THE GENESIS OF MY ONLINE DATING

                                                      MELODRAMATIC PROJECTION

     The heat is unbearable and dry. Perspiration collects on my body in an attempt to cool me, but dries upon escaping my skin. My feet are shackled. The rope binding my hands, chafes only slightly less than the one around my neck. I don’t recognize the coarse shift that covers my body. The flat rock raises me up so I can be more visible. A stranger is beside me barking words I don’t understand.

     Half raising my eyes in the glare, I see a group of men. They are bidding. My chapped lips are pried open to display my teeth. My cheek stings as I am slapped. My eyes open widely. The prospective buyers are invited to see the color and shape. My hair is pushed forward so they can see the texture and assess  its esthetic worth. The shift is slashed open. I am now in nothing but my skin. Cries of the clients accelerate a crescendo towards a sale. The malicious sky ignites my flesh but is eclipsed by my burn of embarrassment. Several men step forward of all shapes and sizes, but a lascivious sneer waits while the rest clear, and roughly grabs the rope around my neck.

 


SCREENPLAY

                               

   If find yourself in the dating pool and a generational change has occurred in your absence, expect it to be different. You are not going to meet someone on campus. The workplace has always been taboo, if you live in an apartment and are smart, so is your own building. Pundits have typically recommended the gym and the supermarket. My gym is filled with people not making eye contact with anything but their own reflection and the members conversationally challenged by ubiquitous earbuds. At supermarkets,  men always seem to have a child, a wife, or a girlfriend in tow. How about the proverbial, "Take a class." It’s become a dated solution. The classes are dominantly women. Cigar bars, rare as they are these days are a great place to meet men but I for one, do not want to smoke or develop second hand smell from a Macanudo. My friends and one sibling suggested if you aren’t the bar type, try online. Coming from the old fashioned, eyes locking from across the room period, I had trouble getting over what I perceived as a stigma with online dating. My uninformed belief was that it was only for the desperate, but with the proliferation of sites and membership at approximately 40 million, clearly the desperate are only one part of this population. Divide that in half for the desperate of each gender and the stigma starts to fade.

    Before the ink was dry on the divorce paperwork, my more progressive and well meaning sister put me on a dating website without my knowledge. She created my profile and uploaded a photo. When she told me about her gift, my initial reaction was to buck. Why did I feel like I was on an auction block of a magnitude that would make Sotheby’s look like a yard sale? Actually, I was terrified. The computer was challenging enough but to have it be the venue to meet the next man in my life? Unfotunately for me, fear rarely triumphs over my irrepressible curiosity. It was only for a trial period anyway, my sister assured me. While in the process of pulling up the site, I began to realize the  myriad of possibilities for Pandora to play.

      I logged on and found myself at my new “home”. With horror, I stared at my own face smiling at me from my actual business card. My real name and personal cell number, was up for millions to view. Scrawled in public bathroom would have been a blessing by comparison. Still in shock, I scrolled down to read the description she put up for me. According to the profile, my major interest was shopping. I was also a big fan of serial TV and romantic comedies. Men with accents were preferable, and I was sensuous, but not promiscuous.

     It began to concern me if my sister and I knew each other at all. For the record, I shop when I need to. It is the rare romantic comedy past the Howard Hawkes era, that is  written well enough to sacrifice and hour and a half. I rarely watch serial TV. Accents are interesting, but my attention is ironically driven by content, personality, and attraction. The last part was true, (the sensuous etc.), but who it solicits, is a reason to omit it.

     The damage was already done but I decided to give the system a try since I hadn’t been exactly swamped by offers, hits, or even come hither smiles during my real time activities. Optimistically I attributed this at least in part to appropriate but no longer useful behavior. Not wanting to put my marriage at risk over temporal ego stroking flirtations or worse, I had successfully cultivated an effective “keep away from me” demeanor.

     Needing serious rehabilitation but knowing that it might take a very long time, I decided to tackle the project at hand. The business card had to be dealt with, for the sheer sake of safety and anonymity. I had to get rid of my name and cell which meant cropping, deleting and uploading. (For computer challenged me… that took hours.) Realizing writing a profile could be a daunting task, I proceeded with minimal initial alterations, so I didn’t draw men who really wanted to meet my younger sister. In my sister’s defense, the sensuous line got immediate results. Bobby the Hammer was one of the first to respond. He promised to show me a good time as he was also known as “The Drill”. That’s when I discovered the delete and block buttons. Unfortunately my search and destroy could not beat the time of some surrogates of “Bobby”.

     Continuing with the visual aspect, I confided in a friend who advised that I needed to do something about the actual photo itself. It was a black and white head and shoulders shot. In online dating visual subtext, a whole language into itself), she explained, this translates as, “SHE IS FAT”. Obviously, this is why I had only one photo of my face, and no full body shot.

     Apparently men do not date “big” women. While I seriously don't believe that Queen Latifah has a problem, I needed to correct that assumption with by posting additional “recent” (operative word) shots. The next many question:  What did they need to be?

     Always resourceful when required, I decided to do a bit of cross referencing.  I  switched genders and did a search as a man looking for a woman. As I perused a few female members, I was appalled at what some women used for photos. De rigeur seem to be major cleavage shots, leg shots, lolling across a bed, (I later included one of these to even the playing field), rear views, and one or more in a bathing suit. I also apparently needed to have some visuals of myself flying a helicopter, swimming with sharks, spelunking, and rappelling. Unfortunately I found myself low on these. I had to make do with my less than Lara Croft lifestyle which all the other women and men dating online seemed to have. I kept the head shot, but cropped, added in one in a cocktail dress and one helping in the kitchen at Thanksgiving in jeans. If they believed the pictures to be up to date, a prospective suitor could extract that I was slim, not all American, I was comfortable in jeans, could wield a knife in the kitchen, and that I owned the prerequisite little black dress. 

Timeline: About 2006 

Thought: The word online: waiting, in a queue, one of many.  Always wanting to be singular even if in an Oscar Wilde context, this didn't sound good.

Thought: The auction fantasy implied I felt I was driven to this without choice and that I was to be weighed, assessed, and deemed worthy or not. In reality, you do have a choice. In fact, you have an unnatural number of blind choices. In all fairness, men are in the same position.
Uplifting note: The labor pains provide a platform for a mixture of experiences which can be fascinating, crash and burns, dust offs, fizzles, a psycho or two, and meeting some fabulous people you could have never met any other way...
...not unlike a ride on a New York subway.

TO BE CONTINUED WITH MY TRIALS OF WRITING A PROFILE