Women, Amiright?, or How I Learned to Embrace Online Dating, Then Promptly Stop Embracing It

Breaking news coming out of the “WABWW” situation room: Dating is kinda bullshit sometimes.

Lost amidst all the life/body changes and the social class warfare and the awk-warrrrrd-ness and the, you know, education of high school and college is the fact that, as a young person interested in meeting someone else of a corresponding sexual preference, you’re surrounded by prospects every single day. Furthermore, with so many different classes, activities and situations in which to meet your peers, there’s a new cast of characters every day to interact with. And there is literally something going on every weekend (Dances/mixers! Plays! Football games! Al-Queda meetings!) designed exclusively for you to meet new people, or to ask someone to go with you.

Unfortunately, you also have all the social savvy of a drunken hyena, which often derails the looooooove train before the train even comes to the first bend in the tracks– or, for the more tentative among us, keeps us from even trying to leave the station. Meeting girls/guys, asking them out/getting them to ask you out, and maintaining any semblance of a long term relationship is tricky enough when you’re not going through all those ch-ch-changes. (Also, not having a car kinda sucks, too, so protip: get a hold of one of those)

Combine the interpersonal inexperience with the abundance of opportunities, and dating in your educational years is like fishing on Lake Michigan with a pole made of taped-up twigs and sewing thread. And by the time you graduate college and hit the working world with your shiny, new “Pike Pick ‘Em 5000” and your fancy new motorboat, all the fish are gone.

Well, they’re not gone, just much harder to track down. Now you’ve got a job (hopefully) and bills to pay. (Technically, your studies were supposed to be your full-time job before but…I mean…come on)

Now you’re not meeting fresh-faced, similarly-aged folks every day, but a variety of grizzled, grumpy co-workers from all over the age map with at least one kid and at least one spouse, whose only interest is putting their head down and grinding through each work day while engaging in more verbal interaction with the dollar-store bamboo plant on their desk than with any other living thing within a 20-foot radius.

How are you to meet new friends now, let alone someone of the opposite sex (or same sex – hey, we live in a progressive society, man) whom you’d like to take out on the town sometime? You could just stay/reunite with your college/high school sweetheart, but you two could have become very different people in the last few years. (Also there is usually the pre-requisite of having one first – no guarantees)

You could meet someone at the bar or the club, but bars are best for hanging with a couple buddies and catching up/watching the game, and clubs are usually too loud to actually interact with people anyway. (But hey, if “no verbal communication” is a huge factor in who you’re looking for, by all means)

You could ask someone out from work, but dipping the pen in company ink is a minefield. What if it doesn’t work out and you have to see the person every day afterwards? What if someone at the office finds out and it creates a conflict of interest? What if you work at a sewage facility? What if you're a priest?

Then, there’s that last bastion of blind dating bliss – online dating.

My friend and I met a couple in Baltimore last summer who’d met on OKCupid, a popular and supposedly effective free dating site, six months prior and swore by it. Albeit with an extremely small sample size, meeting people online has at least proven to be somewhat successful. It’s become a popular enough option that dozens of niche dating sites pop up every day: Farmers Only, Christian Mingle, Black People Meet, IJuggleChainsawsForALivingAndIHopeYouDoToo.com, etc.

For better or worse, social media is society’s new method of communication and keeping in touch, so while you’re “liking” every status with a Justin Timberlake reference in it or sharing the overused meme du jour, why not try to meet someone who ALSO likes Justin Timberlake and sharing overused memes?

So a couple months ago, my roommate and I made an OKCupid profile for another friend of ours (because we’re dicks) and, after seeing what it entailed (bragging about yourself and hoping someone bites), I gave it a shot for myself.

It’s a bizarre environment. Logging on, you are bombarded with pictures and percentages – generally, how strongly the site believes you and the person in the photo next to those numbers are connected. Profiles are generally variations of “I like to have fun! With my friends!” and “Don’t message me unless you have something interesting to say…or if you like to try new things, like I do!” You answer questions to improve your compatibility scores, which range from “Would you prefer good things happen to you, or interesting things?” to “Can you count to four?” You also get to see the last time someone logged in, which means other people are well aware that you’re logging on at 2 AM on a weekend after getting drunk and watching Meatspin for two hours.

The end result of all this: a few messages to total strangers, and little else. (Also, my ex from high school found me on it, which was....yeah)

Maybe online dating just isn’t for me. Maybe I’m just not looking for something like that right now. Naturally, though, the real answer was that I wasn’t being superficial enough.

A friend of mine told me about Tinder, a mobile app that connects to your Facebook profile, picks up on your likes and interests, then presents you with  photos of other Facebook users (not your friends, mind you, but total strangers who happen to live near you – so you do need to give it your location as well). Beneath the pictures are three buttons – a “yes” and “no” button, and an “info” button for people who actually want to go beyond the picture and see what one or two things the person enjoys. If you click no, it casts that person away, never to grace your screen again. If you click yes, it saves your answer and then connects you to that person if they find you as attractive as you find them (which is also determined through the yes-no thing above)

On the one hand, pretending physical beauty is not a major part of dating is pious nonsense. Attractiveness is almost always the first thing you notice about someone. You don’t have time to find out whether someone else likes slasher films or poetry or football, or knows how to fix cars, or how healthy their soul is, before your eyes/brain have determined whether or not they can fixate on that mug of theirs for longer than five seconds without pounding the “ABORT MISSION” button and averting your gaze elsewhere.

On the other hand, Tinder takes all the fun out of acting like a pompous asshole because it’s exactly what “The Facebook” used to be, or what “Hot or Not” was like for those of us with little to no interest in paying attention during computer class at school. If someone’s hitting you up on Tinder, it’s strictly off the basis of your looks (or, the looks of your model friend who also happens to be in your profile picture, which you’ve done just to confuse people).

It also fuels your desire for acceptance and drives you insane if you don’t get it. Why haven’t I gotten a message yet? Doesn’t anyone else find my picture studly and beautiful?  What’s wrong with me? I HATE THIS SHIT.

Even though there's nothing inherently bad about meeting people this way, it's obviously not for everyone, myself included. While the whole point is to find someone you're compatible during the few hours you're not working/eating/sleeping/watching "My Little Pony," something about using algorithms to find my "soul mate," or even a date for a random Friday night, seems weird to me.

It's cliche, but I do consider myself old-fashioned in this category. I like meeting people organically, getting to know them organically, finding out if I'd like to hang out with them more organically. It's more exciting and fun than booting up my laptop for five minutes a night and seeing who Deep Thought has rounded up for me.

So I think I’m done with online dating, at least as a serious option. It’s fun, but it’s basically just Twitter/Facebook with an extra dose of inadequacy. From now on, I’m back to just straight chillin’, homes, letting things just happen, meeting friends – and meeting women – the old fashioned way: by going back to what worked for me in school.