RAZOR, December, 2004

The trials and tribulations of online dating

By Anna David

Somewhere between the time my mother suggested I give on-line dating a try (for roughly the thirtieth time) and listening to the zillionth person I know spouting on about some absolutely amazing couple who met through Nerve Personals, Yahoo! Personals, J-Date.com or in the online chat room for bee enthusiasts, I developed a mantra. It went something like this:

I do not meet prospective men on the Internet.

Of course I’d been using the Internet as a dating tool for years, Google-ing the prospective candidates I could and wondering if I should be disturbed by the un-Google-able — all the while knowing how misleading the results can be. Google me, for example, and learn that I once wrote an article about trying to have sex with as many successful men as possible, a disturbingly inaccurate fact that has surely scared off any number of Mr. Rights. But online dating, I assured anyone who asked, was not for me.

Then Friendster came along.

It started off innocently enough. A friend invited me to join and I spent those initial hours joyfully skimming through page after page, marveling at all the people I knew who had already plugged into this happy wireless community. It didn’t occur to me to scour the site for pictures of available men, due to my aforementioned mantra and the fact that going out with someone based on a scanned picture and shared affinity for David Sedaris seemed absolutely ludicrous.

I quickly ascertained that I was alone in my online dating prejudices. Not only were my female friends bouncing from coffee dates to romantic dinners to Friendster fucks, but I suddenly found my inbox suddenly flooded with enthusiastic emails from virtual suitors. Whether his name was Michael, Morris or Minger and his message was “I like your profile,” “Wanna hook up? or “Your (sic) hot,” it was immediately clear that although the website was called Friendster, none of the men on it wanted to just be friends.

What coerced me into joining the fray was, I must confess, my own vanity. After all those years of interacting with too-cool-for-school Hollywood men who only seemed to be interested in either scantily-clad, IQ-deprived women claiming to be 23 or actresses (preferably both), I relished in all the ego flattery that the online world seemed to provide. Living among Hollywood values, where male dating quotients seem determined by job and bank account (and female’s by age and breast size), I appreciated how much Friendster evened the playing field. Where you’d gone to school, how much money you made, and what lists you could get on seemed less relevant than they ever had been. So I navigated my way through the over-the-top, boring and possibly insane messages until I found myself corresponding with several men who not only seemed to understand the difference between “your” and “you’re” but also seemed reasonably attractive, intelligent and amusing.

But then things took a turn for the worse.