Match-dot-com

I figured I needed to throw some sort of vibe out into the universe, and I was told about OkCupid back in spring 2009. It took just one "you bitch" e-mail from a man who looked (in his pictures) like a gnome to drive me out of there. My ignoring his first unsavory e-mail had unleashed some old baggage for him, plainly. I suppose I wish him luck, or the proper dose of medication.

Getting onto Match was a similar affair--old friend, "give it a try! It's fun!", and blah-de-blah. Yeah, okay. Well, it was not QUITE as bad...I met one man, anyway, who I am still friends with two years later. I exchanged some nice e-mails with a couple of non-contenders, and had coffee with another guy who used to be a bouncer at the Channel in the eighties, which earned him huge points for "cool".

Last summer I tried OkCupid again. It's free, first of all, and it encourages all kinds of social connections, not just romance (and not just hook-ups, either, since I can read your mind), and it has lots of entertaining, smart, goofy quizzes and does an actual percentage-type match thing when you answer questions and they run your responses through their system. (It was started up by a bunch of math geeks from MIT.) The whole tone of the place is "irreverent", and that is me, at least as far as dating sites go.

My pictures were much better this time, and the Gnome did not resurface. I got more traffic than I had with any of my other two attempts at online dating. None of it interested me. I met one guy from the town next door, and truthfully, I should have (and probably did) meet him decades ago, since he was in the music scene and we knew a lot of the same people. I went to a punk show he promoted in October, and saw a good friend of his that I had dated once when I was nineteen (and had only the very faintest memory of....nineteen and twenty were the Hangover Years, pretty much). This guy had gone on to front a band that was playing at the show, and played it well, I may add--more points for "cool" (for the nineteen year old me, anyway), and the show was enormously fun, but still no romance to be found.

I couldn't take to the online thing. I felt like I was flipping through a catalog, and one that was way more Cabela's than Victoria's Secret. I felt some sort of obligation, though...to make some "effort"...to "get out there"..."look around a little!"

Maybe putting a flyer up on the corkboard in the laundromat would work better, and result in a substantial connection, not all this promotional angling?

This one guy was a "97% match" for me, the site tauted. His pictures were attractive, but he had the same facial expression in all of them--a tight-lipped, constrained smile and a hard blank stare. That didn't look too good...and his profile was very lengthy, but that could mean he was just a word-fiend like me; no problem. I e-mailed him a friendly greeting, and he responded within minutes. That never happens. I waited a day (acting just as manipulative and self-promotional as everybody else) and and sent my response the next evening. He again responded within minutes. I was starting to catch on, so I asked him, "So...have you been in many relationships?" His reply mapped them out in detail--in terms of his age at the time, how long they lasted, and the spaces in between--and thus I discovered that my "97% match" had never had a long term relationship (more than three months) ever in his life (fifty years old), and no relationships at all since his early thirties.

Well, gak.

So here I am, just as single as when I started, although richer in having two more male friends, although one is not currently speaking to me (he's like that, on one hand, and really wants to find "love", on the other, which is not with me, but I think we will cross paths again. After all, we know SO many of the same people!), and the other I am pretty much in love with--but don't tell him, he doesn't want to hear it. We are certainly friends, though, and I like that fine as it is, actually.

Internet dating...I don't have the heart for it. I know that a true knight has to slog through a lot of hostile territory to get to the Holy Grail, but my days of being a warrior for love have ended.

That doesn't mean I'm done with love. It just means that I have noticed where my heart resides, by seeing clearly where it does not...and I would rather be in that warm, soulful, expansive place than set off looking, again, for people who can excite my neurons but leave my heart untouched. And yeah, they are legion.

 I don't mind. Here is where I will quote you some Rumi, as no discussion of love is complete without him...

                                  A thousand half-loves
                                  must be forsaken to take
                                  one whole heart home.

(translation by Coleman Barks, Rumi: The Book of Love, copyright 2003.)