I meet them one by one, the bachelors. I ask them to meet me at a nearby cafe. I come early, seat myself at a particular table by the door and I wait.
I always wish that we could delay the speaking part, just for a little while. I’d like it if we were, for example, separated by a thick pane of glass so we could spend at least a few moments just observing each other. Too often it happens that we go slamming straight into the coffee-and-talking part of the date. We introduce ourselves hastily and then we’re off. The question-and-answer session begins and I can’t get enough of an animal sense of him.
Even through the rush of talk, though, I sometimes manage to find some stillness between us. While he speaks, I look. I try to sense if there’s a sparking of interest, of mutual comedy. The eyes have it, both the courage to move outwards towards me and an invitation to come in. I look for a hint of an opening.
It all starts with the machine, of course. The OKCupid machine is the great facilitator here and almost nothing in my love life seems to happen without it. I love the machine, and I hate it. There are other machines, but I’ve chosen this one, mainly because it’s free.
The machine has its demands. Above all, what it wants is for you to say who you are. So you start by answering its questions. You have to come up with the words to say something about, at least, who you wish you were. You have to find photos, and let them show something of what you are. Only when you’ve done this work of self-identification can the machine do its part to find you someone, or a whole raft of possible someones.
I’m used to it now, this process of saying who I am in order to receive invitations. Every day I get invitations from both men and the machine. It’s the machine who points me out to the men and points out possible men for me. Every day I’m presented with photos along with compatibility percentages assigned by the server. The men send text messages: “Hello there” or “I saw you on here, and even if am blind, I could still see within my heart that you are beautiful.” So many men! It’s like, raining them. Some of the photos are out of focus or too dark or even empty of a human. There are photos in which the camera is so zoomed up that you only see a small portion of a face, eyes-nose-mouth. There are photos of men on bikes, men holding up fish, men in hats, men with a gleam in their eye and tattoos on their arms, men with long hair, frowning men. Men with guitars, men in the midst of sporting activities. Men with photos of their beautiful daughters, like expressions of the gene pool on offer.
•
Okay, Cupid, I know you know a few things about love. The magic of your proprietary algorithms has secured me a number of dates, mostly one-off coffee dates with guys that haven’t turned out to be too interesting. Still, most of them, save the first, are single and in my desired age range. Just bringing me into contact with such Mr. Vaguely Possibles is something of a miracle, so I’m indebted to you.
See, I live in a young neighborhood among svelte and tattooed hipsters, eyes on their phones. I’m 53. I haven’t noticed too many guys my age here, save for a few visiting dads.
Okay, I admit that the hipster millennials, they’re not all svelte, but even the pudgy ones are cute in their young skins. I watch them go here and there, drinking coffee, holding meetings on Skype. They don’t look unhappy. They look preoccupied. They’re having babies, they’re eating bread, things I can’t do any more. But, like me they’re thinking about the future and worrying about it and spending too much time on OKCupid.
It was my 29-year-old neighbor who put me on the site this time. She’s out all the time with different guys. I hear her going in and out in her high, high heels. She’s attractive, a redhead, and I’m sure she pretty much gets her pick. She tells me that eventually she plans to settle down, but I see how much she likes the OKCupid thing — the flirtatious text-banter, the clicking and swiping, the vetting of profiles by friends, the refusals, the hook-ups, the tentative second dates. I can tell she finds it an exhilarating game and I can see why. It’s a whole busy, bustling lifestyle. It’s not conducive to breeding, but it’s fun. She’s having fun, though the fact that she’d eventually like to have a husband and a baby nags at her, sometimes causing her to refer to herself as a dating addict.
I don’t really crave fun, though some of the guys I meet are having an intense middle-aged fun period. Maybe a crisis, maybe not. They say they were married to the wrong person and now that their kids are gone, they want to try to be who they were really meant to be. Or they say they just want to recapture the fun they had before they settled down. This type isn’t looking to settle down again, at least not right away. For now, they want dates, dates that are fun with a parade of different women. After a lifetime of marriage, they are looking for a feeling of abundance.
I have ambivalent feelings about all this. When I was younger, I hardly came across this type who wanted one girl after another. I was a feminist, and even though it was one of the things we were taught not to like about men, I didn’t come across too many real-world examples until now, when my estrogen supplies are running short and my hair is edging towards gray. Strangely, the men suddenly seem more physically insistent.
For example, just before I did the OKCupid thing, I went out a few times with a professor who was ten years older than me. We had so much in common that I felt like it must be going somewhere. It felt familiar, like we were treading a path I understood. But then I told him I wanted to wait a bit to have sex, at least for a few dates so I could get to know him first. No go. He had a goal, which was to revive the great success he’d had with women before he was married. He was very serious as he told me how sought after he had been when he was in his 20s and 30s.
I listened to him, thinking what a braggart he was. However, he was a great kisser, I’ll give him that. Just after I told him I’d like to wait, he deliberately got me going in my own living room. He went at the kissing like he was administering a drug. This was kissing as a gateway drug to sex. So while he was kissing me, I was feeling turned on but I was also annoyed, thinking about how he was thinking how, if he got past a certain resistance level, I would stop being so tentative and reasonable. Every so often he would leave off kissing and lean back slightly to observe my reactions like I was his victim. No, not victim: his science experiment.
In the end, I just gave in. I didn’t really know what I wanted, and the stakes didn’t seem all that high. I didn’t like him that much. Still, it felt bad because, ultimately it felt like what he wanted was not me, but an idea of himself as a stud. Remember the feminist demand: Stop objectifying me? Well, this guy was objectifying himself. He had an idea of who he should be and he was performing a sexual operation on me while playing that role.
He was also objectifying me, of course.
“Stop objectifying me” used to be something you heard being lobbed at men by young and attractive females. Usually it was pronounced in the form of a general accusation, in the name of all women and against all men, as a kind of politics. And what was that politics about? Demanding appreciation for mind over body. It wasn’t something just anyone could say, either, because if the accuser didn’t fall into the young and/or attractive category, she risked getting back worse than she gave in the form of a judgment: “Why would anyone objectify you?”
You don’t hear that particular accusation too often anymore, maybe because men have come to accept their own objectification — by other men, by women, by the fashion industry and by the counter-industrial complex of hipster accoutrement. (Only highly self-objectifying guys would go outside costumed as bearded, wolverine “lumbersexuals.”)
But I think a bigger reason that objectification has gone out of style as an accusation, is that objectification itself is rampant: we have become easy with the fact that everyone is a thing and can be treated as one. More and more we understand ourselves in this way, as consumers and manipulators and traders of people and things. So it makes sense that, more and more, we also understand dating as a kind of game – and all the men and women merely players.
“Hello dear,” one 20-year-old texted. It turns out that young men approach older women rather often. “I would love to be your toy boy.”
I never considered having a toy boy.
True, it’s unfortunate that we live in a culture of assessment and comparison like this, but what can I do? Just because capitalism has reached deep into the heart of love doesn’t mean I’m not going to participate.
I was an idealist as a teenager, when I imagined that love would be a meeting of minds rather than of objects. Maybe it was because of the kind of books we girls read, starting with Jane Eyre, the beloved flesh-mortifying Victorian. Through Charlotte Bronte’s chick lit classic, we learned that a man might value you for something other than your looks or your inheritance prospects. You might be a lowly bonnet-wearing plain-faced orphan but you still might win a fortune and a guy with your wit and your directness, your pragmatism and refusal of pretense. Ultimately, too, the handsome-but-arrogant love-interest, Mr. Rochester, has to be brought down a peg for the romance to be consummated. In fact it is only when Mr. Rochester is blinded in a devastating fire that his employee Jane agrees to marry him, the purity of their future happiness guaranteed by the fact that he will never again be able to look at her or judge her by the way she looks.
I was an idealist but, at the same time, my idealism was being undermined by the sex dreams of my elders, probably starting in 1976 with the release of Logan’s Run, a film with a scene in which the hero, played by Michael York, fetches up potential sex partners from a proto-digital interface embedded in his bachelor-pad wall. Although the film ultimately calls the viewer back to traditional family values, the introduction of a hedonistic, non-moralistic way of life facilitated by a futuristic dating machine was fascinating to my 13-year-old self. Objectification seemed easy. And easy seemed erotic.
So I am well-suited to the current world of internet dating, since it offers both blindness and objectification, Rochester and the illusion of perpetual choice. On the blindness side, I tend to prefer smart over good-looking. Smart is my sexual preference. I mean, I don’t exactly get off purely on the basis of a person’s nuances and references, but it’s definitely a pathway. Conversation like wine.
There’s a new term for this love of intelligence, sapiosexual. Sounds like, I don’t know, monkey love?
Last year, the Daily Beast ran a short take-down piece about sapiosexuality called Pretentious Is Not A Sexual Orientation. It’s full of little barbs about how there are too many labels for sexual identities, and basically the point is that the term sapiosexual is stupid because young white people who hang out in cafes and read philosophy use it to describe themselves.
But Beast, I’d like to insist that pretentious is in fact a kind of sexual orientation. At least it’s a social one.
Not that I use “sapiosexual” in my profile. I prefer the older form, “culture vulture,” because it reminds me of the days I used to go out on the town almost every night, taking in all the performances and art shows on offer that I possibly could fit into my schedule. It was a marathon of scoping out, watching, assessing, being seen and drinking.
It’s really no wonder that I married another vulture, a guy whose nickname as a kid was “the Vault” because of his awesome memorization skills. When we went out on the town, I relied on his preternatural, pre-Google ability to come up with the right word, define it, identify its uses. He was up on all manner of trends, fashion trends and pop star trends. And he knew all the sides to any argument current or historical in a deep and nuanced way. I loved this part. He was my GPS and dictionary, my reference guide and stop-gap mental aid. He loved words, he was a professional writer and fact checker. I loved him like I love The Meaning of Everything, Simon Winchester’s book about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. The adventure of language, of compiling knowledge, was our igniting spark.
All my best, and some of my worst, romances have fallen somewhat into this vulture mode. Sometimes they’ve been with intellectuals who have been a bit older. Or they’ve been with people from other countries who haven’t just brought me the gift of themselves, they’ve brought me a whole new culture to learn. The Vault brought me the Internet, which in the early 1990s was about to take off and change the world. It was hard not to connect my feelings about his handsomeness to my excitement about digital culture when he stood back to show me that most uncanny of phenomena — a sentence being typed across his screen “by itself.” Before anyone else knew about it, he showed me how everybody’s once self-contained desktop was opening up to the world.
Sometimes I’ve been the blind one. After all, any kind of sexual orientation can be objectifying and sapiosexuality, too, can be a form of objectification. You can’t prefer a particular type of person without running the risk of falling into stereotyping. You like blonds? Nepalise? Furries? Smart people? Women? In every case, if you focus too hard on a kind of person, you can lose sight of the particularities of specific people.
As a sapiosexual, you can lose sight of the body. You look hard at a photograph of a dark-eyed guy in deep-thinking postures and you imagine the embrace of his mind. You have a texting exchange that is subtle, teasing but not mean, multi-faceted as well as humble, funny, and surprising, and you stop caring about his height or, once, his marital status.
Another time, coffee with a Moscow poet lasted only about 30 minutes. I agreed to meet him because of what he said about searchability — 4,200 or so hits if you googled his name – his Russian name, that is, in Russian letters.
That much was true. When we met, I saw that he’d exaggerated his height by at least two inches and that he was (as he confirmed) ten years older than his profile claimed.
“I liar,” he said, smiling.
It turned out this was his first date ever with an English-speaking woman and, aside from a few phrases, his English was poor.
“Look, I’m someone who cares about words. Language. Turns of phrase,” I said, speaking slowly.
He nodded, laughing, though I’m not sure at what. I tried being lighthearted.
“If your English isn’t that good, how would you be able to tell how clever I am?” I said, teasingly.
At that, a light went on.
“Ah! No. I no need special language comfort with woman,” he said.
My turn to laugh.
He went on. “I have special language comfort — with writing. With woman – is no necessary. I no need special language woman.”
“Then what do you want with woman,” I said, falling into his pidgin.
He laughed, I think at my directness.
“Woman? Beauty!”
“Because,” I continued, “you do see, right? I’m a special language woman.”
I didn’t feel special. I felt like an idiot.
“Woman — beauty,” he repeated with increasing insistence. “Language? No. Beauty. Woman is for beauty.”
What could I answer? We were like two ships passing in the night, et. al.
•
I’m still hopeful. In spite of these experiences, I’m determined to win someone, even if it becomes a full-time job. Well, not really. But I’m determined to ace the rules of the game, and apparently winning is all about strategy, a lesson I learned from yet another on-line suitor.
This was a guy who seemed full of fun and intensity. At first he seemed so excited to have finally found me that I felt immediately flattered. “I had to drop everything when I saw your profile,” he wrote. “I haven’t resonated with anyone like this in a long time, maybe ever.”
For a minute, I was excited. Then I hesitated.
“I don’t want to be rude,” I messaged. “But is your message some kind of boilerplate that you paste into every email?”
The answer came back immediately: “Not at all!”
Okay, good. Then he messaged again.
“I tweak it for each person!”
Ah.
“Just doin’ what it says in Dataclysm. You get better results, he says.”
Dataclysm: Who We Are When We Think No One’s Looking is the book by one of OKCupid founders Christian Rudder. It’s a Freakonomics-style take on identity and love in which Rudder reveals what the numbers reveal about the habits, preferences and tendencies of OKCupid members. Based on extensive research into subscriber activity, Rudder firmly believes that it’s data, not self-help that will get you matched up with a partner, and apparently sending out multiple versions of a highly crafted introductory message – like sending out different versions of your resume – is one way to game the system. Mr. Boilerplate was just hedging his bets.
Reader, I had coffee with him anyways.
When he came into the cafe, I was sitting at my usual table. As he approached, he was looking down at his phone. Then as he sat down some tinny, barely audible music started playing from the phone’s speakers. He looked up, grinning.
“It’s “Jessica.” You don’t like the Allman Brothers?” he asked, looking at my expression.
“Not really,” I said apologetically.
Game Over. I tell you, on these dates, everything gets played out in the first few seconds.
At this point, bad dates roll off my back, more or less. I’ve learned how to say good-bye. I say, “Thank you but this doesn’t seem to be working,” and then I go back to my laptop and I set up a new date. Maybe I’m also getting better at objectification, which, by turning prospective suitors into objects, also makes them easier to let go of.
I have faith that eventually I will curate my best self. I’ll keep taking my own photo. I’ll add and subtract from my profile. I’ll probably delete the words “culture vulture.” In his blog Christian Rudder writes that, according to the research, profile text matters very little compared to the photo. People don’t necessarily read them. Still, I’ll probably take it off. The sapiosexual love-objects I’m seeking do, in fact, read, and I’m afraid that the term might lead a potential suitor of that special sort – tall, smart, with deep-thinking postures — to visualize me as some kind of bird, a giant raptor, slowly circling my prey overhead. I guess I’m still idealistic enough to believe that through all this tweaking, I’ll eventually convince the machine to point me out to the one for whom I will ultimately abandon the game.
Jessica Peri Chalmers writes fiction and nonfiction. She is also an academic, playwright and, formerly, a performance artist. She has been published in The Mississippi Review, Other Voices, October magazine, Fiction magazine, The Village Voice, The Drama Review, and others.
Find Jessica’s website HERE.
