or basically our life, I did not “date” within the conventional sense. I’m able to count on one hand the number of times I went out to dinner having a near-stranger and suffered through the usual litany of “what do you do?”, “where are you from?”, “what flavor of toothpaste do you like best?” get-to-know-you questions before arriving at the awkward kiss or no kiss part of the evening and retreating into my visit watch old instances of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” to distract myself from the anxiety (what, is that not anything?). Most of the time I’d simply meet people “naturally” while out and about, through friends, or because of work. Which would invariably lead to a drink or 2 or 3, which often led to a one-night stand that does not infrequently evolved into a many-night-stand that then became a relationship.
I’d like to think that now that I’m kind of a grownup, I’ve moved on from these often judgment-impaired, alcohol-abetted mating rituals, however the truth is that my entire life circumstances have changed significantly and pretty much demanded that I adopt a brand new methodology.
Several months ago, I moved from my urban home base to some tiny (TINY, like – under 800 people tiny) town in rural Colonial for income both incredibly satisfying and intensely demanding of time. Said locality also bears the brunt of routinely long, harsh winters which adds further impediments to an already rather isolated/isolating existence. In sum, my dating life is, shall we say, substantially less colorful than it was when I was living and working in a population-dense city high were bars and music venues and cafes and sexed up individuals on virtually every corner.
So I did what any self-respecting Millennial would do. I took it to the web. I’d had little use for online dating within my previous life. I’d dabbled obviously, but didn’t have much luck meeting worthwhile candidates, and also the contrivances from the dates always felt inherently forced and unsexy in my experience. However that I found myself encountering less than a dozen people per week and quietly wondering if the snow plow dude was cute or maybe I had been using a deprivation-based hallucination, it was time to become listed on the masses of lovelorn technophiles.
Choosing the right platform by which to cast my romantical net was key. After a short flirtation having a farmer-centric dating site (so. many. old. rednecks.) and what I figured may well be a charmingly throwback-y stab at an actual in-print classifieds ad within an alt weekly, I had to consider my audience. Using tech-savviness as a filter seemed a good bet not less than narrowing the swimming pool to individuals within my age group and socio-cultural bracket. So Tinder it had been.
Because I live literally 30 miles in the nearest watering hole, I wasn’t intending to use Tinder in the manner it’s made to be utilized – that’s, as a casual hook-up app. I believed it would let me sharpen on geographic proximity as well as save me the bother of making an annoyingly in depth profile a la OKCupid.
Most of my encounters with chaps on Tinder didn’t make it much past a handful of exchanges before they discovered just how in the center of nowhere I lived. Purports to encounter me usually began and ended with invitations that i can drive around an hour and a half to hang by helping cover their them. There were a few in-person meet ups that had seemed promising on paper but lacked chemistry IRL. Its keep was Chris. Cute, tall, dark-haired, tattooed, and evidently very tight together with his adorable dog. We started chatting and I was used despite several key red flags: he was seven years younger than me and confessed to having a Dungeons and Dragons habit – neither which are dealbreakers by itself but each of which were traits shared by my most recent ex. I suppose I have a type? To include insult to injury, he informed me he would be a musician. In a ska band. Um, 1995 called, it wants its already repurposed musical trend back. FML.
And yet despite myself I found him compelling. He was into food and film and poetry, and his sense of humor – and more to the stage, his appreciation of MY spontaneity – was extra refreshing after a slew of unfunny dudes who didn’t dig my knock-knock and that’s-what-she-said jokes. After communicating via Tinder and text for a solid week and making tentative intends to get together (I’d visit him, as he did not have a car – another warning sign?), he called me one evening for any real-time, virtual pre-date phone-date date. Datedatedate. Date.
His voice sounded gravelly and oddly disinterested. Small talk and pleasantries were dispensed with quickly. Sure, the majority of the basics had been covered in our textual exchanges, but when less than three minutes in to the conversation he started holding forth on how as a comedian (news to me, I figured you had been a chef?) he is a real PERFORMER and it’s really vital that you get up on stage and say regardless of the fuck you would like “even when people think it’s misogynist” I started quietly panicking.
The conversation veered haphazardly towards a misunderstanding which had occurred between us previously, after i invited him as much as where I lived to satisfy me and he said that he didn’t have an automobile and “it was an excessive amount of a problem.” I had interpreted incorrectly that he was referring to making the trek to see me as a pain, when in fact he was talking about car ownership, and expressed that I had been a bit shocked before he cleared it up apologetically. He ribbed me in my misapprehension so that as I had been tripping over myself to describe, he interrupted with, “Just stop as being a bitch.”
Stunned, I went silent for any half another before making a tale that he should a minimum of wait until the 2nd date to begin calling me a bitch. Was I being too uptight? Was this how ‘the kids’ flirted these days?
Without missing a beat he returned to his diatribe on standup comedy and just how he enjoyed injecting provocative language into his sets – words like n***er and cunt and spic – as a means of inverting their ability. This I simply could not stomach. “Oh, wow, says the WHITE GUY? How edgy individuals,” I finally snorted. I could sense some back-assward faux-intellectual debate brewing and steeled myself for a brawl as he slurred a thing also it dawned on me: Oh my god, this idiot is shit-faced.
“Are you drunk, dude?” I asked
“Of course!” he replied, in his irresistibly provocative [read: turd-like] baritone.
“OK, I don’t feel like finding yourself in this conversation anymore,” I said and stuck.
Dude called once, then twice. Then your texts started fast and furious. “I was just kidding!” “You seem like a nice girl.” “I’m sorry.” It had been such as the seven stages of grief in a 30 second text barrage. I just replied with “Do not call me a bitch. Ever. You don’t know me good enough to kid beside me this way. And if you did you’d know I do not find being called a bitch funny.”
Luckily, after that they got the hint and stopped the text assault. But the experience left me gobsmacked and shellshocked by the strange casualness with which people supposedly become familiar with each other and communicate via these ever stranger social platforms. I guess it doesn’t matter how we met, Chris and that i will not have made for compatible partners in the long run, since i don’t tend to like alcoholic misogynists – a minimum of not anymore. That’s one dating habit I’m happy to say I have abandoned as I’ve evolved into a quasi-grownup. Maybe an early on form of me would have beat myself up just a little for being uptight about a word that really shouldn’t be an issue. But present day me has started to believe her instincts and is slowly shedding our desire to apologize on their behalf. Present day me will not tolerate being known as a bitch by anyone, unless the word is preceded by “bad-ass” and delivered having a look of bewildered awe.
I can’t state that I’ve quit totally on Tinder, or on giving dudes who a small sector of me knows are most likely not ideal partners (terrible spellers and 25-year-olds and yoga enthusiasts oh my) an opportunity to prove my instincts wrong. But only at that rate I’ll probably exhaust the swimming pool of eligible bachelors in a 90-mile radius in another six months, and by then I’ll have my vetting system down to a science.
Here’s towards the future. Bitches.