Loneliness is the destiny of every man, or so the saying goes. There’s a certain amount of truth to it, but it can be applied to women, too. If you want evidence of loneliness, all you have to do is flip on the nearest computer and have a look at the internet dating sites.
I logged on a week ago after talking to an old friend of mine. Back when I was in elementary school, he was the big boy on the block. He was the first one to smoke cigarettes, to stay out late, to skip class, to beat up the neighbourhood bully. To an eight-year-old, he was a god.
That was about twenty-five years ago. Since then he’s had a wife, a divorce, and a child. While I’d been busy gallivanting around the world, he’d grown up.
I ran into him last week. He told me he met his new girlfriend on the internet. He said that the club scene was old and that he was tired of trying to meet women in bars.
So he logged on, chatted to this girl for a number of weeks, and electronically poured everything out to her: his life, his mistakes, his dreams, his break-up, his little kid. And I guess the girl liked what she heard, because he brought her over to meet mom and that’s how I met her. Turns out mom liked her very much.
A couple of days later I decided to check it out for myself. I went on Google and asked for ‘dating sites’ and I got dozens of pages of them. Some were for regular chat rooms. Some were for erotic liaisons. All of them promised love and happiness.
I dug deeper. I clicked and I clicked. I filled out a little form that asked what I looked like, how much money I made, what my favourite food was, so forth. There was a little space where I could write what I thought about myself, and there was another space where I could tell a woman what I wanted out of her. Or a man, if I was so inclined.
After filling out the form on one particular site (no fees ever!) I was allowed into the inner sanctum, where you can look at pictures and read people’s profiles. And what a lot of them there are, too. Thousands upon thousands, all on this one little free site. God knows how many sites there are, and only He knows how many people are surfing them. A hundred thousand? A million? Quite possible.
The sites are a study in human psychology. You start with pictures (you are eight times more likely to get a hit if you have a picture, the sites tell you) and you end with biographies. On the erotic sites, the photos are crude pictures of cleavage, asses, penises. The flash bulbs glare against pasty white flesh. A breast that under normal circumstances might be quite beautiful ends up looking like a plastic bag, deflated and sagging, every wrinkle exposed by a $250 camera with bad lighting.
On the erotic sites, there are seldom faces. When there are, the eyes are blacked out. Sometimes the man or woman is wearing a mask. Other times they pose themselves in front of a mirror and FLASH. You are left with a naked body from the neck down, not at all erotic. More like a cadaver that has left the slab and righted itself before the bathroom mirror.
The biographies on the erotic sites are very straightforward. 1-on-1 sex. Anal. Threesome. Bi-curious. Discreet Relationship. All you need to do is check the box that appeals to you, and you will announce to the world at large that your headless body is in the mood for this kind of kinkiness but not that, this type of loveless sex but not the other.
There are no real freaks on the erotic sites. Many of the biographies are well written. They use too much Netspeak (colons and brackets for smiley faces), but on the whole you can see that at least 50% of the people are educated to a passable degree. Another 40% write in such vague terms that you know they are shy, or afraid of giving away too much information. Perhaps they’re afraid a rapist will find their profile appealing. Maybe they’re afraid of their wife or husband stumbling across it. What a conversation that would be.
Another 10% are pure bogus. Perfect shots of breast and head, gloriously airbrushed, with biographies written by Hemingway. It is amazing how easy it is to separate the fake from the real. The fakes try too hard. Real people are so bad at exposing themselves that it is easy to see the amateur pornographer for what he or she is: an amateur.
You feel a condescending depression with each passing page of face, tit, leg, thigh, balls. It is easy to forget that these are people. They are out there somewhere, and not too far away. When you enter your zip code (for US guests) or postal code (for Canadians) the machine is more than happy to tell you how far these people are from your home. Four miles, twenty-six miles, ten miles away. Right now, as you read this, someone within twenty miles of your chair is taking a picture of their tits. They are loading it onto the internet and putting a name beside it (LickMeTonight is a creative one that I found), and they are hoping for…what?
Well, sex, of course. Any of the people that use these sites wouldn’t want us to feel sorry for them. In fact, they’d feel insulted. This is their world, their game, their subculture. So if you don’t want to stare at my balls, turn off your computer, buddy.
True enough.
On the mainstream sites, the depression deepens. These are people that are looking for an intangible. One is love. Another is companionship. More and more pages of faces and biographies. Endless chat rooms. Icons that tell you who is online right now, and who’s been online in the last hour, four days, two months. Everything is monitored before your very eyes. Been hoping that Stella456 was going to write you? Well, she was online 20 minutes ago but logged off without a word, so I guess you’re out of luck.
You can send emails, flirtatious notes, winks, flowers. You can invite a certain someone to instant message with you. You can send ecards that ask for a reply, or that tell someone they look hot. It is a virtual high school cafeteria, with notes being passed between people ranging in ages 18 to 75.
The honesty is astounding. You can spot a fake a mile away and disregard them, because the real people tell such real stories that it can make you sick if you look at too many of them. The amount of divorced people using the sites is in the stratosphere. The number of literal bastards in the country is laid out before you, as the 20-year-old women finally get around to telling you that they have children. But it is nice to know that all of these children are loved: every single mother says that the child is the most important thing in their life. Perhaps it is. It’s pleasant to think so.
If you stay online long enough, you’ll get your share of winks, flowers, flirt notes, and emails. A new member in the virtual dating world is like the new girl at the dance: all eyes are on her. Chum in the water.
I received 5 notes in the first two days. A 45 year-old from Idaho. A 20-year-old from Scotland. A 35-year-old from Hamilton. On and on. Five days later, more notes, more flowers, from all over the world and from all ages. Some of their biographies are genuine success stories. Others are hard luck cases. The older women write and say something to the effect of, “You’re too young for me, but I just thought I’d say hi.” The 18-year-olds invariably write something like, “I like tall guys with trucks.”
The single common denominator between the women is the word “funny.” From divorced middle-aged matrons, to teens who don’t know how to kiss yet. They all want a man to be funny. They all say they love to laugh.
For the guys’ part, the single common denominator in their biographies is that they all seem to have a “sense of humour.” There are an awful lot of stand-up comedians on the internet today. Almost to a man, they think they’re great at drawing yucks from a girl. This is odd, because virtually none of their biographies are funny. They’re sweet, inspiring, sometimes stupid and ill-written, but not humorous.
There’s a spot on these sites where you can write down what you learned from your last relationship. The men have all kinds of reasons, but for the women, there is usually this one: “Not to settle.”
A lot of women think they cashed in their chips too early the last time around, and are now looking for Plato’s perfect apple. The variety of faces and names on the internet lead them to believe that it is out there, this Perfect Relationship. They don’t seem to realize an ironic truth: it’s almost guaranteed that they believed their last relationship was perfect, too. Until it wasn’t.
So the dating sites provide a relationship merry-go-round, where you can trade in and trade up, constantly looking for something that will never happen, but loving the ride even if that something doesn’t show up. And if it did, would you know it when you saw it? Would you settle?
The modern era of instant gratification has found a new feel-good paradox: loneliness with company.
