Adventures in Online Dating

I’ve been doing some “market research” on the free online dating industry. Yes. Market research.

I started with Ok Cupid, so well designed and full of interesting, educated people with witty profiles that it has almost single-handedly sucked the shame out of online dating. I quickly went through all the girls who met my basic criteria. As a result I’ve been on a brunch date at the Nasher and had interesting conversations with more girls I may see soon. I grew curious about the other types of free online dating sites. Would more queer women be on them? OK Cupid is the the crossover success. How much worse could these other sites be?

I checked out Plenty of Fish (literally the market leader,) which was horribly designed but not very sketchy. My inbox on Plenty of Fish is a repository of banal “Hey pretty” and “You’re adorable” messages. On DateHookup, I received my first no-strings-attached sex solicitation from another woman. (This could have boosted my ego, but I hadn’t even uploaded my first profile picture!) Now that I’ve received catcall messages I see it as less of an ego boost than a let down. Like getting a text, only to realize it’s from my Dad (which usually goes something like "Make sure you are using wifi while on campus!!" or "Do you think Texas will beat Bama?") I liked the idea for How About We, a site designed to match people based on their ideal date. Unfortunately no women who live in the Triangle and meet my basic criteria use this site.

I wanted to revisit the Mogenic of my youth (whichwas not just for teenagers,) but it has shut down. The first Google hit for “LGBT social network” was Downelink. What Downelink has in quantity (over 700 women in the Triangle who fit my basic criteria, over 500 of them black) it loses in quality. Sifting through profiles on Downelink is like looking at woman seek woman on Craigslist crossed with Myspace. All eyesore backgrounds and unsolicited music. I discovered people who spelled “younqq” instead of young, who wanted to meet “FUCK THAT A BANGED AZZ GIRL WHO I CAN CALL WIFEY” and self-identified as 15 year old jailbait. One girl replied with “That was the most refreshing msg I have received on here.” As a Duke student, I also found her refreshing. She had traveled throughout the South, meeting with a former slave owner, and had lived in New York City while auditioning for Broadway plays. For good or ill, unstructured wandering is not in the conversational repertoire of the typical Duke student.

I enjoy this research project, but it is not sustainable. Crafting opening messages beyond “Hey what’s up?” requires the type of close reading of a profile normally reserved for applications and cover letters. I don't have the time or interest to tease out personality from people content to say "I go to NCSU." Every time a message exchange abruptly ends I feel like I've expended much more effort than if I had just talked to a girl for 20 minutes at a party.

Results: My outlook has expanded beyond the terrarium known as Duke. I now realize just how many queer women are in the Triangle, some a bus ride away. The opportunity to check out many women at once is something straight people can take for granted but I rarely do in real life. When I start to think I'm the only queer femme, fashion conscious, intellectual, ethnically ambiguous lesbian in the Triangle I think of this quote by Frida Kahlo:

"I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too.
well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you."

Then I check my new matches on OK Cupid.

[I'm currently undertaking a ridiculous stunt to meet a lot of "my type" women in person. If the stunt is over in two weeks I'll post an article about it.]

Relationship Oriented, But Not Narrow

After reading the top three essays in the Modern Love college essay contest (Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define; May I Have This Dance?; My Dropout Boyfriend Kept Dropping In), I wanted to add my personal experience to the dialogue about my generation’s conception of love, sex and relationships.

I consider myself relationship oriented. I find them simple. Straightforward. I don’t like starting my shivering walk of shame without saying goodbye. I don’t like getting hickies from over-zealous partners who don’t know about my “No Hicky” policy. I enjoy my rough, one-night-in-Vegas hookups, but I can't always stop myself from developing romantic interest afterward. Hooking up can be edifying, but is also as potentially lethal as entering a relationship.

Why am I like this, especially when avoiding commitment seems to be the official philosophy of my generation? The rules of the game are: Don’t ask anyone on a date. Don’t expect exclusivity. Don’t ask if you’re going to see someone again. But I do ask people on dates (I’m careful not to use the terrifying word date,) I do expect exclusivity (though this is not requisite for all successful relationships) and I do ask people if I’m going to see them again.

I don’t have a laundry list of interesting characters that I’ve done interesting things with. My post-college romantic life has been a sandwich: a couple of hook-ups buttressing a long, committed relationship. This relationship was the meat-substitute of my romantic life. I wouldn’t trade a million encounters in far-off locations or quirky stories for what I had with her. When our relationship ended I felt wounded. All last semester I was only able to hook-up. I rearranged my non-negotiables. I reevaluated my preferences.

In the midst of this, I asked a girl on a date off-campus. I was relieved when she said she didn’t want to pursue anything further. I didn’t see a relationship unfurling between us, nor the potential for a hook-up. My relationship-oriented brain didn’t calm down until it knew the other party had no interest. In my simple world, if you like a date with someone you go on another. And then eventually you are in a relationship. This narrative is hopelessly quaint. Impossible to achieve consistently, if at all. Did this really use to be my life?

I’d like to analyze the Malcom X movie with someone and make-out with them afterward. Someone I can go out to dinner with. Someone I can have amazing sex with. (Preferably someone who is into kinky shit but is also a sexual health nerd.) Someone I can go thrifting with. Someone with a car. Someone I can dance wildly with. If I met someone now who embodied all these qualities I would feel crushed. Like a butterfly in an exhibit. I don’t like the feeling I get after watching Malcolm X with someone who might hold my hand or fix my collar, but nothing more. I am frustrated by long, intimate, sexually tinged conversations with essentially straight friends. I feel alienated when I grind with someone I couldn’t converse with. This incompleteness is new to me.

The few queer girls I knew in high school rotated around me like a merry-go-round. In middle school I went to sites like Mogenic. In high school, I used Myspace and Facebook (Is anyone else disappointed that on Facebook you can’t search for people by sexual orientation?) My most epic moment was an awkward, groping kiss near the entrance of a Plano mall that was the result of a month-long long-distance online relationship. Then I met another girl who played World of Warcraft and sent me a (obviously fake) picture of her hot girlfriend in Iowa. We watched Brokeback Mountain in a theater (where she got asked to leave the women's restroom) on New Years Eve. She drove me to my house and we watched the ball drop with my family. Then she had to go home, ostensibly to feed her grandmother's cats. Another girl, the reason for the phrase "You looked better on Myspace", visited me at Vacation Bible School. Meeting people online still feels shamefully juvenile and desperate. (The origin of stories you don’t tell anyone, unless you write for this blog.) Over winter break a friend suggested I start using OkCupid. It has so far proved worthwhile; though I've already contacted or rejected every single gay female in a 25 mi radius.I think the more gay saturated an area is, the more the gay and straight youth converge in their attitudes on relationships. If I had more women to pick from, I might not feel the need to commit. (I could also be permanently relationship oriented, or value my relationship skills enough not to let then atrophy. )

I first meet someone in person, usually at school. We start talking. We start talking more and seeing each other more. Eventually someone makes a flirty comment. I’m nervous. I like this person a lot but don’t expect them to feel the same way. They do. We starting hooking up and going out, everything blurring together. Eventually someone pops the Facebook relationship status question. We’re official. In my narrative there’s no room for disappearing acts. If someone becomes unresponsive I imagine that they got busy. I wait. I don’t pine for them. No relationship, no problems. Then the cycle begins again. I don’t envision another relationship created by my dated high-school formula. Like the quadratic formula, it doesn’t work for every polynomial.