A literary affair: Writing & online dating

When you suddenly find yourself single and in your mid-thirties, you realise your general dating criteria has become elaborately complex. Rewind twenty years and my criteria was thus:-

1) Handsome

When you’re sixteen, the fact that Steve has a pretty face AND drives around in a lowered mark three Ford Escort with blacked out windows and under-car neon lighting is quite frankly, all you’ve ever dreamed of.

Then you do life. That first long term boyfriend comes along, who couldn’t be more unsuited to you, only YOU don’t really exist yet. You’re basically a blob of unformed plasticine that has yet to have the fucking shit beaten out of it. After several years of playing ‘grown up’ you actually start to take shape, and come to the realisation that the guy you call your boyfriend is in fact, a massive twerp. And so it goes on. You have more unsuitable boyfriends, some lovely ones, and you learn stuff from them. Some of those things are really good, and others help you to understand what to avoid. You get jobs and meet people, and leave jobs and travel. Get drunk and cry, laugh and get high. Party and read, listen to music and bleed. Develop opinions and passions and hobbies and sometimes make a complete tit out of yourself and then one day… you’re thirty-fucking-six, and you’ve developed some kind of wisdom.

So you revisit your dating criteria, and realise you’ve added a couple more items since 1996. We’ll take a quick look at the first twenty of the seventy-three I’ve defined so far:-

• Intelligence
• Wit
• Compassion
• Spelling, spelling is important
• Honesty
• Emotional stability
• Basic punctuation. I love a man that knows how to use a comma, an apostrophe and a full stop
• Romantic
• Can engage and entertain me through texts and messages
• Loves music
• Has a reasonable job and is able to maintain independence
• Likes adventure, travel and spontaneity
• Reads shit (as in good shit, and definitely NOT The Sun newspaper)
• Political awareness
• Has some idea about what’s going on in the world
• A little rebellious
• Doesn’t take themselves too seriously
• Imaginative
• Thoughtful
• Passionate. In all senses of the word

This is surely not an unreasonable list? Is it? At this point I realise how important the written language is to me. In fact, it’s made the 1996 list redundant and ‘Handsome’ has been dropped! Not that I am in any way a great writer, far from it, I make lots of mistakes, but I do have a love, an obsession, an excitable desire… for beautiful words and creatively crafted sentences.

So, how to find such a human. This leads me on to the logic of online dating.

What are the chances of the right person, with similar interests, being in the same town, in the same bar, on the same night, at the same time as you — and then striking up a conversation? The probability, I believe is in the region of one hundred and forty-seven billion to one. I’m looking at this from a scientific perspective. If I limit romantic relationships to meeting someone in a bar, on any given night, the options are extremely limited. You might meet someone, think they’re okay, and then it takes three months of dating for you to realise they’re a complete twat. On the other hand, you can join a dating website, answer specifics about what things are important to you (politically, socially, romantically, morally), and find out your compatibility with others. The pool of opportunity then increases from the four lads down the pub, to hundreds of potential suitors.

You get to read their resume a.k.a. profile, and see if they can string a sentence together. If they pass that initial stage, you move on to the written interview; messaging, email, texts and the like. If they can engage you in written form, they progress to the telephone interview (to make sure they don’t have a voice like Joe Pasquale, or an undesirable accent for which I’ll be deliberately non-specific). And should they pass all of those stages, you advance to the face-to-face interview. The Date. Now that amount of data would take months to accumulate just by dating the lad from the local pub. Hence, I advocate this method highly!

It comes with a price. Of course. Not only the subscription fee for a half decent site that uses clever algorithms to ensure suitability, but the painful process of sieving through and being subjected to messages from some (by some, I mean a LOT of), let’s call them… exceptional people.

So I’ve joined the world of online dating. Here are some of my reasons for not responding to messages so far:-

• His name is actually Fanny.
• He smokes.
• He’s wearing a Tetris T-shirt.
• He used lower case on multiple occasions where upper case was entirely necessary.
• He’s up a tree. In his profile picture. Up an actual tree.
• ‘Nice rack.Lol’ — Did you ACTUALLY just send that to me?!
• ‘I like your profile.Fancy getting a coffee one day?Msg me back’ — Listen, Darrell, I don’t care how handsome you are, if you can’t be arsed putting a space between a full stop and your next sentence…
• He’s holding a fish.
• ‘hey babe your gawjus you wanna go 4a drink sumtime?’ — Where do I even start with this? No.
• He’s cuddling a teddy bear. A grown man. A fucking teddy bear. And that’s the picture he’s chosen to promote himself with.
• He used a little ‘i’ instead of a big ‘I’. I’m not sure any relationship would be sustainable.
• There’s a photo of him in a ‘wacky’ hat to show he has a crazy side.
• He’s swimming with captive dolphins. He’s kissing one, in fact. Again, this is his main profile picture.
• He plays golf. I think that puts me off. People who play golf.
• Oh god, it’s fucking Steve. I wonder if he still has the mark three Escort?!

I get that I sound picky. But, I think I’ve earned the right to be, given the trauma I’ve been through over the years of dating. I remember I once ignored the fact that a guy didn’t put a gap between a full stop and his next sentence and you know what happened? He turned out to be a mental, and on the first (and last) date in a bar, I was so alarmed by his behaviour, I had to pretend my phone was ringing, took the call outside, and then legged it down the street to a taxi rank where there were no sodding taxis waiting. I ended up having to hide between two wheelie bins for twenty minutes until one turned up. This danger is real. And I shan’t be caught out again.

There’s a reason words and dating go hand in hand, for me. As Albert Einstein famously said:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

I’m in love with words, they are part of my blood, and without them I wither and die. So when people can use them to eloquently describe the magic of their imagination, my world lights up with colour. I don’t tend to do small talk unless I absolutely have to, but get me talking about space, the stars, aliens, spirituality, energy, memories, travel, music, books, friends, fears, darkness and dreams — and the excitement, emotion, words and passion will ignite. You could drive a Ferrari and own the Bahamas but if you can’t engage me in the beauty of language, then love will never blossom.

And so thank you, Steve, for dating me as a sixteen year old blob of plasticine, and for starting me on my journey to exactly where I am today. Here is exactly where I want to be, knowing as I do now, that romance and words are the most exciting, most magical and most alluring of unions. To the lovers and the words, and the lovers of words: keep loving, keep writing.

And to anyone embarking upon online dating, I’d like to offer you one piece of advice:-

Beware the non-punctuator. Stay safe.

Anna x

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Originally published at blog.theprose.com on February 13, 2016.