Not long after our divorce early in 2003, my best buddy and I were drinking cheap beers at the dining room table of his downtown Victorian. It was still winter, and since the departure of his longtime, live-in girlfriend, he’d had a propensity for keeping the thermostat set low. I don’t think I was wearing my winter coat in the house, but I’m pretty sure I was bundled in layers of long-sleeve shirts and a sweater. He probably had a ratty blanket wrapped around him. We were a pathetic sight.
We were both going through fundamental changes in our lives — newly single, untutored, generally clueless about how/why/if we could get out there and start dating again.
I look back at us now, and shake my head; at that moment, bereft and shivering, terrified about the future, we had no idea of the wonders ahead of us and no clue that our struggles together would provide the foundation for a friendship that would be even stronger almost decade later, even though we’re now separated by a few thousand miles of mountain and prairie.
But this story is about something that happened that night, when my pal said, “Hey, come here, take a look at this.”
He’d moved to his desk, which was also in the dining room, and had a window open on his computer. I could tell as I went to stand behind him that he was at an online dating site.
“Oh no,” I said. “I could never do online dating. It just sounds so...contrived.”
“I know,” he said, logging into Nerve Personals, his fingers clacking on the keyboard. “I thought that, too. But take a look.”
He rolled his chair back a little bit so I could peer at the screen; an array of photos of women with a snippet of information about each one. 10% were gorgeous, 15% percent were frightening, but the vast majority were just interesting enough to warrant further investigation.
We read through some of the profiles — Nerve asked funny, insightful questions that made just about anyone look witty at some level, so the reading was entertaining in its own right. My pal pointed out a few women he’d been emailing with, but we didn’t come across anyone I thought would be worth the humiliation of admitting I needed an online yenta.
And then...there she was. Sultry but approachable, a cute Jewish girl with dark features and warm eyes, whose answers to the various and sundry questions demonstrated a quirky intelligence. I was spellbound. My friend let me write to her via his account (since he’d paid for the service), and I wrote a florid email, explaining I wasn’t the account-holder but that I couldn’t resist reaching out.
She emailed me the next day, a few hours after I’d shelled out the cash to set up my own profile. Although we never actually went on a date, we did end up becoming friends, and we’re still in touch here and there.
But the Nerve Personals experience, with its emphasis on the intelligent creative target audience, was like a gateway drug into online dating for me. Suddenly, I had an answer to my fears of dating — my lack of game and mediocre small talk skills were irrelevant when I could write a funny, smart and self-deprecating online profile, and send out an email that was at once charming and compelling.
Suddenly, I had dates planned for most nights when I didn’t have Simone. Occasionally, I’d stack up several dates on the same day (I still get traffic for an early post — Rules for Online Dating).
The process was generally similar from target to target — I’d impress her with a well-written email, we’d chat online for a week or so, and then we’d meet.
And then I found May. Her photos of a small, curvy, and immensely pretty blondie were why I clicked on her profile, but it was the writing inside — clever, winking, salty, hilarious — that I fell for right away. We connected immediately, both picking up on our love of words, and began one-upping each other with funny and smart responses to each other’s questions.
We set up a time to meet, but May came down with a cold and had to cancel. By the time she was feeling better, I was traveling out of town, and it wasn’t until a couple more weeks of daily emails (dozens and dozens of long, flowing conversations) and late night IMs (lasting hours and hours) that we finally could set up a time to see each other. By then, I was certain I’d found an amazing woman, and I was giddy with the excitement of finally seeing her.
But she cancelled again — this time, because she’d decided to get back together with her ex-boyfriend. Truly, I was devastated. Sure, I’d been going on other dates, and had some other online stuff working, but nobody fed my intellectual appetites like she did.
I wrote her a kind, understanding response, nursed my sorrows over a big-ass martini (not daring to admit the source of my sadness to anyone), and did my best to let her go.
It was just a week later when I received an email from her again. I was out of town on a press junket. I just looked back into my email and found my response:
“I'm sitting at the Four Seasons, the french doors open to the balcony that overlooks the city — I can see the Hollywood sign, and an almost imperceptible breeze is blowing into the room, stirring the detritus from my pockets left on the desk — cab receipts, notes to myself, a gum wrapper. There are amazing fresh apples in the fruit bowl, and Fiji water on the nightstand. I can smell hints of ocean and eucalyptus and even that dryer smell you get when you're near an industrial laundry facility. And I saw your name in the Inbox, and my face got hot, and I felt a little dizzy, and I forgot where I was.”
And then we were writing again. Email after email. She was still dating the other guy, but she was writing to me, I thought, for the intelligent conversation she wasn’t getting. Looking at the emails I have saved, we did this for another couple of weeks, our mutual affection evident in every word we wrote.
Late, late one Saturday night, after we’d been emailing for hours, she asked me to wait for an email she was writing.
The email that arrived 30 minutes later had a subject line that read, “The Truth about Cats and Dogs.” I didn’t open it before taking a full few breaths, because I knew what that meant, and wanted to keep our fantasy love affair alive for just a few more moments.
I didn’t read the text first, no. I jumped straight down to the attachments. I suddenly realized I’d opened my heart to...well...it could be anyone. I nearly puked right there at my desk, my fingers shaking as I opened the first of the photos.
“Please let it be a woman,” I said to myself. “I don’t care about anything else. Please let her be a woman.”
And she was. Not small. Not blond. And her name wasn’t May. The pictures showed a pretty face on a large woman, and though I was still feeling heartbroken by the deception, at least she wasn’t some creepy guy leading me on and on. The story was that she’d written May’s profile for Nerve, and had responded to my initial email on May’s behalf because she wasn’t able to answer from work that day.
By the time May was ready to take over, she was already intimidated by the level of writing and rapport between us. So she asked her friend to keep writing on her behalf. And she did. And she did some more. Then May decided to get back together with her boyfriend, but her friend was in love with me. So May insisted she sever ties, which her friend did.
For a little while.
When she started back up, writing to me while I was in LA, it was without May’s knowledge; but our text-only relationship was exciting and loving, and she could be the woman she really wanted to be, at least via email.
After reading the email, I swore out loud. I rubbed at my face. I took three deep breaths. I didn’t know what to do.
So I called my baby sister, and when I read aloud the whole email, she laughed. She laughed loudly and at length. I wanted to throttle her through the phone.
“This is the best thing that has ever happened to me,” she said. “And it happened to you!” She made me tell her the whole story again, and then laughed some more that something so intense and funny and stupid happened to me “fresh out of the gate.” By the time we got off the phone, I was laughing, too.
So I replied to the email, giving this woman a choice: meet me for brunch the next day, or never speak to me again.
I recognized her by her chastened, embarrassed expression when she walked into the restaurant, and stood up when she approached the table. She wasn’t sure what to do, and I could see that she was shaking, so I gave her a hug. It may not have been the hug that I’d been looking forward to for so long, but it was one we both needed. It broke the ice, and then we spent the next two hours alternating between sheepish and laughing. My jaw hurt from the smiling.
The friendship that began that day gave me great pleasure over the years, and though we always talked about repurposing our hundreds of emails into book form, we never got to it.
In the years since, I’ve backed into the occasional text-only relationship. Some have turned into something real, if only for a short time, while others gradually ended, the intervals between texts and emails growing longer, from days to weeks to years. Facebook has taken some of the mystery out of the text-based love affair, and it has generally allowed for a more realistic understanding of who we are and what we’re about.
But some of those romances felt as emotionally palpable as a real-world dating experience. And even if I opened my heart to some degree, my early Cyrano moment gave me the strength to take pleasure in the nature of the thing, while not investing my heart completely. Even the most amazing, lovable, and perfect text girlfriend is only a theoretical construct until she makes an appearance in my physical world.
Until then, I may play along for a little while. But I won’t believe it’s really real until that first hug.
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