A few of my friends have forged into online dating in the last few years; one is currently chatting with a bunch of guys who all sound really cool, another has met a guy in person and had him be as great there as he was online, and another two are now in serious relationships with guys they met on RSVP—one around six months and the other over a year now. I’ve always been pretty reluctant about the idea of online dating though, even if I’m more than happy to meet new friends in the same way. Honestly, I’m still not sure I’m ready to give up on the possible Meet Cutes that happen in real life, that make telling your future children how you met their father a cool story, but in a moment of curiosity and, ok, plain nosiness on Monday, I decided to make an online dating profile. I figured I wouldn’t actually use it; I could just have a bit of a look around and see what online dating was about and maybe come back once the horror set in of hitting 25 single when, at seventeen, I was so confident I’d be getting married, if not already building a family.
But OkCupid, where I ended up (totally free: a mixed blessing), has a policy of only allowing you to view other people’s photos once you’ve posted one of your own, and I’ve always been more curious than is good for me. So I did.
And I’m not exaggerating when I say that my page views started to climb pretty steadily (OKC's standard setting shows you everyone who’s viewed your account, and it shows everyone whose account you’ve looked at, regardless of whether you liked them or not, that you were there (to be fair, you can change this setting though). This isn’t me bragging; actually, I was pretty surprised. I’ve never thought that I’m unattractive, but I’ve also always had the normal level of discomfort with my appearance that’s pretty much beaten into women from a young age. I know that, statistically, there are more men online than there are women, so the chances of a woman getting swamped with interest tends to be the norm. The interest was still an ego boost; it’s one of those gross side effects of how sexually objectified women are—and you know that you shouldn’t care what men think of you, but it’s hard to help it.
The first message came through not long after I put up pictures, and I responded in a pretty typical fashion for me: I panicked. I’ve never had that disconnect other people seem to get once they reach the anonymity of the internet, so I don’t know why I was surprised by the full-force awkwardness of realising that a guy, who’s profile I had looked at and decided I wasn’t interested in, had messaged to say that, oooooh, he’d seen I looked at his profile. I know that starting a conversation with a complete stranger can be pretty tough and intimidating so I try to cut guys some slack when it comes to their first contact, but he’d manage to combine that unappealing profile with a message I had no idea how to respond to—there wasn’t even a question at the end for me to answer—and I just froze, because my fight or flight response tends to come with a bonus “deer in headlights” setting that it keeps getting stuck on. I couldn’t think of a way to respond that didn’t either a) inadvertently encourage him, which felt unfair, or b) inadvertently come across as cold, which felt rude; I slept on it and deleted his message the next morning so I wouldn’t have to feel guilty. I’ve done the same thing a few times, with messages from guys who I could tell from the offset I wouldn’t like, and I don’t think it’s something to feel bad about anymore. As women, putting ourselves out there on the internet can turn bad quickly. In online gaming, the tone can get crude and sometimes outright sexually violent the moment a female gamer reveals she isn’t another man. And I’ve seen Why They're Single and It's Not Ok, OkCupid, and I’ve heard horror stories about online dating. Listening to our intuition or deciding we don’t like what we’re reading when a guy is talking about himself, it’s not necessarily a shallow action; often, it’s actually pre-emptive self-protection.
And even when we’re taking those pre-emptive steps to keep ourselves safe, there’s no guarantee that the creeps can’t slip through the barriers. I actually, until tonight, thought my experience on OKC had been weirdly short of creepers; I thought, stupidly, I’d managed to set up strong enough personal filters that I could pick a not-ok guy from the beginning and let his be one of the deleted messages. I’d totally forgotten to account for That Guy who acts friendly and nonthreatening, who lures you in until you’re starting to feel comfortable talking to him and then throws his doucheyness in your face, leaving you feeling surprised and confused and creeped out and a little violated. That Guy is probably either a Nice Guy™ or something incredibly similar, and That Guy messaged me on Tuesday and, after a few days of harmless, free of flirting, getting-to-know-you chatting, he struck. It was a slow build that I can see looking back, but seemed innocuous at the time: first, wondering if I had much planned for the rest of the week, then, joking that he’d thought of spontaneously meeting tonight but maybe later when I rattled off my plans. Alarm bells were starting to go off, but I hesitantly said that, no, not tonight but maybe another time. Almost simultaneously, he doubled his weaponry and sent through an IM, which I hadn’t thought to turn off yet. More innocuous, platonic chatter. Wondering whereabouts I lived, a question I’d answered (vaguely) without needing to abort a conversation. There are about five different suburbs around the golf course I live near, so I felt fairly safe using it as a landmark. Or I did until he suggested he come over and we sneak over to the golf course to “be naughty”. I promise, the “ahahahhaha” that followed did nothing to make the suggestion less unwelcome.
Because what more could a woman possibly want from her first meeting with a total stranger than to have it in the middle of an enormous, pitch black, empty golf course, with enough space that no one would hear her screaming and definitely a few good hiding places for her brutally raped and murdered corpse. I know that men don’t have to think about these things, but women do. We do. Because if we don’t think about these things then we might end up in a situation like that and, hey, if we live through it, we might get blamed for it to boot.
I had a moment, I really did, where I thought, “Well, I should say no nicely, right?” as if my being rude to another person was worse than the level of discomfort he’d just inflicted upon me, but instead I rapidly abandoned ship. I closed the tab and decided I would open it again and block him once I was feeling calmer. In the meantime, because I’d mentioned working on a post for this blog earlier and he’d expressed enough interest that I gave him the URL, he used the Facebook link on NYAD to take him to our page and, from there, found me among the people who like it, and “poked” me. Presumably because I was taking too long to respond to his super appealing offer. Needless to say, I went ahead and blocked him on both Facebook and OKC.
I’m definitely not saying that there aren’t actual, genuine nice guys on OKC or online dating in general, because there are. Like I said, I have friends who’ve had great experiences with it and I’ve heard a lot more stories from other people who have too. And I have talked with other guys who, so far, have been interesting and funny, and who hopefully won’t follow in That Guy’s footsteps. It hasn’t turned me off the idea completely (although, spoiler alert, still not convinced by the concept in general), but it’s definitely been a reminder to stay alert and keep safe.
Written mid-March, but posting was delayed (better to be safe and all that).
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