Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 2)

He answered immediately, pleased I'd gotten his handle's reference. And we were off. First a flurry of on-site e-mails, then the name disclosure and the switch to regular e-mail. In a few days' time, we were sharing our lives. Nick did well doing good, designing housing for the poor; he was a red-diaper baby who'd lived in New York all his life. He told me the exact bohemian history I wanted to know. He steered me to E. B. White's "This Is New York," a work whose wisdom and beauty attached to him in my mind. I told him my new-in-town trepidations: Smart people took fashion seriously. Writers slandered and gossiped instead of discussing Craft. Donald Trump was a folk hero. I e-screamed, "ME TOO!" when he shared his loathing of the city's eponymous anthem to crawling up the backs of one's fellow man, "King of the hill, top of the heap." Nick validated my doubts about the city, but told me I'd still grow to love it. Just what I wanted to hear.

Soon Nick and I were e-mailing ten to fifteen times a day. I guess the homeless were on their own those days; I know my work wasn't getting done. I'd try to log off but couldn't help peeking one last time for his name in my mailbox. He Googled me and read my columns, then e-mailed them to his friends and told me their compliments along with his. We typed long quotes out of favorite books and sent mini-essays about beloved movies and music. We agreed on politics and told self-flattering stories about our families and past relationships and kept jokes running over days. He rhapsodized about the beauty of my picture, not overtly sexual, but romantic. Drawn-out flirtation like this was a new treat: I generally would have slept with someone I liked this much by now.

Perhaps it felt so close because I "talked" to Nick from the room where nobody had ever been except the one-night stands and my cat Spud, confined inside for the first time in his fourteen years. I typed all my parental guilt to Nick, the first New Yorker I'd come out to as an overdevoted (not crazy!) cat lady. Was I not in effect a jailer, I agonized, knowing how happy Spud had been roaming the big yards of DC? Nick assured me I was anthropomorphizing and that retirement in a Brooklyn apartment was the best and healthiest life a cat could have. More of what I wanted to hear. As Nick and I shared more and more affectionate dailiness and art-discussion loftiness, he seeped into the room, settling among Spud and the photos and paintings and taped-up quotes, the stuff too precious to sell at my yard sale.

After two weeks of virtual woo, we decided to meet. He picked a bar on the edge of Chinatown. I washed my hair and got dressed, took the subway to Soho, and walked south on Hester Street, inhaling the world after too long at the computer. The city was as erotically charged as ever, but softer now that I shared it with Nick. The fire escapes looked to me like black lace draped down the brick walls; the cobblestones, lumpy quilts thrown across the narrow streets. Nick's wit and compliments and wise observations played back in my head like music. I forgot that people on the street could see me beaming till their smiles reflected mine. We weren't eight million lone voyeurs anymore; we were all costars in a romantic comedy.

I reached the cross street, started checking addresses, and spotted a man leaning near a door. My breathing raced alongside my thoughts as I drew closer: "That's got to be him. I hope I'm not late. No way he's 5'11". I should have worn flats. He's not - well, I probably don't look as good as my picture either, though my picture's not as blurry as his. Would I look twice at a stranger this short and kind of odd-looking? If I liked his personality, yes, I would. Anyway, it's not a stranger, it's Nick." I straightened my skirt, smiled, and sauntered up to him singing: "Mystery date. Are you ready for your mystery date?"

The man who looked like a plainer version of Nick made a face that wasn't a smile. Uh-oh. I thought the singing was cute, but maybe too show-offy. "You're way too tall," he blurted.

I kept my smile propped up while my brain reeled: "What does that mean? It's bad, right? Not 'too ugly' or 'too fat,' but if it starts with 'too,' it's negative. After all the eloquent, gracious words he's typed, he opens negative? What's going on? And wait a minute, why's he's criticizing me, the one who's generously overlooking his misrepresentations of height and cuteness?"

I kept smiling and pointed vaguely at my boot heels. Then I struggled on and said it was great to, uh, meet him, if that was the right word after all, you know, all the e-mailing. I couldn't help noticing I was doing all the work. We went inside and sat on uncomfortably high, narrow bar stools; I hunched to look shorter. We exchanged some more close-lipped smiles and nods, ordered our wine, and then he turned and asked in a snide tone, "So how was your day, dear?"

What the hell did that mean? Was it a joke about our faux familiarity online? Some sort of crack about us being old and never married? Did he simply hate the way I looked and everything about me and want me to leave? I gulped down my wine, moving to an impromptu Plan B. While I'd been primping for Nick, I'd decided to slowly nurse one drink during the date. I was intimidated by his written intelligence and wanted to keep up. I didn't want to sacrifice thought processes to obliterate my fear and I certainly didn't imagine having the third "what the hell, let's make out in the bar" glass of wine with this gentle Cyrano.

But my thoughtful swain seemed an aggressive boor so far, more to be put than kept up with. He gulped his wine too, and we lunged in tandem for refills.

"What are you thinking?" is not a question that ever gets asked online. The correspondent is the e-mail is the thoughts that exist for you, the recipient, alone. That's all there is to him. I glanced unhappily at the stranger next to me and wondered where it all had gone - all our recognitions, coincidences, compliments, shared guilty pleasures, "oh my God me toos." Our relationship had been the realest thing in my life for two weeks. Now it was dissolving as fast as a dream you try to preserve upon waking, squeezing your eyes against your real life pouring in.

But our correspondence wasn't a dream. It was tangible and retrievable. Stored on two computers. More solid than speech and gestures and facial expressions and body language, in which I felt completely illiterate at the moment. Nick, what are you thinking? Our clear and well-chosen typed words were a truer expression of us than this inarticulate, hostile flailing in a smoky bar - weren't they? I gulped my wine miserably. This was the kind of ontological conundrum Nick and I might have tackled together in e-mail. We'd hit no obstacles in our perfect communication until we came to this accursed bar.

And I'd been the one to push for meeting. "Everyone who's e-dated tells me the same thing: don't dally online. Get to the F2F - face to face," I'd said on the phone - a conduit that wasn't as good as e-mail for us, but still immeasurably better than the corporeal fiasco in Chinatown. "Everyone says the initial meeting is weird if you wait too long."

"Maybe they didn't wait long enough," Nick had protested, his voice rising wildly. "Maybe they should have e-mailed for a year. Maybe what we need is a return to courtly love."

© 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.