The other day I created a profile and completed the personality profile at eHarmony. Today, I purchased a one-month subscription.
This is something I’ve never done before, and to be perfectly honest, I’m a little scared.
Well, perhaps “scared” is a misnomer. I don’t often scare, so this would probably qualify as “Afraid out of my frickin’ mind.”
I’ve already received a few matches, including a few in Oklahoma, and I’ve begun the communication process with a few of them that seem interesting. Allow me to explain:
eHarmony.com works in quite a different way from most online match systems. First of all, you don’t get on and just search for people near you that fit different criteria. You actually take a personality quiz, in the spirit of the Meyers-Briggs, and then allow the system to find a “match” for you, someone who closely resembles your results on the personality profile. Once matches have been found, you can initiate communication with them, starting with a round of simple, multiple-choice questions, a list of “Must Haves/Can’t Stands”, a set of “directed questions”, and finally, open communication. Either one of the potential-couple-to-be can break things off at any given point, limiting the emotional, financial, and temporal investments.
Except, of course, for the $50.00 monthly fee.
I don’t really know why I signed up for this thing, other than the fact that I seem to have run out of options everywhere else. I go to the bar about once a week and hang out with friends and have a beer or two, but I never meet anyone there (nor do I think that I really could “meet” anyone there anyway). None of my friends really have the capability to play matchmaker (they either don’t know anyone single, or wouldn’t set me up with anyone they do know), and all of the girls I know can effectively be summed up with the following:
A. Out of my age range
B. Not single
C. Not within an hour’s driving distance (Alaska is so out of the question)
D. I wouldn’t date them anyway
E. All of the above.
I’m not really in a place where I can meet a whole lot of new people (an emotional place, not a physical place), and I’m not sure I’d really want to. The only reason why I do the bar scene is because it’s about the only time I get out of the house, other than for work, and I like to have a beer and hang out with friends every now and then.
I suppose the greatest impetus for all of this is the recent relationship troubles I’ve been dealing with. Instead of pass this off with a word and an upward, knowing glance, I’m going to use this space to bitch about it (why? because I can, of course).
It all started several months ago, when I became interested in a friend/co-worker of mine. I won’t mention her name, but her initials are D.H.. She’s around my age, intelligent, outgoing, and caring. Besides, she has an enormous amount of potential in the aspect of emotional and mental maturity, which is one of the major things I look for (About a year ago I had an epiphany, and I tend to see the world quite a bit differently since then. Allow me to explain this in a later post in exhaustive and droning detail). I tend to look for someone who’s on the same “wavelength” as myself, and unfortunately, people that meet this criteria are few and far between. I don’t know if this says more about the average person in the world, or about myself and my general oddness, but I’ll leave that question to the philosophers.
Anyway, back from the tangent. I had basically been up front and honest about my intentions to her. I was interested in having a romantic relationship with her, and moving away from a “just friends” status. Unfortunately, she was dealing with ex-boyfriend troubles, and didn’t feel she was at a place where a relationship could work. She asked me to wait.
I waited. She dealt with the ex’es. She dealt with family stuff. We went to a movie. I pushed away the little voice in my head that was saying “Dude! Just go find somebody else!”. I asked her again if she wanted to move beyond “just friends”. She asked me to wait.
New Year’s came around. We were supposed to be going to a party that one of her friends was hosting. The plan was to arrive around 10:00 P.M. and watch the ball drop. The plan was to have a nice, New Year’s Eve with some friends. The plan was to get a Midnight kiss, and ring in the New Year’s with someone who I was interested in.
One thing that I have to keep reminding myself is that nothing, ever, goes exactly according to plan.
She cancelled a few hours before the party. Needless to say, I wasn’t in a mood that was conducive to starting off a new year. There I was, preparing for a new year, starting off with a clean slate, and before it even gets started, smudge number one.
I went to Eskimo Joe’s, a local restuarant/beer garden/club/den of morons, and watched other celebrate the first few seconds of 2004. I watched other people have an alcohol-induced blast. I just stood there, too pissed off to really “mingle”, too detached to strike up a conversation with someone, too depressed to do more than just watch. But dammit, this year I wasn’t going to spend New Year’s Eve alone, while everybody else got their midnight kiss.
I don’t know why I was so hung up on this one little thing, but it was tradition, everybody did it, and for a change, I wanted to conform. For just a moment, I wanted something shallow and meaningless and fun, just to start a new year off with something that I hadn’t done before.
So, I waited, and watched, and did nothing. In my watching, the only thing I could find were women who already had someone, women gathered together in groups to try and stave off guys trying to get laid, and guys looking for women not gathered into groups trying to stave of guys trying to get laid.
Ping.
My radar went off. I saw a girl dancing somewhat alone. As I continued to watch, I noticed that she was dancing near one of her friends who had a guy droolingly in tow. The girl that had made my radar jump wasn’t Hot. She was beautiful. She was naturally beautiful, had a wonderful, honest smile, and overall seemed to be in a much better mood than I was. Most notably, however, she actually seemed to have something that nobody else there had (at least that I had seen). Most of the women there weren’t exactly what you’d call emotionally or intellectually mature. When you looked at them, you instantly realized that what they were went no further than the fake smile on their faces, their fake blond hair, expensive clothes, and overall “No soul here” demeanor. This girl that I had discoverd, actually seemed to have something hidden deep down inside. She actually had potential.
Don’t ask me how I know this, because I’m not sure either. But I’ve seen it before, and my accuracy, although never calculated, is pretty good.
“10 minutes!” the local town crier screamed distortedly into the microphone, to all those sober enough to understand him. The final countdown had begun.
I watched this girl for a while, trying to build up the nerve to ask her if she had someone to spend the rest of the evening with.
Just so you know, I’m not good at bearing my emotions with anyone that I don’t already know and implicity trust, so this is much easier said than done (how I can sit here and do it over the Internet to millions of anonymous readers is beyond me. Must be the coffee talking by this point).
I imagined what I’d say. I ran over a few scenarios in my head. I refined my words so that I didn’t sound like a complete loser. I nixed that plan and tried a few other scenarios.
While the gears turned in my brain, trying to decide how to the hell to approach this girl that I knew was the only person that I actually wanted to approach in that entire Godforsaken club, I had utterly failed to notice that she was now no longer in sight.
“5 minutes!”
Shimatta. I looked around, and finally found her (she was a bit on the short side), now completely unreachable, lost adrift in a roiling sea of white people attempting rhythym (and failing at it). Meanwhile, I had lost precious seconds of 2003, and was nowhere nearer my goal of not spending the first few minutes of 2004 alone in a spasming ocean of idiots.
“3 minutes!”
Hey, what happened to four? I went back over my plan. I thought out the words. I mentally put myself in her shoes and tried to decide if a weird looking stranger, dressed all in black, coming up and asking if she wanted a New Year’s kiss was going to give her a coronary or not. I thought of how fun the word “coronary” is to say. I rolled it around my tongue for a moment, letting the word drip out of my mouth. I growled at the half-drunk, other half naturally moronic guy who passed by me and almost spilled his drink on my new coat after hearing the word “coronary” randomly blurted out in a crowded bar.
“2 minutes!”
Oh yeah, reality. I thought to myself “Screw it, I’m just going to mess up what I wanted to say anyway.” By this time her and her friend and the guy she was practically having sex with on the dance floor had moved to within screaming distance. I needed to build up nerve. Her friend was saying something that I could just barely make out about how she needed to find a guy to kiss at midnight.
Oooh! Me! Pick me! Mistser Kotter!!!
“1 minute!”
Perhaps I should externalize my internal dialogue, or this is never going to happen. Her friend grabbed a random guy in passing and shoved him over to her, and said “Here, just kiss him on the cheek.”
Shit.
“30 seconds!”
The clock was ticking. My heart was pounding. The music was pounding.
And, for some mysterious, unbelievable reason, I did nothing.
“10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-Happy New Year!”
I watched her kiss this guy on the cheek. And by “kiss this guy on the cheek”, I mean go for a full, open-mouthed 3 minute make-out session in the middle of the dance floor.
Fuck. Oh, and smudge number 2.
So, I left, nonchalantly found my car, drove home, went up to my apartment, and calmly began cursing at D.H., the girl who had cancelled our plans with little advance notice at the top of my lungs.
Two minutes into my tirade, with my inebriated neighbors listening worriedly, my cell-phone rang. It was D.H.. Apparently, her evening had gone no better.
We ended up chatting, in a misery-loves-company kind a way, at IHOP for 2 hours about how sucky 2003 had been.
It wasn’t all bad. I got my midnight kiss at 2:00 A.M.
But, in the end, she asked me to wait. Fast forward a little while.
I waited some more. A couple of weeks ago, I told her that I needed closure. I needed a committment from her, or the canonnical “Let’s be friends” speech. But either way, I just needed an answer. She asked me to wait.
I waited for a few days. I gave her the ultimatum on Monday. On Thursday, the plan was to go to the club and have a fun evening hanging out with friends and listen to stupid Hip-Hop music.
I picked her up, and on our way to the Stonewall (a local tavern, specializing in insanely powerful mixed drinks and pool tables badly in need of re-felting), she told me that her friend Ahmeet was going to be there. “Unfortunately,” she said as she attached a rider to this official notice, “he gets flirty when he gets drunk.”
“Fair enough,”, I equitably replied.
We arrived at the bar, and the people we were meeting were playing pool. One of the guys broke from the herd and hugged D.H. for a moment. This moment began to last quite a bit longer than I expected, from somewhere between 30 seconds and “Do we need the Jaws of Life here?”. I could only assume that this was Ahmeet.
Smudge number 3.
No problem. I had been given the warning. I was okay with this.
We chatted for a while, D.H. had a drink or too, I watched everybody else play pool, and then we headed over to Eskimo Joe’s. Considering my track record at Joe’s, I should have told myself “This bodes not well.” Of course, the plan was to hang out, have a few drinks, and have a generally nice evening with some new friends.
One thing that I have to keep reminding myself is that nothing, ever, goes exactly according to plan.
We went on ahead of Ahmeet and his friends, and ended up getting into Joe’s without much of a wait in line. But the line behind us was growing insanely long as we waited. After we were inside, we waited about 45 minutes for everybody else to show up, just listening to the music, and myself holding D.H.’s beer.
When they finally did arrive, Ahmeet said hello to D.H.. As before, by “Hello” I mean “hug you’d need an hourglass to time”. I started to get a little cheesed off by now.
Smudge number 4.
By the time that Ahmeet was grabbing her ass and they were making out in a drunken stupor, 7 feet away from me, I was downright, grade-A, all-around pissed. This one was more than a smudge. This was a whitewash of chalk covering the board.
Ultimately, I left in a huff. I didn’t talk to her for several days. I ended up bringing this all out in the open to her, resolving nothing except damaging our friendship in the process.
So, ultimately, I decided to try different avenues. I’ve asked my friends if they know any single women interested in a real, Honest-to-God relationship. I’ve tried meeting new people at the bars.
So why is this important to me? I’ve been planning for the last several years for the future. Eventually, I want to have a family, a nice house, and actually settle down into some sort of routine life. It would be nice to have a relationship in the meantime, and actually start working towards that goal, even if what I have right now doesn’t work out.
One thing that I have to keep reminding myself is that nothing, ever, goes exactly according to plan.
So, I bit the proverbial .45 bullet, and joined an online dating service. The plan is to see who I’m matched up with, start some communication with people, and try and have an actual relationship for a change with someone who operates on the same “wavelength” as me, perhaps even towards my ultimate goal.
One thing that I have to keep reminding myself is…well, you know the rest.
I’ll let you know how it turns out.
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