Why I Broke Up With Internet Dating
okay, so i'm considering dating again. BUT, the aid of the internet shall not be used this time 'round. I have a massive crush on the boy at my bike shop. He is British and lovely and would know how to fix my bike if something were to go awry on our bike tour of Brazil.
So, bike boy crush aside, here is why the internet failed to work for this gal:
1. The composition of people using the internet to people-shop has changed drastically in the last three or so years. When I first began the wonder of internet dating (introduced to me by none other than Mr. B-Baltimore), the pool of contestants vying to win a date with me consisted of mainly fellow braniacal, part geek-part hipster, tech-savvy people. Now, I'm not saying that the total number of cool people in the universe has changed, nor that all of the cool people have now coupled up and no new cool people have been spawned to replace them; rather, the pool has been flooded by unwanted, unoriginal, dean koontz-reading, "insert witty headline here"-writing, semi-literate folk. It's not that I don't want these people to find love and spawn more humans whose most humbling moment is filling out an internet dating profile, I just don't want to have to wade through their profiles to find a decent date, yo.
2. This problem is even more irritating when coupled with a poor locale. I now live just across the Mexican border in sunny San Diego. I've been demoted from concrete playgrounds and fake breasts (LA) to a surreally beautiful wonderland of brainless and chill "dudes and babes." The boys here really_do_want an activity partner--in the strictest, most hiking biking surfing sense of the word. So, being the adventurous young gal I am, I cast my net wider. I started searching extra-locally.
Internet dating seems to encourage this sort of search parameter expansion...I would spend more time defending my choices to date fellows in Boston, San Fran and Ohio, but given that there are numerous people at-tempting the same fate, I feel it's unnecessary. However, I will caution others against this game. You see, should you find someone amazing cross-country, or perhaps cross-Atlantic, you will spend much time emailing and speaking to this person on the phone...all the while, you will most likely become more and more neurotic about the other's expectations of you, as well as your expectations of the other. "Oh Lord, he said I was hot--do I really look like the picture in my profile?" "He's never smiling in his picture--does he have all of his teeth?" Further, conversations are easy on the phone--cake on email--but in person...oh, my.
Also, this will have carried on for quite some time, most likely, before an attempt at The Big Meet takes place. So, now, at least one of the contestants is a neurotic mess, and you now have, at minimum, two days of staring at the other person, expectations met or not. A normal first date would last, at maximum, five hours. I was staring down the barrel of four days with Ohio, and a whole week with Boston. For a little introvert like me, that was enough to drive me crazier than a cat with a tuna strapped to its back.
Basically, when an attraction grows organically, there's much more leeway for quirks such as I have. But there was always so much pressure with internet dating...when I was locally internet-dating, I always always always met the person at a dive bar with pool tables; that way, I could continue to play pool if the person wasn't interesting/was weird/happened to think the Nazis were "hot." (Dive bars are play-to-win----I always win-->an easy, passive-aggressive out.) But even so, everyone was always trying SO hard to "make a connection" in the first twenty minutes. I just don't work that way. My first long term relationship occurred after five months of mutual flirting and friendship. The only LTR ever borne from internet dating was five months of intensity, marriage proposals, and then the fizz just went flat all of a sudden.
Conclusion: internet dating screws with the time line of dating and relationships by skewing the expectations, intensity and pace of attraction.
Sooo, tomorrow I will bike down to my cycle shop to drool a bit more over BikeBoy. Who knows? Perhaps five months from now one of us will work up the courage to wink at the other.
So, bike boy crush aside, here is why the internet failed to work for this gal:
1. The composition of people using the internet to people-shop has changed drastically in the last three or so years. When I first began the wonder of internet dating (introduced to me by none other than Mr. B-Baltimore), the pool of contestants vying to win a date with me consisted of mainly fellow braniacal, part geek-part hipster, tech-savvy people. Now, I'm not saying that the total number of cool people in the universe has changed, nor that all of the cool people have now coupled up and no new cool people have been spawned to replace them; rather, the pool has been flooded by unwanted, unoriginal, dean koontz-reading, "insert witty headline here"-writing, semi-literate folk. It's not that I don't want these people to find love and spawn more humans whose most humbling moment is filling out an internet dating profile, I just don't want to have to wade through their profiles to find a decent date, yo.
2. This problem is even more irritating when coupled with a poor locale. I now live just across the Mexican border in sunny San Diego. I've been demoted from concrete playgrounds and fake breasts (LA) to a surreally beautiful wonderland of brainless and chill "dudes and babes." The boys here really_do_want an activity partner--in the strictest, most hiking biking surfing sense of the word. So, being the adventurous young gal I am, I cast my net wider. I started searching extra-locally.
Internet dating seems to encourage this sort of search parameter expansion...I would spend more time defending my choices to date fellows in Boston, San Fran and Ohio, but given that there are numerous people at-tempting the same fate, I feel it's unnecessary. However, I will caution others against this game. You see, should you find someone amazing cross-country, or perhaps cross-Atlantic, you will spend much time emailing and speaking to this person on the phone...all the while, you will most likely become more and more neurotic about the other's expectations of you, as well as your expectations of the other. "Oh Lord, he said I was hot--do I really look like the picture in my profile?" "He's never smiling in his picture--does he have all of his teeth?" Further, conversations are easy on the phone--cake on email--but in person...oh, my.
Also, this will have carried on for quite some time, most likely, before an attempt at The Big Meet takes place. So, now, at least one of the contestants is a neurotic mess, and you now have, at minimum, two days of staring at the other person, expectations met or not. A normal first date would last, at maximum, five hours. I was staring down the barrel of four days with Ohio, and a whole week with Boston. For a little introvert like me, that was enough to drive me crazier than a cat with a tuna strapped to its back.
Basically, when an attraction grows organically, there's much more leeway for quirks such as I have. But there was always so much pressure with internet dating...when I was locally internet-dating, I always always always met the person at a dive bar with pool tables; that way, I could continue to play pool if the person wasn't interesting/was weird/happened to think the Nazis were "hot." (Dive bars are play-to-win----I always win-->an easy, passive-aggressive out.) But even so, everyone was always trying SO hard to "make a connection" in the first twenty minutes. I just don't work that way. My first long term relationship occurred after five months of mutual flirting and friendship. The only LTR ever borne from internet dating was five months of intensity, marriage proposals, and then the fizz just went flat all of a sudden.
Conclusion: internet dating screws with the time line of dating and relationships by skewing the expectations, intensity and pace of attraction.
Sooo, tomorrow I will bike down to my cycle shop to drool a bit more over BikeBoy. Who knows? Perhaps five months from now one of us will work up the courage to wink at the other.
Labels: Ranting
posted by slickaphonic at 2:43 AM
3 Comments:
ah, that's so charming. and I am so glad to see you are happier!
well, thanks, ttractor! I'm just hoping that you're smiling wide over on the other coast...it sounds like you've had an awfully brutal couple of weeks.
thanks. yeah, pretty brutal, but there are ok/stabilizing things too. I finally watched 'Team America" and that cracked me up pretty good. One of the parodied actors goes to the Subject Bar, so that is kinda interesting.
another reason for feeling funky is aptly summed up in this word verification: kotxd. perfect!
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