Never Eat Soup When You're Drunk and Other Hazards of Online Dating

Okay, so the first one is more accurately a hazard of me being a moron, getting overly excited when I came home from a date at 1am to find that my roommate had left a pot of some vegetable noodle thing on the stove, and not letting it cool off at all before slurping it down. Whatever. My tongue still hurts and I’m blaming the internet.

So it’s finally happened. After several months of fighting off my roommate’s urgings that I follow her into the dark scary world of virtual ass hunting, I finally admitted I don’t actually have any pride left and signed up for an online dating site. Somewhere I think the little me that was convinced that by 23 I would be writing for VOGUE and struggling to choose between marriage proposals from Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonathan Brandeis just shot herself in the face.

I decided to do this for two reasons:
1) I have no clue how to meet women and while it would be nice to think that every few months I will get the opportunity to run into an old acquaintance from high school, get drunk, and make out with them in a bathroom stall, I just don’t think this is a strategy I can rely on.
2) I figured it would give me something to write about.

Even at the time I knew this second reason was pretty much bullshit. One of the advantages of saying you’re a writer is the ability to claim that any range of potentially embarrassing decisions were made in the name of research. I’m not desperate, I’m an anthropologist! It doesn’t matter. So far the only revelation that has come of this is that I was probably right to hold out in the first place. I went on two dates last week and they were both fine. The girls I went out with were friendly, read books, and I wasn’t attracted to either of them. As neither of them openly questioned my intelligence or tried to make me pay for everything, however, both dates were infinitely better than ones I’ve been on with guys I met in real life.

At the end of each night though I couldn’t help thinking that the whole thing just feels like too much of a project. I have enough trouble making time to hang out with my real friends on a regular basis. Do I really want to reserve two nights a week to getting trashed with strangers? (And yes, I understand that these things don’t necessarily have to involve alcohol, but you try getting through a blind date sober.) While it’s nice to have a safety net and a guaranteed way to meet people, it just seems so forced. The whole fun of dating and meeting someone new is the excitement that comes from that initial electricity and confusion. Even if the person completely sucks, which they will, and everything falls to shit, which it will, you still had those first few moments of possibility when it seemed like it could work. With this all you get is the knowledge that you're both awkwardly assessing each other and that after three beers and two hours will probably find the other person lacking.

I’m giving this experiment until the end of the month when my subscription runs out. This is partially because I don’t like treating my love life like a position I’m holding auditions for and partially because if I keep it up much longer I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to add “overweight alcoholic” to my description of myself in which case I’ll probably be off the market anyway.