CSotD: Experimenting on humans
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Oh, if only it were that easy.
No, not the idea that you could dress like this and pick up girls in a bar. Bizarro has that part down. It would be that easy.
It's the "now what?" part that is complex.
You'd have go to her place, because you sure couldn't bring her to yours, unless you actually were a Rolex-wearing, Lexus-driving, yacht-sailing doctor and, really, so few of us are.
But you can't go to her place because she lives with three other women in a two-bedroom apartment and yes they are home. They are always home. They live there.
*Sigh* A tiny, but decidedly fatal, flaw.
About a decade or so ago, some genius was peddling fake ATM receipts with insanely high balances printed on them. The idea was that you would meet a girl in a bar and say, "Let me give you my phone number," fish through your pockets, pull out an ATM receipt, write your number on the back and hand it to her.
It stopped working on the macro level as soon as word got out that some genius was peddling fake ATM receipts with insanely high balances printed on them, but I have to suspect it failed on the micro level several times in the interim for the reason suggested above: How long can you keep her from seeing your car, much less your apartment?
Which brings us to Match.com, where, unlike meeting in a bar where revelations take place in a matter of a couple of hours, you can drag out the interval between "Oh, boy!" and "What the hell?" for weeks or months.
I will confess to having tried Match.com a few times, including three that progressed to an actual face-to-face three-dimensional meet-up.
I have a friend who married a Match.com date and they're still together a decade later, so it's not impossible for it to work, but I found it to be a very long process to go through for an evening that ends with, "Well, it's been nice …"
For the record, I had the most fun with the one who had to walk across the room and introduce herself, since she looked so little like her picture, while the graphic artist who had all the access to Photoshop looked in person pretty much like she looked on-line, but had a few other issues.
Like her entire family sitting at the next table watching us eat dinner.
It works both ways, of course. I have a friend who regaled me with stories of her merry adventures on Match.com. She's pretty much the fantasy guys have when they join up — very good-looking, intelligent, successful, she runs marathons, she's got a great sense of humor.
Which means she can laugh telling me about a guy who drives around the block several times before getting the courage to park the car and get out, and who turns out to still be living with his mother. And the older man who says he also enjoys clubbing and working out, but it turns out he enjoyed them when he was her age and hadn't done either in the dozen years since.
For my part, I found that, while love truly is lovelier the second time around, that may be in part because your radar is a lot better tuned than it was when you were 20 years old. When I became single again in my mid-30s, my ability to sort things out at the start had markedly improved.
Which is to say, somehow in those intervening years, I had learned that good-looking is a positive, but "screwed up" is a deal-killer, and also that there really isn't an inventively romantic path that will get you around "not interested," neither of which I accepted as a young man.
So, armed with a little more mature outlook on things, it was easy enough to sort through the listings on Match.com and eliminate, for instance, the ones who work as a store clerk and like to vacation in the Greek islands and want to meet a non-smoking man who makes $150,000 or more. And, yeah, wears a Rolex, drives a Lexus, etc etc.
And some of the others, where it took a little back-and-forth emailing to make the cut. I had someone approach me at a statewide educational conference where I was speaking and introduce herself as someone I'd met and corresponded with on Match.com. I had ended up telling her that, nice as she was, it didn't sound like she had resolved her divorce issues and was ready to date, and now she was thanking me because she'd gone back and reconciled with her husband and things were good for them.
Which story of nobility I recount so that I can tell about the mixer freshman year in college when, after a series of dances with girls who were brutally straightforward in letting me know they had hoped I was at least a junior, I tried this conversational gambit:
She: So, where are you from?
Me: Um, well, really nowhere in particular.
She: What? No, really.
Me: It's kind of complicated. I grew up in a lot of places, because my father owns a string of platinum mines in South America, so we were always going from one to another, and I had tutors. I'm really looking forward to being in one place for more than two or three months …
That's the thing about being 17. You can try things just to see if they work. That worked, at least in the sense that she didn't mumble "thanks for the dance" and wander away when the music stopped. She even introduced me to all her friends, even though I was only a freshman.
But the part where I realized she was a really nice girl and started feeling like a shit and finally confessed? That part didn't work so well.
And even though I recognized that maybe she wasn't any less snobbish than the other girls, and that there could conceivably be a connection between her markedly more cordial attitude and my father's purported string of platinum mines, I kind of felt, even at 17, that I'd gone to a place I didn't want to be.
It really brought things into focus and changed the way I behaved towards women.
In just a very few years.
But, hey, go easy on me. After all, we were raised on creepy stuff like this:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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