“If you had to name your greatest motivation in life thus far, what would it be?”
This was how I was supposed to lure in a mate. Whales had their songs, blue-footed boobies had their choreographed dances, skunks had their musk and I had this question.
There were four potential answers: love, wealth, expression or knowledge.
Huddled up in the round, green chair tucked beneath the cave of my lofted dorm bed at Otterbein, I asked nobody, “What the hell does this even really mean?”
This was it — after the excruciating task of trying to create a profile, hundreds of questions awaited my careful consideration so I could lasso me a boy. And I was stalling on the first question.
I ended up choosing “expression” because it was the vaguest of my choices, the one answer I could mold myself around while still remaining the best possible version of myself.
So this was online dating, where I could become the incarnation of myself that I’d always dreamed of embodying, right until the moment I realized she’s only half the person I am.
OkCupid’s tagline is “The best dating site on Earth,” which is a bit of a lofty claim and one that I find comically phrased, like the site is run by a team of frat boys. It turns out that it’s not, that Chris Coyne and his three co-founders are all monumental math nerds with degrees from Harvard or MIT — polymathic nerds, actually, since they all helped found and oversee the creation of every high schooler’s best friend, SparkNotes, as well.
All 127 questions I’ve answered, from “Do you think drug use with your partner can be a romantic activity?” to “Do you believe in dinosaurs?,” have been applied to the site’s system of calculating match percentages, which is how OkCupid tells me that Brandon and I are a 92 percent match while Mark, who used “your” instead of “you’re,” only makes a 29 percent match with me. The equation considers my answer, the answers I’d like to see from potential partners and the level of importance — from “irrelevant” to “mandatory” — I place on the question. OkCupid is all about the science of matching, a fact emphasized by its logo of hearts bubbling out of an Erlenmeyer flask.
Even when my search criteria are narrowed to what seem like constricted characteristics, I’m left with hundreds of choices. There are over 80 pages of 20-25-year-old males who are interested in females within 25 miles of Westerville and who are not only single, but have at least one photo on their profile and have been online in the past week.
There are a lot of us clicking and browsing around, and maybe that’s supposed to bring us together, but most of the time the hollowness of my conversations left me feeling oddly alone.
I spent one Sunday night lamely flirting with some guy named shadows8.
My roommate and I were watching “Zoolander,” cackling and quoting our way through what I will always consider Ben Stiller’s greatest cinematic achievement, because the day Blue Steel stops being a relevant pop culture reference is the day I turn in my resignation from existence.
OkCupid has this feature where you can rate a user’s profile based on a five-star system. If you give someone a rating of four or five stars, the site is kind enough to send this person an email exclaiming “Someone chose you!” in its subject line. Receiving one of these emails is like being half-heartedly punched in the gut — a cross between ticklish and wanting to die because oh God, people are ranking me like prize chickens at the county fair.
Shadows8 chose me. I told my roommate that I was “flirting with some hot dude,” which I found hilarious, mostly because I was convinced that guys with beach-ready abs like his didn’t talk to girls with hoodie-ready curves like mine. But he had a really nice smile, not something effortless that I would be quick to distrust, but a grin just on this side of toothiness, like he was genuinely laughing on the inside.
His profile was utterly forgettable. That sounds harsh, but after encountering guy upon guy who was “just your average nerdy guy” and was, like, totally into hiking, and “hey, just message me if you think I seem interesting,” being forgettable was just par for the course. But he chose me, and that was enough.
I initiated the snail-mail private messaging. He responded to my elaborate greeting with a simple “Hi :),” which meant I was going to be forced to work at creating some semblance of conversation.
We talked about laundry. And student loans.
“The worst thing about graduating is your student loans kick in!” he messaged.
“Ugh, God, loans. I don’t even want to begin to think about that.” Lies. In a sudden fit of shame, I felt the need to hide the fact that I was a middle-class privileged girl whose parents had been saving money in a college fund from the year I was born. I didn’t have to think about debt.
“Yeah, loans, ouch. :)”
I was bored and uninspired, but I wanted to keep going. He was nice, and supposedly finding a “Nice Boy” is what it’s all about, and there was also the possibility that we were both just painfully awkward.
I kept snorting in an amused, undignified way as our messaging went on even though it wasn’t funny, still strangely giddy to see the white envelope in a flashy pink square near the top of the screen that indicated shadows8 had replied. I kept waiting for something better, something exciting.
Meanwhile, Billy Zane was flanking Zoolander at a club while he confronted his oh-so-hot-right-now male model rival, Hansel. “Don’t you know I’m loco?” my roommate and I both quoted with Owen Wilson before I ducked my head in laughter.
The only part of my plodding conversation with shadows8 that made me laugh like that was when I explained what I was doing, which was simply lounging on my bed in a dark dorm room and watching a movie with my roomie, and I risked actually making a joke, good God, and I prayed that he got it. See, male model Derek Zoolander always runs around telling everyone how “really, really, ridiculously good-looking” he is, so I said, “It’s the stupidest movie ever made, but it’s so ridiculously good (looking).”
To which he responded, “Lol, you dork. But that’s ok, it’s cute. :)” And later, “lol I’m still laughing that you put good (looking).”
I laughed for days. Which was weird, because it wasn’t even really that funny. Not his response, anyway. But the fact that I was online, actually talking with some boy who’d seen my dumb face and yet still wanted to tease me in a way I’d seen happen to pretty, bright-smiling girls around me my whole life … that was absolutely laughable to me, but it also made me feel uneasy in a way I didn’t understand.
Our conversation died after he responded to my explanation of the popularity of 2004’s “Mean Girls” with a simple, “Hmm.. okay. :)” and I couldn’t, for the life of me, think of a reply to further the conversation. He’s since deleted his account. I never learned his name.
I didn’t get it then, but I got it later.
The twinge in my stomach I’d felt when shadows8 made his flirtatious jibe was the same unpleasant twist I’d felt when Travis said I seemed fun and Zack referred to me as his “dear” and Jason said he’d love to browse $1 CDs at a bookstore with a cute, smart girl.
I felt momentarily gratified, and then I felt false.
No one talks to me like that to my face. And if boys talked to me like that online, didn’t that mean that the girl on my profile, the one who lied and accepted compliments with ease, wasn’t me at all? She was like me, a more outgoing me who shared all the same interests and passions and cynicisms, but she also clung to dying conversations and was unerringly polite because she needed to work at maintaining who she was. Self-embodiment shouldn’t be a chore — it just is. I didn’t set out to be false, but false was what I became.
I have no way of knowing if it’s true, but I imagine that OkCupid’s server is crammed with log after log of empty, lackluster conversations, hollow compliments and stomach-churning flirtations that all puttered to a stop like a dying engine. Maybe we’re all trying too hard because we want to see our dream-selves, our realistic but idealistic avatars, being accepted and wanted. That’s kind of sad, like tiny hearts popping out of existence as they escape a little Erlenmeyer flask.
