It’s a date
Five essential tips to find love in the digital age
No. 5 Rule of Dating Online: Keep Your Profile Essentially Vague
I kept my background and preferences vague for two reasons: I haven’t figured out yet how to frame who I am and who I might be. It’s a terrible situation, but potentially mitigated by the right match, which is bound to be traumatic but probably for someone other than myself, so, hey, it’s a party. The reason I kept my preferences vague is because I really don’t care what money you make or how often you work out. I don’t care if you have kids or a disability as long as your challenges, as applicable, are under control. I am about as forgiving as the EEOC when it comes to protected classes — I care that you suffer if you do, but kudos to you for seeking a good match with a bad hand. If you disclose that you make more than $75,000 annually, you’ll attract individuals who search for that sum or above that sum — and everybody knows that money comes and money goes so, it’s a recipe for divorce during bad times.
No. 4 Rule of Dating Online: Make a Timeline
Lying is, like most things, not a problem if you do it well. Keep a spreadsheet of what you’ve told and to whom you’ve told it. Maintain timelines for your fantastic past based on divulgences to each woman. You weren’t a doctoral candidate at Berkeley from 1994 to 1996 if you were simultaneously a boxer in Mexico during those years. And if you attended Harvard the year I was admitted, you’d better know my buddies — at least by name recognition — who did take that ticket. You bet I’m texting Peter Finch who wrote for the Crimson from 1998 to 2002 to see if you had actually been there. And you bet Finch will write right back. Maybe you were invisible. Or meant Harvard, South Dakota. Of course! Happens to the best of us.
No. 3 Rule of Dating Online: Punctuation and Sentence Length
Long sentences worked for Brandeis but not so much in the age of Google. If you throw around exclamation marks and thoughts loosely connected by dashes, I am putting you right where you belong: in the Anne Sexton class of people who are intrinsically miserable but want to fake it for forever. I collect the letters and journals of people who were historically notable enough to have biographical benchmarks. When I have time, I read their letters and/or journals against the stories of their lives. William Styron was ebullient to his father when “Sophie’s Choice” was accepted by its publisher, and you can “hear” it in the announcement to Dad. Syntax, punctuation and sentence length tell the reader more than content, and anyone who knows what Sylvia Plath meant when she fell in love for the sixth time in her life, knows that happiness cannot be conveyed by word choice alone.
No. 2 Rule of Dating Online: Do not Date Online
Nothing foretells divorce faster than the dead eyes of a sociopath. So if you’re meeting someone for the first time who looks like his dog just committed suicide by leaping out of your date’s 23rd story apartment, you should ensure that said date does not know where you live or what your last name is. Aside from that obvious caveat, your cousins, aunts, parents and members of your place of worship should know of someone as desperate as you are. Chaching! If such friendly desperado is a neighbor to Aunt Annie, then he can’t give you a disease and expect to live it down.
No. 1 Rule of Dating Online: Do Not Fall In Love
Veterans of internet dating select you based on a photograph and profile. They search for someone based on the metrics and algorithms of presented income, education, ethnic background and occupation, often in that order. Tap-click-love. As a result, they tend to see the person as a vector and value proposition that can be dismissed by an email or a dreadful silence. Tap-click-love; tapclicklove. And because Pittsburgh is a small town, you will run into the same people over and over again, with different names (bad marriage) and different bodies (it’s been 10 marathons since you dumped me in 2002). And you can say to yourself: I will never fall in love with you again. I will never fall in love with you again. I will never fall in love
withyou again. But you will. Someday when you’re both senile in a retirement village — still hopelessly single — you will ask that person if he would like to race you down the corridor in a wheelchair extravaganza, and you know, this time, completely free from memory or the passion of your 20s, or the heartbreak of your 30s, he might unlock his wheels and give it a go.
After exactly three weeks pursuing love on the internet and more than 35 years’ experience being female, Mary Florio (mary.c.florio@gmail.com) is an expert on love in the digital age. She lives in Oakland.