Tuesday, May 27, 2014

When you turn to the Internet, de facto province of cat videos and selfies and giftcards, for something like dating, it’s daunting. There is a sea of questions, feeds, protocols, matches, stages, thresholds, and your profile feels like a ship in a storm. There are choices to be made, seemingly about everything, and the burden of creating context lies squarely on your shoulders. I haven’t made it a week into eHarmony yet, and I couldn’t even try to guess where or how this is going to end.

But I can tell you how it began, and it started, as most things do for me, with a bunch of questions: what to say, what not to say, expectations to be set, the types of pictures to be taken. I gathered input from guys and girls, then got down to it. Dropping 20 pounds from my health regimen helped photos, certainly, but it was the profile itself that was grueling. I wrote it, then rewrote it. Then, I rewrote it again, tweaking here and there until it was polished to a sheen. And finally, finally, I went live on Thursday.

There’s this unspoken fear–and maybe this is just my own neurosis–that your profile will launch to crickets. These are metaphorical crickets, not the crawly kind, and I’m compelled to clarify because I’m sure there’s a site somewhere for people who are, like, actually into crickets. I’ve reached out to five matches, and four have hit me up. A fair ratio at first glance, but the twist is there’s absolutely no intersection between these two groups–for completely shallow reasons, too, which I’ll be the first to admit. I will yield no ground, though. Not at this junction. I’ve got to date up, got to earn my way, and if I’ve chosen the tougher road, well, at least we’re covered for a few more posts.