Of all the things I’ve always wanted, the one thing that caused the most distress was Love. Before you barf in your mouth (unless it’s already done), just hear me out. I know you wanted it too. Yeah yeah, don’t pretend you’re too cool to admit you haven’t yearned or pined or agonized or downright paaaained for love. So what if I’m that mid-twenties Midwestern white girl that writes acerbic comments on blog posts about the atrocities committed in the name of the institution of marriage? I’m that type, sue me. No don’t sue me; I’m a lover, not a high-income earner. (Thanks liberal arts college.) Instead, why don’t you go ahead and think to yourself that you know for sure I love all those sappy Meg Ryan rom-coms, fawn over my scrapbook of Leonardo DiCaprio magazine cutouts and bakes catnip cookies for my “babies” when you’re not looking. I know you’re doing it anyway. And you know, you might just be right about that (well, all but the last two), and what I say to you is…
Fine, it is a little
embarrassing, ok?! In a time where women can be Anything, I wanted to be in
movie love. At the time, it was more like Hollywood movie love that I wanted.
That passionate, kissing under the waterfall love that consumes your very being.
I wanted to twirl with him in an whirlpool of sugar and dreaming that looks
like the innocence of cotton candy from the outside, but is really made of the
intoxicating gases of Venus perfectly aligned with his eyes and the light of
the moon. (um, rude, can I get you a paper bag or a breath mint or something?)
When I was stricken with the
Yearning, I believed it afflicted me deeper than anyone. The first person who I
fell in love with was my next door neighbor in 7th grade. He was
blonde like me, older than the other guys in our neighborhood group that were
all in love with my best friend anyway, and he could stay out late on Wednesday
nights when my mom was somewhere til 10pm. We would take walks on Wednesdays
after the sun went down through this field behind our townhome complex. It was
Matt and I, we’d hold hands, stare up at the real stars and I’d periodically
remember to breathe. And when I did breathe, it had to be shallow because my
chest was filled to capacity with ecstatic nervousness, which was surprisingly
suffocating.
After a few months, one icy night we
took a detour to a little courtyard with a bench obscured to potential
onlookers by snow-covered pine trees. He sat down, and then asked me to sit
down. I hesitated, but by the utter majesty of the universe, I slipped on a
patch of ice and tumbled straight into his lap. Of course I was mortified
because all my friends called me “cow” back then, so I assumed I’d squished
him, but he just looked at me with his icicle-colored eyes and smiled. In an
effort to save the moment, I let as many muscles as I could go limp to pretend
I was relaxed (which required me to strain my left hamstring for a while to
keep myself actually up on the bench) so that I could be held.
“Would…would
you…would you want to go out with me sometime?”
Oh god oh god oh god, what is he
asking me?! A jolt of lightning pierced my lungs and the ecstatic nervousness I
held there for months paralyzed my body like I had swallowed a grenade full of
IcyHot that just burst in my belly. I stared like a laser beam at a sidewalk
block, making my intense focus on the cement exactly perpendicular to his gaze,
which was at god-why-me? In response I pretended there was no possible way I
assumed that he was asking me out. Nothing would have been worse if I responded
as though he, Matt, beautiful Matt, asked me out and I was wrong. I stammered,
oh how I stammered, “Uh, sure, y’know, Jessie has some connections at
this one club in town, um, she could probably get us in, um, yeah when are you free,
I could talk to her and see, y’know, yeah, what do think?” When I finished, it
was as if all hope of an “us” escaped out of my mouth and dissipated with my
heavy breaths in the vacuous night air. I tensed up again, knowing I used all
those “ums” and “y’knows” as a sword and shield against the beast of admitting
that Oh God There Is No Way This Is Happening Right Now And I’m Blowing It. He
gave me a confused look, then a more certain one when I think he realized what
I realized, then rose to get home. There’s no way anyone could expect me to
remember what we talked about on the way back, if anything. What I do know is
we definitely didn’t hold hands.
Of course, like all good movies
where you cry for the main character because “he got away,” the neighbor moves
away a couple weeks later thus commencing the decade of No One Will Ever Love
Me. So, like a cowardly mutt that barks and chases you until you turn around to
pet it and it runs away, I too, barked and chased after that feeling.
Throughout my adolescence, I didn’t really date, had a few flings with rules
like you see in squinty-eyed Renee Zellweger flicks. But always, in the back of
my head and in my journal I wanted love so badly even though I was thoroughly
convinced that it was impossible for someone like me.
And so, while I never thought it
would happen, I have indeed been through a few beaus since that first pining at
prepubescence and after my teen years. In my young adult love travels through
college, found that what I wanted as a kid is out there, I just had to adjust
my expectations a little: For instance, it just so happens that waterfall part
works out ok because he kisses like a drooling Rottweiler. The whirlpool is the
toilet flushing after I puked up my Flash Tacos and PBR after a horrific night
of consummating my latest four hour relationship. The sugar and dreaming are
what I lived on at home or in the dorm watching Lost marathons during my
period. Today, the stars are those glow-in-the-dark plastic stick on ones that
I stared concertedly at when I finally made it into his bed. The stars are
manufactured promises I pretend are communicating hope to me from the ceiling, plaster
and paint peeling around the corners, as I keep my face as still as I can so I
don’t ask him to be my boyfriend. Venus is still a distant planet and the moon
is still a satellite.
After a while, the dating scene in
college and my young adulthood after college just weren’t hacking it. I had
dabbled in internet dating as a teen, too, flirting in AOL chess chatrooms, initiating
with my best friend cyber sex encounters with guys that likely had no idea they
were the butt of budding sexuality snickers. Or they did. Looking back, I hope
for the former. So when I wanted to get into that scene again, I talked about
it with a friend and fellow comrade-in-arms who was on active duty in the
field. She says something along the lines of, “I’m actually on The Chicago
Reader Matches site. It’s pretty fun and seems to be working.” And by working
she meant she met a few guys in person and she wasn’t robbed or maimed. She had
fun, even! So I decided, what the hell? Let’s get some.
For the uninitiated, “internet
dating” is a term used for people who meet and chat with people on websites
that are specifically constructed for the purpose of inching, email by email,
toward real-life romantic encounters of your consensual choosing. (Please note,
as for these websites, they’re pretty much divided into the camps of
let’s-pretend-we’re-mature-here-and-say-we’re-looking-for-a-long-term-relationship
(see: eHarmony.com) and find-accessible-loveless-sex-escapades (see: okcupid.com
& the Reader Matches). Of course the real-life part is not so binary.) The
Reader Matches and Okcupid are personals websites more of the
find-accessible-loveless-sex-escapades variety (let’s use the acronym false
for the rest of our time together). That’s where I found many profiles that
were of interest to me, but Ah, these sites mimic real life insofar as that you
cannot just say that you want to false without generally coming across
as creepy, if you are male, and slutty, if you are female. As a person
concerned with the pursuit of movie love (c’est moi), I chose the false
route because it opened up the possibility of connecting with so many more
people than I encountered during my daily life.
You create an alias, or username,
and that’s what people see as your name on the website. Conventionally, you
then create a profile for yourself. That includes a picture or pictures of your
choosing and a few sentences about yourself, which is essentially a cover
letter that you’re using at an interview with thousands of people who come
across your profile and may be interested in copulating with the idea of you
that you created for them. These profiles begin with a hook, similar in
importance to the first sentence of a novel, and continue with more detailed
information. I’ll give you me. Then how about three guys: one who broke my
heart, one who broke even, and one whose heart I broke. For brevity’s and
dignity’s sake[1], I’ll
just show the first bits of these profiles.
My online presence was a little
cheesy. While my headspace is full of a hot mess of emotions and insecurities,
I could meticulously finesse online another’s perception of how totally playful
and carefree I am! LOL! Though as you can see in my personal essay, I can also
playfully slip in there that I love over-analysis, which is code for obsessing
about every facial muscle spasm. The sweet and sassy part may tip off the
reader that I’m moody as hell, the sassy part more vitriolic.
Sources:okcupid.com & chicagoreader.selectalternatives.com/gyrobase/Personals
Screenname: Aliasilicious & Jensese
Personal essay (for both): I’m a sweet and sassy kind
of lassie who loves coffee, over-analysis and quite possibly you.
Now
what stupid, stupid man wouldn’t want to date that saucy profile?
Now here are those three men whose
profiles and impacts stick out in my memory, in order of appearance:
Time:
Winter 2008-Summer 2009
Source:chicagoreader.selectalternatives.com/gyrobase/Personals
Screenname: NickBelane
Personal
essay: These profiles are bullshit,
just message me if you want to have a beer on my roof.
I really wasn’t planning on this
one. If you could believe it, I got my heart broken even though I was going in
expecting false. I couldn’t believe
it either. Thank god for internet dating, otherwise what would I have done
afterwards?! We had exchanged messages for a couple of weeks before Christmas
2008. Then we started texting. Which was exciting. We hadn’t heard each others'
voices yet, and flirtation was high. When I had to go to my mother’s for
Christmas Eve, I stayed up til 3am watching A Christmas Story over and over.
When Barack Obama was elected president, the QVC gold coin people made Obama
collectors coins BEFORE the inauguration! I couldn’t believe how funny I found
this and texted NickBelane about it. At that, he decided I was worth calling
the next day. He called to say “Hey, Sara,” and I said “Hey…” and he said,
“Merry Christmas and shit” and I said, “Uh, thanks, you too,” and he said,
“Ok…bye-bye” and hung up. My stomach exploded a little from the inside, a
little like it used to when I was young. My cheeks wouldn’t stop contracting in
joy even though it was my job to make Christmas miserable for my family.
We met for the first time a week
later. I took the #72 to his apartment. I dressed up, straight-ironed my hair
and donned an art-deco patterned shirt that hid my upper arm fat. When he let
me in, he was wearing ripped up jeans, a ripped up t-shirt and desperately
needed a haircut, and just sort of opened the door and walked straight back to
his grimy kitchen. He poured me a straight, shitty vodka. I was very tense, and
he could tell that, which come to find later, he enjoyed very much. We sat on
his ripped up couch looking at pictures from a family album he kept under a
dingy pink blanket he’d had since he was a boy. From that moment, we became
best friends for 6 months. Practically inseparable. Never agreed on anything.
He said the difference between us was that if someone dropped an orange in the
top of his head, it would come out his mouth an orange. If that same orange
were dropped in mine, a little gremlin would catch it, sniff it, conduct
non-invasive experiments on it to determine it was, yes!, indeed an orange,
then come out my mouth the orange.
He moved in with me because he was
broke and unemployed and he would have to move back to Texas if I didn’t let
him. I already knew he had another girlfriend, but I drank whiskey and smoked
out on the porch pretending it wasn’t true til he finally moved out.
Time:
Winter 2010
Source:
Okcupid.com
Screenname:
MariusLT
Personal essay:
I'm looking for a female/girl/woman/fairy princess/cyborg/other fairy
incarnations (got enough sausages around me), someone to shoot the proverbial
sh!t with and do the coffee/tea thing...perhaps even sushi, enjoy each other’s
company, laugh, get to know each other, scamming the man, and destroying the
law, ya know, the usual fun stuff.
MariusLT was a long-winded fella,
just like myself. He so readily shared everything that was on his mind and was
so willing to explore it, I got lost in his rambling as if I were the kid chosen to explore Charlie’s Chocolate Factory. He
was 1 part disturbing, 2 parts sweet and 3 parts not quite right, but I liked
it. We first met at my apartment this time. I had a new roommate after
NickBelane moved out, and we discovered through conversation that my roommate
was started dating a girl that was MariusLT’s best friends in high school…and
was already planning to come over to my apartment! It was a little less awkward
to meet MariusLT, because not only did we have these mutual friends in common
but we apparently graduated in 2008 from the same small liberal arts college.
We went out a few times. He hated
his job in finance, and I disliked mine in administration, and so we would
bitterly complain whenever we saw each other. We would bitch and moan. There’s
really only so much of that two people can do, especially when one was so disillusioned
with the imagination of the other based on the otherworldly letters we wrote
each other before we became acquainted with each others' realities.
He said he was too tired to drive to
the city and back to his home in the suburbs, but I knew we bored each other
quite a lot. We still write each other letters and rarely meet for coffee. Our
relationship works in the internet ether, but rusts too quickly to function
regularly when exposed to reality’s airs.
Time: Summer
2010
Source:
Okcupid.com
Screenname: infinitjazzkeys
Personal essay:
I'm an adjunct professor of Mathematics at [CONFIDENTIAL]. I also play jazz
piano on the side with a few small groups. Don't worry though, I'm not uptight
or your typical jazz nerd.
My first impression of
infinitjazzkeys was that he was a professor and a jazz pianist, also that he
has triple citizenship in the United States, France and England. Impressive
stuff. Given my last couple of joyrides, I wasn’t really expecting much from
this particular guy other than the soft, self-satisfying glow of having seduced
a math professor/jazz pianist/citizen of the world. He wasn’t the type to mess
around on the internet so much, but especially since it turned out the two of
us lived within blocks of one another in Edgewater. The midpoint between our
apartments was Moody’s Pub, a favorite of both of us, so we decided to meet
there. It was a weekend day in August 2010, and I arrived at the pub first.
It’s a dark wood pub with stained glass, bull skulls and ye olde gardening
tools mounted on the walls. Their patio is gray stone spotted with mature
hardwood or oak trees lined with white Christmas lights, reminiscent still of
the monastery the building used to be. The place makes me feel calm. When we
talked, I figured he was too hoity-toity for me being a triple-threat and all.
I figured I was beneath him, that he must think I was fat since he was so trim
and that he was bored of my sing-songy suburban vocal intonations that come out
from suppression when I feel nervous. But little did I know, I seduced him by
the end of the night. Not enough for him to invite me over, but enough to
invite me over in a few days.
Infinitjazzkeys’
apartment resembled NickBelane’s in the coating of grime over virtually
everything in it, but I am not one to judge, just notice. He actually similarly
offered me the shitty vodka. Within two weeks, I had reconnected with my
college boyfriend, Jonathan, whom I did not meet online. He and I met in our
library, I was the circulation desk assistant and he worked A/V. I caught
Infinitjazzkeys on google chat and told him I couldn’t see him anymore, that I
was just back together with my ex-boyfriend, and that I was sorry. He accused
me of fucking him and leaving. It stung, but isn’t that what we all do til we
don’t?
[1]
Just kidding, there’s no shame in internet dating despite
all the cultural dildo-logue that would suggest otherwise, but really, I can’t
remember the rest of their profiles anyway. They’re much too long. I liked
writers.
