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Finding myself new, or renewed, to the whole meet and be met scene has been an eye-opener to say the least. Since my last ride on this merry-go-round, things have changed, namely me, but also the way that people approach meeting each other. There are so many books, tapes, websites and television shows out there telling everyone how to be attractive, how to meet someone attractive, then how to catch that attractive person, it’s a wonder that there’s anyone left out there that’s single....
It’s a lot of work to get a date nowadays, with all the things you need to do to catch or be caught. It makes you wonder if it’s worth the hour or more you spend on a dull date stressing about how long you have to be on the date before you can politely say you want to go home.
It’s amazing there’s no advice out there for that particular dilemma. For what it’s worth, I say meet them for coffee, which should last about half an hour before you can politely excuse yourself, then go from there.
Living in a rural county compounds the dilemma of meeting someone. There are virtually no seen and be seen hot spots like there are in more populated areas. The ones that do exist, usually are dominated by visitors to the area who bring their own spouses or significant others with them.
My friend Lisa is an internet dating junkie. Her attitude towards dating is simple, you have to expand the pond you’re fishing in. She believes the internet is a way to turn your small pond into an ocean of possibility.
She signed up with match.com awhile ago and has been a morning, noon and nighter ever since. Sometimes she meets people just to hang out with and sometimes she dates them for awhile. Unlike another friend of mine who went the same route, the goldmine of possibilities has not turned up Lisa’s golden mate. But, she keeps trying.
Following her advice, I decided to ride the surf looking at those people who are either to busy, to desperate or have enough wild abandon to put their faces out there in the ethernet and let nature take its course.
The thing abut living in a small area, or even in a larger one where you are highly visible, is this, you can’t put yourself online like that without people recognizing you. Even if you don’t know them, they know you.
You run the risk of being recognized, which is just what happened to me in the grocery store the other day. I wasn’t recognized, but, I did recognize someone from one of the sites. I saw him first in the produce section perusing lettuce and squeezing oranges. I wasn’t sure if I was seeing correctly, so, I followed him to frozen foods where he bought Marie Callender dinners along with frozen vegetables. When he looked at me strangely in the cereal aisle where he was choosing oatmeal, I started to feel like some sort of internet stalker and slinked away before he might guess that I, a perfect stranger, was indeed following him through the store wondering if he was indeed who he said he was, or someone else entirely.
The grocery store isn’t the only place that this weird experience has occurred, after cruising the online equivalent of the old fashioned newspaper singles ads for awhile, I find myself looking at people everywhere and wondering is it that who I saw online, or not? Let’s face it, most photos that people post would be better of left in the dark recesses of their computer’s hard drive than seeing the light of day or landing on a virtual stranger’s computer screen.
Besides the photo dilemma, which boils down to the question of should I post a photo that looks, well, not so good, or should I post none at all and have people think I look like Quasimodo? Lisa failed to mention, when she was singing the praises of computer dating, that you need to fill out a profile.
This profile supposedly allows others to figure out whether they are interested in you, but is actually an exercise in self examination that delves to a level most of us don’t want to go to. In fact, we not only don’t want to go there, but most of us run screaming from such raw emotional exposure.
Questions such as, rate your attractiveness and tell us about your personality make me cringe. As far as personality goes, I would always be described as ‘shy/warms up slowly’ which bears the social equivalent of telling someone they would have a better time with a frozen filet mignon than you. Added to this in-depth personality analysis is the question that makes every woman cringe, the ever daunting and seemingly innocuous, how much do you weigh? This is a written gauntlet that most fear to hurl themselves through.
I don’t even want to admit my weight to myself let alone a stranger. Whatever happened to beauty is in the eye of the beholder?
I do have to credit where credit is due, people who go online, fill out a profile and post their photo’s have far more courage than I do. And after seeing some of them around and knowing who they are, my question is simple and basic, if these people are using the internet to get a date, what chance do the rest of us have?
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