On Online Dating

Depending on who you talk to, online dating is either the iPod of the dating world, or its ill-fated beta machine.

One camp will insist that they have heard a dozen success stories. These success stories invariably involve someone who knows someone whose coworker was dating unsuccessfully for years and was about to resign themselves to a fate as an unmarried, Eddie Bauer sweater-wearing ambassador of cat ownership, when all of a sudden our late-thirites heroine meets her soul mate online; a handsome, gentle potash farmer from Montana who writes poetry and who then flies her out to meet him and takes her in a canoe out on a lake full of swans during a rainstorm, or some such. Inevitably these stories also end in "...and then six months later they were married and trying for a baby!" which, I suppose, lends credibility to the whole deal. Institutional sanction? Check. Procreation of species? Check. Must be true love.

The other camp is wildly critical of the whole idea. Their stories, by contrast, invariably involve middle-aged ex-cons perpetrating themselves as upstanding professionals in order to dupe hopeful legions of love seekers down to their basement dungeons, where they manipulate them into some bizarre form of sexual slavery and then dissolve them in lyme in their deep freeze.

Rationality would suggest that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I've been on dates with people I've met through normal, real life channels where, by the end, I wouldn't have been too surprised if there weren't pieces of his last date still hanging around in the freezer. So perhaps it's unfair to blame the internet.

But it's very easy to understand the appeal. The internet marches forward like a secular version of the Roman Catholic empire, mercilessly sucking up entire industries in its wake. News, shopping, music, banking...when was the last time you went into a bank to talk to an actual teller? Tellers used to be power-mad gatekeepers who could exude chilly authority right through their synthetic blazers if you stepped too far outside of the little velvet rope lineup labrynth. (Now they wear lululumon pants with 10K charity run t-shirts and shout "I can help you here!" the minute you walk in the door. How the mighty have fallen.

So it was no wonder that dating would eventually become another industry to find considerable efficiencies on the world wide web. After all, you can cruise through pages of prospective partners, evaluate from a distance, and send a casual email - all without risk (basement dungeon notwithstanding) and with about the same amount of effort that it takes to pay your cable bill. However, a little effort might not be such a bad thing when the ultimate goal is finding someone you wish to spend the rest of your life with, no? Nature makes us compete for mates for a reason - survival of the species.

(Don't believe me? Watch the next time a pretty girl walks up to the bar to get a drink when two guys are standing there. Once they notice her in the presence of another male, both men will subconsciously start trying to direct attention either to their wallets or their crotch. It's like Wild Kingdom with cocktails.)

So competition, in some ways, is a good thing. In the absence of competition, we have...well, communism. And believe me, folks, you don't want dating to become communist.

After all, those olive green uniforms are so damn drab.

For my friend O, who has eternal optimism, and who to date has never yet been lured to a basement dungeon.