#youretooold

[forget-what-eye-said]

Forget you because

I remind of you my sociopathic, drug addicted mother?

News flash! I’m not my biological mother and just because I have features that resemble her is not my problem. It’s yours.

And stop tormenting my siblings because of something they cannot control!

[orlivepro]

A friend said, #youretooold to wear #Hollister clothing #myspouse disagrees! 😂

[ipeakedinsixthgrade]

Online Dating... Online Hating?

I was an early, and unabashed, adopter of online dating, long before anyone had ever heard of social networking, the explosion in which has now made meeting strangers from the internet de rigueur. I've done time on okcupid (which does pretty incredible analytics of its user communication patterns in addition to being fun and, remarkably, free), eharmony (expensive, irritatingly constraining with its "guided communication" bs and, in my own personal experience, though admittedly not that of several friends, terrible ideas about compatibility), a brief but eventful few months on jdate (I'm not Jewish but I do love my Jewish boys... though I soon learned the phrase "shiksas are for practice" and won't soon forget it), salon personals (gathering place for witty, left-leaning, educated, intellectual types, and my favorite before it merged with yahoo personals and aol personals and spark networks and... well you get the idea), plenty of fish (free and... just gross, stay away, trust me - one of the basic profile questions is "do you have a car"), and the mother of them all, match.com (pithy observational comment too long for a parenthetical aside). All in all, I've been on and off various sites looking for love for the better part of ten years. I've even come close to finding it once or twice.

I really took to online dating, much more than I ever took to our mothers' way of doing it, which is to say, meeting someone at a party, or at a bar, or in class, or in the goddamned supermarket, sharing a laugh, flirting a bit, being asked for your number and going out on a date. For being, what I'm told, a relatively cute girl with a pretty decent personality (I have absolutely zero perspective on this, other than to say that yes, ok, I have my charms), this has never been my experience. I didn't really date in high school or college - though, to be fair, my Amazing Exploding Bustline™ at the age of 13 resulted in enough unwelcome attention from creepy older men to scare me off from sex for a good long time, and I was a drama major at NYU focusing on musical theater, so I was surrounded by gay men... which didn't stop me from crushing on several of them in the most tragically predictable of ways. Sigh. (You’ll always have a piece of my heart, S.!)

My one “appropriate” college crush was on my straight (an improvement already!), adorable, interesting, and very charming neighbor, N., who quickly became a very close friend. We had a million of those endless, cigarette- and wine-fueled, late-night-into-early-morning conversations that could veer from drunken analysis of the under-appreciated brilliance of “The Simpsons” to uncontrollable giggling at literally nothing to deeply intimate, philosophical discussions of life and love and sex and social justice and dreams for the future and changing the world that are so nostalgically reminiscent of college, and which have become the foundation of lifelong friendships for so many. I was in secretly in love with him for close to 9 months, terrified to say anything for fear of ruining the friendship, but desperately wanting him to make a move and flashing green lights like it was my job, As it turns out (plot twist!), near the end of the school year (thank God for small mercies), I inadvertently discovered (via, of all things, a note ***about me*** that fell out of the trash when the bag broke as I was emptying it) that my beloved N. had, in fact, been sleeping with my (engaged) roommate / close friend / confidante / advice-giver-on-all-things-N for months. Soo yeah. I admit, that one did take me out of the love game and plant me firmly on the “fuck this shit” bench for a few innings.

As far back as I can remember, though, when I did get asked out, my first instinct, always, unless I had already decided I liked them based on previous observation and/or actual interaction or established friendship, was to say I had a boyfriend or make some other excuse. (In my defense: for whatever reason, the... personal presentations of the men who most frequently DO approach me in public tend to inspire rather immediate concerns about their mental stability and/or apparent intellectual deficits and/or possible sex offender status and/or employment status and/or basic living conditions, so y’know. Not totally unjustified.) But when I do find a guy attractive at a party, or a bar, or in class, or in the fucking supermarket, just try to catch me making sustained eye contact, let alone smiling at him. God forbid. (Gosh, can’t imagine why it’s only the creepers who approach me.)

I think online dating appealed to me because it allowed me to a) look at cute boys and learn all about them without having to appear interested unless I wanted to (thus removing any fear of rejection, see above), and b) when contacted by someone, I could get a lot of information about them before deciding if I was, indeed, interested, and if not, it was much easier to say "thanks but I don’t think we’re a match" in an email than face-to-face. As much as rejection sucks, I honestly feel almost the same level of - if a different breed of - angst when I'm the one doing the rejecting.

It also allowed me to present myself in a way that highlighted all the things I liked about myself - I could be funny, smart, a good storyteller, occasionally sincere, post realistic but flattering photos... and I'll be honest, I got a ton of interest. From a ton of really great guys - smart, interesting, funny, successful, attractive men. It was great! I, of course, also communicated with, met and/or dated a good number of schmoes, man-children, addicts, weirdos, commitmentphobes, creepy stalker types, and flat-out liars, but for the most part, I was introduced to and dated a lot of great guys I never would've crossed paths with otherwise. In fact, I'm still friendly and in varying levels of communication with almost all the guys I initially met online that I connected with enough to go out with at least a few times (and, actually, two that I only went out with once, but those boys are another story for another blog post).

So here's the thing: I think I might be done with online dating. Or... to be more precise, I think online dating might be done with me. I've always gone through periods where I turn off all my profiles, either because I've met someone and want to see where it goes, or because I get busy and dating's not a priority at the moment, or because I'm nursing a bruised ego from a failed almost-relationship, or just because I need a break. On average, I probably spend four to six months a year with an active profile or two, and the rest of the time I'm offline. But every time I re-activate, there they are, a bunch of guys wanting to talk to me. I'm telling you, it's fabulous.

Except this time. This past fall, when I reactivated my okcupid profile following a particularly insane experience on the relationship crazytrain (oh I guarantee that one's gonna be a future post; it involves forceps and a trip to the ER), I was getting significantly fewer profile views and emails - especially from the all-important category of "men I would be halfway interested in meeting." Men with things like jobs, cars, the legal ability to drink BUT not the owner of an AARP card, not having fathered three kids by two different women, a familiarity with basic grammar and spelling rules, the modicum of class it takes to refrain from asking if my "knockers are real," the lack of an extra chromosome. Etc.

So I pulled out my debit card and reactivated my match.com profile. Maybe it was true: you get what you pay for - after all, okcupid is free. Same thing. What is going on here? I wondered. Have all the good guys left online dating en masse? So I started doing a few searches of my own, and guess what? There are still a lot of great guys online, but they're no longer looking for me, and here's my theory about why: on Halloween last year, I turned 35. And as we all know, the most desirable demographic to advertisers and men of all ages is 18-34. Even the ones who don't want kids. Now, I don't think they suddenly find me unattractive and unfunny and assume my ovaries have dried up overnight, but I suspect that the searches they're doing stop at 34. These same guys, once I "view" their profile (visibly, to them), view mine, and contact me. Fabulous. Problem solved. But one thing is clear: I'm either gonna have to get a helluva lot more proactive than I've gotten used to being (and really, who has time?), or I'm gonna have to pull the totally sleaze-ass move of aging myself downward to show up in searches. Yuck. No thanks.

OR... and this is the really crazy thought... I'm just gonna have to learn to smile at men in the goddamned motherfucking supermarket. Wish me luck.