The Perils and Peculiarities of Online Dating

So it's no secret that I've been dabbling in online dating for the last year or so. I feel like there's not much stigma left attached to it at this point - especially in this town, where it increasingly seems you can't find a single person between 25 and 32 who hasn't at least signed up for an account at some point or another. As I've realized that I've come to be more or less entirely OK with admitting I've played with it and sharing some of my experiences and/or opinions of the practice as a whole.

And most of those experiences (the ones that make for interesting sharing anyhow - no one wants to hear about how, for example, I once froze up so badly during a date that I literally could not make conversation about anything but television shows for almost two hours) somehow come back around to that fact itself - namely, that within the borders of the greater downtown area pretty much everyone and their mother (perhaps literally in some cases?) is on OKCupid.

[I feel I should take a moment here to say that while I sign on to OKC semi-regularly to browse my messages and sometimes the profiles of people who send them or are suggested to me, I haven't used or viewed it as a serious means of meeting duded for like 6+ months now. This is for two roughly equal reasons: A) I'm not enamored with the format of meeting someone one-on-one for the first time in a more-or-less formal date context where you're both more or less explicitly evaluating the romantic-relationship potential of the other, and B) it requires an energy, excitement and time investment that I simply haven't been able to invest in non-work pursuits for awhile now. So all this crossover? It's from occasional mostly voyeuristic browsing and a handful of dates dating back at least half a year.]

This density of use and the possibilities it creates for odd crossovers manifested itself only gradually. . For example, within my first three or four months on the site I went on dates with two dudes who both worked at the same (very large) company in town. "Huh..." I thought to myself at some point after my date with the second one, "wouldn't it be weird if somehow they knew each other and discovered they'd both been out with me. Weird." This seemed to me unlikely, both then and in retrospect, but given how OKC charts and almost gleefully displays viewing and contact statistics not at all impossible.)

I've come to see however in the months since then that this is an OKC/IRL collision so distant and with such minimal power reach back to me as to be almost adorably quaint. Because within this strip of city - everyone you know is looking at your profile right now. Or near enough as makes no difference. You may or may not ever see the effects of that - but probably you will. You may not be looking for information about the personal, sexual, or daily lives of people you know when you're running through QuickMatch - but you're going to run into some probably 2/5 times. You may never ever message that dude whose profile you cruised while tispy and bored at 2am last Wednesday night, but that won't stop you from recognizing him at the next TAA event and remembering that he's looking for a woman who wants to take latin dancing lessons with him at Monona Terrace this summer.

Because this isn't Facebook here, my friends. OKC profiles and questions cover a lot deeper ground, get more personal, get more graphic, get more revealing - ethically, sexually, personal-history, and otherwise. Sure, one can argue that you know what you're getting into and as adults we should act according to the risk we're willing to incur in terms of these potential inadvertant OKC/IRL collisions - and I do keep that somewhere in my mind when filling out questions and such. But it's also an environment that breeds a somewhat deceptive sense of, if not anonymity (the picture is more than half the game, for God's sake), then at least comfortable detachment from the eyes of people IRL. Because after all - you can't be searched for by name. Most of the people you know are probably already in stable relationships (those bastards) and have no reason to be on there. And it's a mutually-assured-embarrassment kind of thing if you should run into someone, which further cushions the sense of risk. So before you know it you're admitting in writing that your job really is slowly destroying your ability to enjoy life and that you could maybe imagine a scenario in which you'd have sex with someone you otherwise hated.

And so when those crossovers do happen, there's a fairly potent "...oh my god" kind of feeling. Here's a partial list of OKC/IRL collisions I've experienced in roughly the past 4-6 months (so like, half the time I've been on there):

- Running into the profile of the fairly adorable but married dude who did the home renovations for the family I nannied for my first two summers here and used to chat with frequently there and discovering in this manner his (presumed) divorce. (Guess that explains the visibly increased fitness level I noticed when I passed him going into the Secret Beer Store a few weeks ago.)
- Apparently being listed as a Quiver match for someone from my grad program - particularly awkward as we were barely friends at the time as it was.
- Having an ex-student with whom I've stayed in touch realize that his first-ever OKC message back in Dec (a month before I had him in class) was in fact to me. I cannot impress how narrowly I feel I dodged the World's Most Awkward Semester bullet here.
- Mentioning to a student this spring that I'd gone on a blind date recently with someone who worked locally in the same general business field on which she'd recently done a project - only to have her ask his name and then reveal that he was her husband's employer. Her: "Didn't he get a divorce really recently?" Me: "Yeah maybe I don't know SO what are you doing for your next project?"
- Attending a social function of people my own age to which I was attached only by one person (whom I knew only slightly) and realizing that the reason so many of the people there looked familiar was because OKC regularly suggested them to me as matches.
- Meeting a pair of fun and friendly dudes in a neighborhood bar, having OKC use come up casually in conversation; one of them then falls silent for 15 seconds while looking at me fixedly, then says "I've got it - [my user name], right?"

This is a selection of the most notable. I could keep going. And of course all that's not to mention the all-too-frequent times I run into people I've been out with in the grocery store, on campus, at the corner bar...or even avoid certain places entirely to prevent such run-ins. And when you consider that really, only one of my dates ended on an actively negative note and all but that and one other on reasonably non-awkward ones - I feel there's a lot to support my theory that (for many people at least, myself very much included) using OKC in this town does far more to breed awkwardness than to breed romance.


Which, I mean, is not the worst thing. There's part of my that finds it kind of hilarious, and maybe even (slightly) welcome, in this day and age of fiercely locked down FB profiles and aggressively monitored Google results pages. And should I ever have an experience that really throws or mortifies me, it's easy enough to trim back on the offending material.  And one thing typing this post and crystallizing these realizations has done for me is made me realize that there's a part of me that enjoys the evidence that  there are all these little threads (however random, awkward or of questionable compatibility with my professional life they may be at times) connecting me not only to this city but specifically to other people of my age and in my somewhat transient and unsteady life position. That I have an actual life here that extends beyond my work and into the community -with all the complication, mundane or otherwise, that that implies.

That said - I do not see myself going on an OKC date anytime real soon. Shit's a little too close to home already. ;-)