 

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Crying in Public: My Cubicle