You Tech My Breath Away

I've had some good experiences with online dating, but I just can't get over this feeling that it just isn't natural or sexy.

--Clicking For Love

People romanticize chance meetings over highly calculated search algorithms. They swoon telling the story, "If I hadn't filled in for the night nurse the evening he lopped off his thumb..." as opposed to "If I hadn't typed 16 very specific terms into a search engine on one of the five online dating sites I have a membership to..." People also love the idea of "the one" -- that one special someone they're supposedly fated to be with. In online dating, you're trying to weed that special someone out of a field of thousands of other potential special someones -- making the process feel about as romantic as a livestock auction. And while the stigma formerly attached to Internet dating is largely gone, what it still lacks is any plausible deniability about one's intentions. In a bar, you could be there to grab a beer, but there's no pretending you posted your profile because you were thirsty. In fact, you might as well stand in the center of town shouting, "Hi, I'm alone! Here's how I look! Any takers? Yoohoo, anyone out there?" In addition to the weirdness of posting your face on a big bulletin board to see if anyone might end up loving you, there's the weirdness of shopping for the love of your life in between bidding on a used tennis racket on eBay. But, with Internet dating, instead of waiting for that chance meeting, you have increase-your-chances meetings. With a few keystrokes, you can connect with countless people you probably never would've met, and select for the right religious beliefs, smoking habits, and/or weird sex habits instead of spending hours trying to tease the answers out of some guy in a bar. Where people go wrong is in turning what should actually be called "online meeting" into online dating. The same woman who'd go home with a near stranger she met in a bar will spend weeks e-mailing a guy to assess how good his grammar is before she'll feel safe enough to meet him. She'll tell herself she's vetting the guy, but what she's probably doing is getting attached -- not to the actual guy, but her idea of the guy, and maybe how smart and funny she is when she's talking to him. Investing all this time and emotion makes it somewhat devastating when she finally meets the guy and finds that he looks wrong, talks wrong, dresses wrong, and smells like rotting liver. So, sure, there are pitfalls in online dating, but it can be a great tool if you use it wisely. And when you say it seems unnatural, you could argue that there was no dragmeoffbythehair.com in the Stone Age, but humans have always tried to find partners using the best resources at hand. Go into that painted cave in Lascaut with the right archeologist, and see if that wall doesn't just read "Single, hairy club-dragger seeks sturdy woman for long walks on what will one day become the French Riviera..."