Online Dating: What’s Normal, Anyway?

If you’ve ever met a fan of Second Life or Warcraft — both 3D virtual worlds — then you’ve surely felt what I’ve felt; it’s a sense of weightlessness.  There are people crazier than me.  There are a slew of examples.  Take the show Intervention; after four solid collegiate years of television abstinence, I was introduced to the A&E show about addiction.  Family members send their loved ones — who are alive how? is my constant thought — to rehab, and once again, relief.  I’m so normal it hurts! is the final thought.

Clearly, I’m not one for reality suspension; news of the South Korean couple who starved their baby to death while raising a ‘virtual baby’ nearly induced a panic attack, and my face is usually suffocating a pillow when Interventionshows dope users injecting.  But I’m certainly no Peggy Orenstein, either; in an article on “self-binding” in The New York Times Magazine, she writes about a life-changing app called Freedom, that once downloaded, blocks your Internet access for up to eight hours at a time.  I cringed while reading her piece.  Do we really need an application to to create an obstacle we are helpless to control, to deal with a helplessness that all started with a series of apps?

When Google introduced Buzz a couple weeks ago, I gave it a try.  I have a neatly curated set of almost 100 tweets; technology turns me on, but it’s never led me to cheat on my offline life.  My adjacent interests — squinting at the Google Analytics graphs for the blog I run can enchant my afternoon the way The New Yorker does — helped me justify my foray into online dating a year ago.  JDate was a nine-month bust, and I was more surprised than anyone when a suggestion from a powerful woman named Barbara, who met her husband online, led me to join Match.  Signing up for a dating site was a blow to my integrity in the first place — although, as I famously tell it, I really joined as research for a Senior paper I was writing —  but now I was going to start 2010 by signing up for another one.  Go figure.

The first Match “match” that I was sent became my boyfriend.  He was tall, had a face that I was over the moon about giving to my children, and was ready to commit.  We sat at one of our favorite restaurants in Brooklyn the night he asked me to be his girlfriend, and when our dimple-faced smiles could bear to look away from one another, it was only to look down at our phones where we changed our respective Facebook statuses to “In A Relationship.”

I thought I had a winner.  Like most of the relationships any of us will ever have, this one ended.  I was sad when he deleted his Relationship status first, but nothing quite compared to the feeling of seeing his profile back on Match, no less the same day we broke up.  He had made his profile “invisible” after our first date, and we both deleted our accounts in the following weeks.  The reason, the website asked?  We “met another Match member!”  As quickly as he fell for me, so too was he able to get back on the Internet dating horse.

I put myself back on Match, too.  I would love to meet someone in the ticket line at the Sunshine Theater, or see to it that an old flame rekindle what wasn’t then meant to be.  But I’m not discouraged from the thought that the person for me is hanging out on his computer, like we all do when we’re not outside.

I blocked my profile from him at first, but unblocked it when I realized it wouldn’t stop us from landing in each other’s Inbox everyday.  A couple months ago, we were 95% a Match.  Today we are 73%.  The Internet hasn’t caught on to our break-up, but when I see his picture, I don’t resent it the way I did at first.  There once existed that familiar inanimate panic, except instead of throwing my melon into the carrot container to whisk myself out of a Bodega run-in, I am now sitting at my desk, or lying in bed. Hello hipster with glasses, I think.  Fancy running into you here.  We’re so normal.