Prologue

I Love You, Let's Meet; Adventures in Online Dating
by Virginia Vitzthum

In this savvy guide to a fascinating new world, former sex columnist Virginia Vitzthum goes underground in the online world to navigate the meanings and mores of sex and love on the web. Using interviews, anecdotes, and her own experience with dating online, Vitzthum builds an animated and irreverent narrative about modern intimacy.

How does the path of a relationship change when it starts with a profile? What do we reveal about ourselves - our personal lives and our private preferences - when we look for love online? Who are the people who actually manage to find happy relationships by trolling the web? Success stories, sociopaths, and fearing the F2F meeting: Vitzthum is an entertaining decoder of online culture, under all of which lies the question - what does the internet do to human relationships? A compassionate voyeur, Vitzthum approaches her fellow online daters with an open curiosity that makes her the perfect guide.

A girl never forgets her first e-courtship. Mine fell in the false-alarm year of Y2K, six months after I moved up from Washington, DC, to New York City.

Some folks back in DC spoke enviously of my chance to "become whatever you want," which didn't resonate. I was thirty-eight and basically liked who I was; it was my surroundings I wanted to change, not me. Yet in New York I did self-upgrade in ways I hadn't planned. I rode my bike on busy streets. I pitched stories to magazines I admired. I openly stared at the beautiful young men who congregate here like pigeons and taxis. Doing these things, on top of selling most of my stuff and moving into a railroad flat in Brooklyn with a very strange stranger, made me a braver person.

Reinvention didn't have to spring from self-loathing or secrecy, it seemed. It really could be organic, a form of becoming. And boldness was rewarded. Sometimes one of the beautiful men stared back, and looks sometimes led to conversation or dancing and then to kissing in a cab hurtling toward my place or his. I'd learn the gentleman's last name in the morning when we politely traded business cards, a Kabuki ritual of parting rarely followed by a phone call.

All this cosmopolitan action was thrilling and flattering and I did mean it when I e-mailed my friends back home that "you don't need a boyfriend here, you can date New York." (I was embarrassed when Sex and the City later built an episode around the same line.) And I was also forming routines and routes and the buds of friendships. The real-life stuff joined or displaced images from books and movies and black-and-white photos, and the city started to become home.

But I was alone almost all the time. I felt more like a movie camera than a person, especially with my Walkman on. When the music lined up serendipitously with street life - say, a wrinkled beggar trudging through the subway car as Skip James or Robert Johnson moaned in my ear - I could briefly merge our movies by giving him a dollar, even pushing the headphones off to hear him out. But it was still two movies. My one-night stands and my professional "networking" card exchanges (which also generally came to naught) were just slightly longer movies, gracefully performed, polite, then over. I prided myself on not being in the suburbs watching TV, but sometimes I felt equally spectatorial. I just walked more.

So I went online to find a boyfriend. I clicked into the personals from the margins of Salon.com, where I wrote a column. I figured I'd throw my dating dollar toward my struggling employer, which was starting to show up on Fuckedcompany.com as the Internet bubble began to deflate. (Salon, still going, has proved itself the Rasputin of Web sites.) Back in 2000, people still lied about online dating, but I didn't have anyone to lie to. And it didn't seem humiliating anyway; it seemed more like another bold adventure.

I searched first, checking little boxes to build my parameters: nonsmoking, age thirty-five to forty-five males over 5'10" within ten miles of my zip code. I chose Any for race, religion, eye color, and the rest, clicked on Search, and reeled before the instant man-bounty. Hundreds of them, stacked ten to a page as if in an apartment building. The pictures to the left of the headlines were little windows opening into each story. Either a witty headline or an attractive picture lured me in, and I found hordes of funny, creative, attractive, thinking, evolving men.

I'd guessed this demographic would be more populous in New York, but I'd never seen them gathered so efficiently. I'd certainly been in no room, building, or even block of the city with so many intriguing eligibles. It did seem absurd to have to computer-date in the most bachelor-dense city in the land, but here was a promising new neighborhood of Sex City, a better way to bring the relationship seekers together. You could check Play or Serious Relationship, and most checked the latter. The Salon personals seemed a not-unreasonable place to find a partner for the second half of life.

Making the profile was like a cross between going on a first date and writing a personal essay - and more fun than either. I quantified recent, middle-aged shifts in my mate priorities: warm over cool, soft over sharp, humble over certain. Figuring out how to scan and e-mail a photo boosted my pride in my technical competence. Crafting an adorable written me while sitting at my computer in sweatpants and dirty hair was a uniquely relaxed way to date. I didn't know yet that the paradoxical self-description is the clichè of online dating, so under Why You Should Get to Know Me, I put independent yet loving, sincere yet funny/ironic, tomboy yet sexy, and I made bettyveronica my handle. Making a big deal of my contradictions felt forthright, as if I were also admitting to my less attractive loner dyads: impatient yet tenacious, judgmental yet acceptance-preaching, critical and thin-skinned. I put my real age and my weight on a good day.

Glass wrote me after I'd been on a week or so, opening with Sorry I haven't written earlier, but I wanted to give you enough time to fool around with the other guys around here, 'cause I figure if we end up liking each other (and I'm hard pressed to see how we're going to avoid it), I don't want you wondering forever, "What would it have been like with that cute guy from the Netherlands who had that featured ad, or that half-naked Calvin Klein pinup boy?" No, better to get it out of your system now. I clicked onto his profile: he hadn't showed up in my search because his ad was hidden from all except those he contacted. He had big, dark, kind eyes, and his three photos included an older one featuring him with long hair. He seemed like what we called a progressive back in DC, an earnest sort I was having trouble finding in New York. For the "celebrity he resembled most" he put "the Holy Ghost" - check. Guys who list actual look-alikes, usually actors, come off vain and deluded, plus I'm a sucker for a blasphemer. He listed his occupation as "do-gooder" - check, social conscience and deflation of self-righteousness. Everything he wrote was witty and smart, subtle, layered, and decent. He lived in the East Village, my favorite neighborhood and only six subway stops away. It was all there.

I labored happily for a half hour over my three-sentence response. I asked if his handle meant he chomped shards like some carnival freak or if he was the eighth sibling in Salinger's family of geniuses. I also said I'd had trouble finding left-wingers in New York. I honed and honed and lobbed back my reply.

© 2007 by Virginia Vitzthum

About the Author

Virginia Vitzthum is a journalist and former sex columnist for Salon.com. She has written for the Village Voice, Elle, Ms., Time Out, and many other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.