Nowadays, internet dating through websites, chat programs, etc. seems relatively common. At least, relative to how it was when I first tried it out roughly ten years ago. I’ve actually had a few relationships start this way, including my current one. But as with meeting women offline, the going has been rough. Obviously, almost everyone has heard some kind of horror story, but they usually involve the men turning out to not be what they seem in real life as they are online. The same holds true for women. This is just one of those cases…..
Kids these days have it easy with the internet dating. Between digital cameras and cell phone cameras, 99.9% of all people with any kind of profile on the internet have pictures of themselves to go along with them. It’s expected. One dating site, okcupid.com, even makes a joke about this on profiles with no picture. If someone sends you a message, it will automatically show a small version of their picture along with it. If there is no picture to show, okcupid will supply a line along the lines of “Hmmm, no picture…be afraid…be very afraid.” Ten years ago, when I first tried out this newfangled online dating, this was not the case. Most profiles didn’t have pictures. It was a crapshoot. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, dates were like a box of chocolates. You never knew what you were going to get.
I’d just moved to Burnsville to go to school for radio. I didn’t know many people, and I’m generally not the most outgoing individual to begin with. It didn’t help that I was 19 and most of my classmates were at least 21. If they hung out, it was at a bar, and I was screwed. My roommates were no help, either, as they were pretty much only interested in smoking pot and the occasional Phish concert.
The first site I’d tried was blinddate.com, a sort of tech tie-in with the TV show. We happened to have a scanner at the apartment, so I could even use my school ID for a picture (school info cropped out of course). I started talking to this girl from Winona with no picture, and we seemed to be hitting it off. She described herself as having brownish blonde hair, and curves in all the right places. Nowadays, of course we all know what this means, but I didn’t at the time. I just figured she had a little meat on her, which is fine. I’m not one for the anorexic chicks anyway.
We make plans, and I drive down to meet her.
This was the first time I found out that “curves in all the right places” can be used as another way to say “morbidly obese”. And “brownish blonde hair” turned out to mean “ugly orangish dyed blonde hair with two inch brown roots”. My reaction was likely obvious by the look on my face, and we both just kind of stood there awkwardly before she decided to be the one to make an excuse for why we suddenly couldn’t do something that day. I mumbled something about calling to reschedule (which I never did), and drove back to Burnsville as fast as I could.
Stay tuned, as there are more to come.
