VIII: In Which I Go Shopping For Girls

Last night two very dear old friends and I had dinner at Otto, Mario Batali's Greenwich Village pizzeria. The place was packed when we arrived, so we went to the bar to drink wine and await our turn at a table. Nearly everyone else in the place was very young and very attractive--I was surprised that we were allowed to stay, honestly--so there was ample opportunity to look at pretty girls. Because I am both male and alive, this is an activity I very much enjoy.

I harbor no illusions about my chances with gorgeous twenty-somethings. Back home in North Carolina, these girls all call me 'sir' and look at me the way one looks at one's schoolteacher or at an unremarkable customer one is waiting on. When I indulge in this sort of ogling, the inevitable soundtrack in my mind is The Coasters' "Shopping For Clothes," mostly for the final line: "That's one suit you'll never own." In my mind's eye, Will "Dub" Jones wags his finger at me disapprovingly as that line plays over and over.

Which is fine by me. I never had much luck with twenty-somethings the first go around, and that was way back when we shared approximate frames of reference on music, movies, life goals, etc. My final foray at a gorgeous twenty-something was with my future ex-wife, who was 24 when I met her; that effort was considerably more successful than those that preceded it, but nonetheless here I am, a reluctant bachelor.

Why worry about the age of potential matches? As I consider--slowly, very slowly--the prospect of reentering the dating world, why not cast my net wide and see what I can drag ashore? Because when you sign up for online dating services, setting a target age range for potential dates is one of the many millions of data you must enter before you get to look at said potential dates. My application to college wasn't as thorough as some of the questionnaires you must complete to begin your dating adventures at such sites at match.com or eharmony.com.

Now, to be clear: I have not yet paid to join an online dating service, nor am I likely to any time soon. I have, however, created free profiles on several so that I may look to see who out there is single, looking for someone like myself, and in possession of a complementary set of genitalia. I call this activity "shopping for girls." It is the Internet equivalent of standing at the bar at Otto.

You can be as particular or as catholic as you please when shopping for girls. Want a girl who earns at least $150,000 a year? That's where you set your income floor. Want a girl who has a slender or athletic build? Eliminate all who list their body types as 'a few pounds overweight' or 'curvaceous.' Combine these qualities into comprehensive searches. Save as many searches as you please--you can title the search above 'Skinny and Rich' or 'Meal Ticket, Cheap to Feed' or anything else for that matter--and scroll through your search results as often as you like. In virtual space, no one can see you ogle.

Nearly all user profiles include at least one, and usually several, photographs. Some of the photos are more current than others, one suspects. It is usually impossible to tell who is practicing deceptive advertising on these sites until you meet them, of course, but occasionally the photos include giveaways; a "Dole for President" campaign button, for instance, or a Seattle Pilots baseball jersey. Some women have clearly used photo-editing programs to enhance their images, mostly to blur out wrinkles and other imperfections. I suppose such women are hoping to ensnare a mate with a bad case of glaucoma.

Be prepared for a few other shocks. Women definitely have a different understanding of body type classifications than I do, I have learned. Some who describe themselves as 'skinny' or 'proportional' look shockingly like fullbacks. Likewise, some who reportedly earn at least $150,000 a year appear to be sitting on the porch of a singlewide drinking a PBR. Is this an investment property, maybe? Is your singlewide located in the Virgin Islands, perhaps? I am confused, but still intrigued.

The privileges afforded freeloaders on these sites are few, just enough to convince you that it is worth $40 per month to enjoy the full complement of prerogatives. Freebies usually include some variation of 'winking,' a quick text-free message that lets another user know you are either interested in her or that you have something in your virtual eye. A wink is as far as you can go for free, however; if your intended responds with anything but a wink you'll never know, and if she winks back at you, you'll know that she did but not her name or email address or phone number or any other information that would be useful in procuring a date. For that, you must pay the money.

Paying users, on the other hand, can look at other users' profiles, send emails, post on bulletin boards, and generally have free run of the place. Freeloaders like myself will know that a paying user has been checking them out and trying to reach them by email but will not be able to retrieve the checker-outer's identity or message until they have paid for the full service. Watch those irretrievable emails pile up in your mailbox and try not to imagine one of them is from the reincarnation of Myrna Loy, that you are ruining your one shot at marital happiness because you'd prefer to hold on to your forty bucks, you miserable and penurious loser. You deserve to be alone. This is the way these sites work, and I can feel their allure. It doesn't make me want to sign up yet, but it does make me wish I'd gotten into this business; someone is clearly making a killing in the loneliness sector.

One site offers freeloaders an intriguing feature: instant messaging. From my experience, this service is used exclusively by impossibly hot twenty-year old girls who are very, very interested in you even though they have not even looked at your profile, meaning that they know nothing about you but your user name (e.g. Lonely_and_Desperate_6822) and what you look like on your best day from a great distance (i.e. your profile picture, which appears only as a tiny thumbnail to all who do not check out your profile). If you click on these girls' profiles, you will note that their self-descriptions are a little too well written, and if you google the text of those descriptions you will find that it is boilerplate copy used by many impossibly hot young women on many dating sites. Their profiles typically disappear--removed by the site administrators--a few hours after they contact you. I find it odd that these same women who treat me as though I were a kindly old eunuch in the real world flock to me with such enthusiasm in the virtual world. I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but I strongly suspect anyone responding to these IMs soon finds himself enmeshed in a maze of credit card numbers and pornographic websites.

My inclinations in matters of the heart are fundamentally Luddite. I do not trust computer dating, and the anecdotes I've heard from regular users bear out my trepidations. One friend--the same one who informed me that many men refer to match.com as "snatch.com"--explained that it's all about the second date: "That's when you have sex," he said matter-of-factly, and I flashed back to too many youthful indiscretions when I hopped into bed with someone way too early, only to find that we had nothing in common but physical attraction. And I remembered that the getting in to those relationships was pretty fun and a big boost to the ego, but that the getting out was always far more difficult and traumatic than the getting in was fun, and that in the end the ego boost had been more than negated by feelings of self-reproach and self-loathing.

I also recall how the feeling of virtue that comes from abstaining from such encounters is eventually and inevitably overwhelmed by loneliness, by the desire to be desired, and by the need to be intimate with someone, even if that someone is a relative stranger with whom you probably have nothing in common. These aren't problems endemic to computer dating; they're problems endemic to being human, and I'll be navigating them again soon enough or spending the rest of my life alone, match.com or no.

So there you go.