My first girlfriend was in preschool. She and I, holding hands, approached our teacher and said, “Miss Carol, we want to be alone.” Miss Carol accommodated us by situating us on stools in the kitchen, where we talked at length about what superheroes we wanted to be when we grew up.
In kindergarten, another girl decided she had a crush on me, and would chase me around the playground at recess. One afternoon, she sneaked up behind me and kissed me on the cheek. I fell right off the jungle gym, tore my pants, got a face full of dirt and had the wind knocked out of me.
To this day, I’m looking for the girl with whom we can be superheroes, but I am always and forever falling off of jungle gyms.
The above is the intro to my profile on OkCupid, the free Internet dating site (yeah, I know…). With these little anecdotes, I intended to express my sense of idealism coupled with my practical failure in each foray into the world of love beginning at an early age. I wanted to express how I’m open to the idea of relationships, and recognize the possibility of hitting the jackpot, while acknowledging that if history is any indication, I wouldn’t bet my rent money. I wanted to present my cynicism in a package of whimsy, my clumsy idiocy wrapped in eloquence. I wanted to acknowledge my dumb luck through humility, while hinting that I’m wholly desirable. Or, maybe I was just trying to be clever.
While I may delve into each of these stories later, let’s just start with the uncontested facts that 1) I am on a dating site, and 2) this will never work for me. I maintain a profile on OKC just to signify to myself that I haven’t completely given up on the idea of love and marriage—there’s still a little wiggle room in which I could be duped into participating in a rewarding relationship. But, shopping for women online allows me to put in next to zero effort; and let’s face it, I can be judgmental as shit, and I can weed women out online without confrontation and hurt feelings.
I suppose my record with online dating is better than most. My first OKC date led me to a three-month fling with a pretty girl fully equipped with the best breasts money can buy and an IUD. (She was also smart, creative, career-driven and a wine lover, blah blah blah…) But, since then, it’s gone nowhere. I went out on a date that landed me squarely in the friend-zone. I went out on a date that turned into a networking opportunity for her. I went out on a date with a girl who quickly moved out of state before we could meet up again. I went out on a date that I knew would be short within the first five minutes, but that ended up lasting a couple of hours due to leapfrogging the timing of our beers. In that case, I kept thinking, “this girl would make a better lesbian,” and at the end of the date, I pounded out a hug before realizing that we were both about to walk in the same direction. It was an awkward, quiet couple of blocks before I took a dumb detour just to get away from her. (Interestingly, I’ve seen her profile since, and she’s edited her details to indicate that she’s bi-sexual.) Each time, I do what I always do—start compiling my list of things I won’t be able to tolerate in the long run.
The thing is, I’ve been lucky. Though I’ve only dragged myself out on five or six dates in the four years I’ve had a profile on OKC (I can rarely summon the initiative to actually go on a date), the girls I’ve met through the site have all been pretty great in their own way. I haven’t met any crazies, psychos or bitches. They’ve all been nice, attractive and decent conversationalists; and if I’d been more motivated to actually land a girlfriend, most of them would have been pretty good candidates—assuming, of course, that they were similarly impressed by me. Maybe that’s a function of OKC’s matchmaking ability. Maybe the psycho girls are being paired up with the psycho guys. Or, maybe I have a singular talent at culling the bad fruit from the vine.
Like meeting someone in person—but without the utter waste of time and money spent on a dud date—browsing OKC profiles affords me the opportunity to identify what I think are character flaws that I’ll never be able to tolerate. Here are nine of them.
1. If you say you’re “sassy”
There seems to be a trend in the OKC dating pool where nearly every female refers to herself as “sassy,” either in her username, her description or both. On a scale of one to super-annoying, this ranks right up there with duck lips. You know what? If you say you’re sassy, I wouldn’t go out with you for anything. The fact that you’re using the word to describe yourself means that you’re probably not lively, spirited and cheeky; it means that you’re a bitch and you think it’s funny. You’ll throw insults under the guise of humor while sucking down all the cosmos I can afford to buy while fluttering your eyelashes as if to say, “Isn’t it just adorable what a giant cunt I can be?” No thanks.
2. If all of your photos are face shots
C’mon, you may have a pretty face, but if you don’t include any body shots, I know you’re hiding something. It’s not that I’ll automatically object if you’re a little thicker, but the overt concealment of your body means that I’ll have to put up with your body image issues, your shame eating, and I’ll forever be forced to lie when you ask me if those jeans make you look fat. Even worse is when you just put up a closeup of your eye. How avant-garde of you. You may say, “I just want to find someone who appreciates me for me, and not what I look like,” but your appearance is part of this “you” that you want people to appreciate. Your appearance is how others can identify you in a crowd, and how men can differentiate between you and the haggard old crone posted up at the end of the bar. I’m not positing that physical appearance is a person’s most important attribute, but it’s certainly not the least (I’m less concerned about your size 16 than I am about your complete collection of Kenny G albums). Hiding anything below the neck in your profile photos means that 1) you don’t like your body, 2) you don’t think anyone else will like it either, and 3) you’ve given up on ever doing anything about it. That kind of self-consciousness is less attractive than the extra weight. Also, “curvy” is not a polite synonym for “heavy.” If you’re shaped like a 170-lb D battery, “curvy” is not an accurate description.
3. If you include your income in the details
I once had an acquaintance that was ready to settle down and get married, and she was utterly consternated that she couldn’t seem to find love. For her, love meant finding a guy that made over $75k a year, owned his own home in a nice neighborhood, had a nice car and liked to go to fancy restaurants. Basically, she wanted to marry up from her $55k income, her Volkswagen Jetta, and her tiny condo in the ‘burbs. If you’re including your income on your OKCupid profile, you’re just like her—it means that money matters to you. It probably matters to you more than the sound of a guy’s laugh, the way he encourages you on challenging days, the way he patiently listens to you complain about your friends and co-workers and the way he’ll feed you soup when you’re sick or crampy. By including your income on your profile, you’re saying that this is part of what makes you a valuable human being, and that you’ll use that metric to assess the worth of others. Well, I’ll be out pursuing interesting conversations while you’re at home counting your coppers.
4. If all of your photos are “seductive”
Really, all of your photos are selfies taken in bed to capture various angles of your cleavage? You’re also the one who’s looking for “true love” and someone who really understands you? You’re going about this all wrong. You clearly believe that you have only one thing to offer, and that some guy will mistake sex for love. More than likely, that guy will be so busy getting in your pants that he won’t spend any time getting into your head, which is just as well since you’ve only presented one aspect of yourself that you think is worth showing to the universe. If you’re just looking for a hookup, then more power to you; but as the band Frightened Rabbit so eloquently put it, “You won’t find love in a hole.”
5. If you can’t decide what you’d be doing on a typical Friday night
Oh, you’re either out with friends or staying in with a movie? No shit. It’s true that this is kind of a dumb question on OKC’s part, because most people I know don’t have a typical Friday night. If they have plans, they’ll go out, and if not, they’ll stay at home and binge on Netflix. But c’mon, you get no points for originality here. You’re the beige of the Friday night color wheel.
6. If all of your photos are mirror selfies
Oh, here’s you in your bedroom in a black party dress. Oh, now here’s you in your bedroom in a white party dress. Oh, here’s you in the bathroom in the black party dress again and your hair did. Oh, here’s you in the hall with your fur coat over your party dress getting ready to leave for a par-tay! Jesus, why do you have so many fucking mirrors in your apartment, and why are you snapping so many pics of yourself? Hey, I get it, selfies are necessary sometimes (who do you think takes all of my mugshots for this website?), because we don’t all have live-in photographers that will jump out of the darkroom every time we need a likeness taken. However, all of these mirror selfies clearly aren’t photos you’ve taken just for your OKC profile, but rather, you appear have an addiction to selfies and a narcissistic disorder. They’re not selfies that capture a moment, but instead capture a look. For some reason, I think I should care more about how you look than you do.
7. If your favorite books include anything in the “inspirational” or “self help” genre
Hey, I’m all for self-improvement. I considered doing sit-ups yesterday before I got distracted cooking up some chicken mole tacos and rice. But if you spend your time reading self-help books, then you’re not going to stop at helping yourself, you’re going to try to help me. I’m just as good identifying my flaws as I am at identifying yours, and I don’t need you to rope me into your latest self-actualization scheme thank-you-very-much. You’re the type that probably won’t vaccinate your kids because you read some shitty book with shoddy anecdotal evidence packaged in sappy heal-the-world rhetoric, and they’ll all die of polio. You’re the type who will claim to adopt Buddhism, but mistake Budai (“fat Buddha”) for Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) because you read some dumb book out of the Barnes & Noble bargain bin instead of the Dhammapada. You’d be better off simply listing Kurt Vonnegut like everyone else on OKCupid.
8. If you don’t know how to read
On my OKCupid profile, I reference a song lyric from the band The Cat Empire: “I will die with a twinkle in my eye, because I sang songs, spun stories, loved, laughed and drank wine.” Some girl messaged me telling me how much she’s always loved the lyric I mentioned from Cat Power, and then referenced other Cat Power songs. This is the equivalent of saying, “I love Billie Holiday, he’s my favorite!” Do me a favor and make sure you’ve read something before you comment on it with such gusto. Everyone’s looking for things they have in common, but before you get so excited about it, make sure you’ve got it right.
9. If you say you want a guy who knows how to treat a lady
Oh boy, this one is loaded. Let me start by saying that I’m all for common courtesy and random acts of kindness. As I’ve said before, I tend to put disproportionate effort into these things when I’m interested in someone. But, by establishing that a guy needs to treat a “lady” in a specific way, and that you are presumably said lady, what you’re saying is not that you want a relationship of equality and mutual respect, you’re saying that you want to be put on a pedestal without the necessity of reciprocation for no other reason than that you were blessed with two X chromosomes. You’re saying you want to be treated like a queen—not the way the king treats the queen, but the way the servants treat the queen. I suppose it’s possible that you’re just trying to weed out the dudes that physically abuse their “bitches and hos,” but it’s more likely that you’re looking for a guy who picks up the check, holds the door, gives you his jacket on a brisk evening, and buys you gifts on a regular basis. None of these behaviors should be one-directional under an artificial structure of gender roles. Being nice is being nice, and it’s something we should expect of humans, not just men. If I’m going to date a girl, she’ll need to be my partner, not my goddess.
