Dating in my late teens and early twenties went something like this...
When I was in college, a boy might become interested in me by reviewing the pages of the "freshman shopper", the freshmen edition of the school paper at the small, prairie school called The University of Minnesota, Morris. It was part of the "main U" (University of Minnesota located in Minneapolis), but had not nearly the numbers. While the main U had nearly 50,000 students, including graduate programs and the St. Paul campus, Morris had less than 2,000 and the town had less than 5,000 people in it, many of whom were Mennonites and resented the rowdy, liberal students the college brought into town. I remembered feeling apprehensive about the number of sheep I saw on campus property as my parents turned our mini-van off of Hwy. 28 when I was arriving for my freshman orientation. Later, I would discover that the stabled horses on campus went out to graze the apple trees in the pasture located right next to the soccer field where I practiced. One day five horses got loose on the field during practice. I had a sprained ankle and could only stand and watch while my teammates chased them down to bring them in.
In the freshman shopper at this school was a compilation of all the photographs of freshmen who were tricked into sending their senior picture to the school and writing three of their hobbies on the back. I was one such freshman, who dutifully sent her picture in, believing it might be sent to my roommate or my orientation group leader for some sort of get-to-know-you activity, and thus choosing my "ugly" picture to send in because it was the one I least wanted to give to my real friends, the high schoolers who attended Fridley High (and some of them certainly were high, believe me). I wrote on the back "Soccer, Swimming, Dancing." I had censored my original third selection "Reading" because I felt it was too nerdy. I was determined not to be nerdy in college (even if I was in real life).
Little did I know that my "ugly" picture would be put smack in the middle of the school newspaper to be perused by older students before the first few house parties of the year. "Oh yeah," I heard on more than one occasion after telling an older boy my name, "I saw you in the shopper." Mortifying.
So while a boy might initially become interested through perusing the shopper, it did not guarantee any sort of communication. In order to actually talk to a boy, I could strike up a conversation with him at a house party and either tell him my full name so that he could look me up in the campus phone book, give him my brand-new email address (something I had never had before), or tell him my phone number, since for the last two years now every dorm room had its own phone instead of one for each floor at the end of the hallway. "It's 6518," I would say, listing off the four digit campus extension and adding, "65, like the age you retire, and 18, like the age you're an adult," a clever mnemonic device I had conceived in order to help the drunk boys remember after the house party was over.
Of course, there was one other option, which was to get sloppy drunk, make out with a boy at a house party, and then invite him over to my dorm room if my roommate happened to be out of town, (which was often, since her boyfriend still lived back in Watertown, South Dakota). We would make out on my roommate's bed (she had the bottom bunk and it was just too awkward to climb up a ladder) and I would always say, "but I'm not sleeping with you."
"That's fine. I wasn't expecting it," they'd almost always say. (Really, I've made out with some extraordinarily respectful individuals, not at all like what we learned about during the "safe sex" and "no means no" talk we all got during freshman orientation.) Then in the morning, the situation would become awkward. Either I liked him but he wanted to avoid me, or vice versa.
Make-out sessions very rarely led to relationships for me, though for many people at Morris a good make-out session was a sign of instant couplehood.
Provided I was actually going out on a date with a guy, the course followed a very different route. He'd eventually call me or email me and ask me out on a date. I wouldn't be able to think of anything to say other than "Sure." And then he'd cook me dinner in his dorm kitchen, having banished his floormates from the room for the evening, or he'd pick me up and take me to Alexandria, a town 45 minutes away that boasted a Chinese restaurant and current movies. On the worst of these occasions, the drive was painful, me attempting to make small talk with a very shy and sweet individual, but one who took me to BURGER KING for dinner and then made me pay for my own meal. I felt no chemistry for this individual and the Burger King expedition was a nail in the coffin.
Very few, if any, of these "real date" situations led to a relationship for me at Morris, either, though again, it was like insta-relationship for other couples.
If I were home for the summer, the dating scene took on a new form. Dance clubs were a part of the way to meet boys. I would go to teen night with my friends and we would pay our $3 cover charge and buy $1 waters all night. We'd check out the boys and smile at the ones we'd like. We'd speak in girl-talk to each other with eye-brow raises and head nods, letting each other know if the guy dancing behind us was cute or not.
If I wasn't into a guy, I'd perform the "t" move, meaning I'd position my body to be perpendicular to his whatever way he moved and thus, the only part of me he could rub up against would be my hip bone. This deterred most boys after attempting to get closer once or twice and they'd look for friendlier territory. If I liked the guy, I'd either face him while we were dancing, or allow him to grind on me from behind. (As I just chaperoned a high school prom three months ago, this methodology still seems to hold true.)
Then, after maybe a half an hour of sweaty dancing, we'd try to go get some water and scream a brief conversation at each other over the bass. I might even give him my phone number. If I did this, it was a week of anticipation, wondering if he'd call, and when he did, of course, he'd have to get through my mom, or dad, or brothers if they answered the phone first. Many a time I'd try to sprint down the hallway in my basement where my room was to be the first one to answer our phone, the one in the basement laundry room that was a beauty out of the early 1970's complete with rotary dialing. I'd have to really think about if I wanted to call someone while sticking my finger in each little number hole and pulling it up to the top of the circle. It was very exhilarating.
When I did actually talk to a boy, after first screaming up the stairs to my family, "I got it!" I would be almost as physically involved in the conversation as I was mentally. I would sit on the dryer, I'd kick my mom's sewing chair, I'd walk down the hall as far as the curly receiver cord would let me. I'd lay on the hallway floor and run my fingers through the tough bristles of the cheap downstairs carpet. I'd kick my legs up on the white walls of the hallway scuffed with black marks of my brothers' hockey equipment that they brought into the "sports room" after practice, an unfinished sauna room lined with cedar started by the people who owned the house before my parents and I moved in when I was 2 and-a-half.
All of this was very exciting and once in a while, after a hour long discussion about nothing in particular, a date would be planned.
But, again, very few of these dates or phone calls led to a real relationship, though I'm told they did for other people.
In my awkward early dating career, I really only had one big relationship (with the man I would go on to marry) and a couple of brief practice relationships. I think part of this was my own fear of relationships, and part of it was the lore I had built up around the legend of parents' relationship. They had met at a party during which my dad said to himself "she's the one," and my mom said to herself, "he seems like a nice guy." Four months later, they were engaged. Eight months after that, they were married. Thirty-four years later, they still are.
In my mind then, there was ONE relationship in everyone's life, and I believed my marriage was it, the relationship that would last until I was in my 90's.
But that was not to be, and sadly, or at least two years ago I thought it was sadly, I'm back in the world of awkward dating. And there are all sorts of technological advances that have made it more and more complicated, like facebook, and texting, and things I never even had to worry about back when I was 18 and the most anyone really might have was a pager. One of my friends had a cell phone to be used "only in emergencies!" because each minute was "really, really expensive!"
Through the last two years I've been awkwardly navigating the whole technological dating world, asking myself questions like "to text, or not to text?" But it's time, I've decided, to enter the final frontier: online dating.
I have decided to experiment with eharmony this summer, for one, because I actually have time to pursue this kind of adventure right now (there's a lot of homework involved), and two, because I suddenly realized I might not always be single, and how silly not to take advantage of this while I can.
It has been quite an interesting experience. I log on each day to review my "matches", profiles of men sent to me by a database playing God. Then I decide to either archive, contact, or simply leave the men in my homepage. "What happens to the archived men?" my dad asked when I explained the system to my family.
"They just hover in bubbles, like on SuperMario [for Wii-the new one], crying 'Help me!' until Katie lets them out." We all laughed, and I have to say, there is a certain power that comes with deciding to archive someone.
"It's not mean, is it?" I asked when I archived someone because I just wasn't that attracted to his pictures.
"No!" said my friend Lana, "It's normal! It's just like at a bar, the process of elimination."
And plus, there is just no way to contact everyone. I can only imagine how things could pile up if I wasn't checking my matches each day!
After the initial stage, there is a four-step process. First you send each other multiple choice questions, then you send your list of "Must-Haves and Can't Stands." If both of you are still on board after that, you send each other three short answer questions, and finally, you are allowed to email each other.
"Chompers," as Lana and I have fondly dubbed my first e-harmony date, (because he wrote in his profile that he had braces, 'the metal kind that most people have when they are 10' but that he was hoping for 'a nice set of chompers by the latter part of the year,') I have discovered was sort of an anomaly. He jumped right to step four and proposed we meet for a drink. We had a good time and swapped amusing stories about our families, and then, three days later he sent me a very polite email explaining that while he had had a great time, he had also been on a couple dates with another woman and he wanted to be exclusive with her. "I joined eharmony because I wanted a serious relationship," he wrote, "and for me, that couldn't happen if I was dating more than one woman at a time." It was so nice, and so filled with integrity, that I became even fonder of Chompers and decided we had been on the best first eharmony date ever. I wished him well and returned to my six matches a day.
The first time I got to step three with a man, I have to admit, I almost broke out into hives. The questions were serious! "Besides love, what one trait do you believe successful couples have?" and "If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?" and finally, "tell me five random things about yourself." The first question was the one that really caused me to sweat. How serious was this? What kind of commitment were we making? This was with Brian, or "Cheese-lover." I contacted him because he included cheese in his list of five things he couldn't live without. But, after making it all the way to step four, I suddenly stopped hearing from him.
No matter. What I like about eharmony is that I feel like I'm getting over the concept of rejection. I contacted another one of my matches, named Joey, who I was just swooning over. He was so cute, looked kind of manly, was in triathlons, said his daughter was something he couldn't live without, and here's the kicker, said he was looking for "someone who wants something serious." I contacted him and showed his picture to Lana, my dear friend and dating coach.
"He looks like Wes," she said.
Perhaps you have heard the new song by John Mayer, the one called "Friends, Lovers, or Nothing?" I would say this aptly describes my relationship with Wes. And we are firmly in the "Nothing" category as he no longer returns my calls.
I would like to say I simply ignored the comment, but with all the maturity of a seventh-grader I instead said, "Yeah, except taller and smarter."
Not that height is a "big" factor me (ha ha), but I imagined the 5' 8" Wesley would be chagrined to know I was dating a 6'1" version of himself, and so mentally I felt I had scored a point. And the smarter comment refers to the adage I coined this year in my 9th grade classroom when I would turn to the girls I was teaching after we watched the 9th grade boys hump each other and try to hit each other in the balls during the first couple minutes before the bell rang, "Boys are dumb." They would nod, and I felt like real learning was happening.
Here's the thing, it's not about me if a guy rejects me, it's about him or us or timing, but really, I am still quite a fine person. It helps me to remember that "boys are dumb," a comment I don't believe literally, but one that reminds me not to take dating so seriously or so personally. When it finally works out, it will be great. Until then, no fretting, just more surfing.
This is why when adorable Joey never responded and eventually "closed" me as a match, (sort of like death to an eharmony match, because you are never allowed to communicate again--Ever), I was not upset.
"But why would he close you?!" asked my dating coach, just the sort of unconditional supporter you need in the dating world. A woman who can't imagine any man not falling madly in love with me while I too quickly see all of my flaws.
"Oh, well, I just think it's probably because he met the woman of his dreams a month ago and now he's being respectful and closing all of his matches," I said, having no clue if this was the case, but choosing to believe that it was.
"Oh," she replied, "that's nice of him. I guess that's ok."
Whether Joey closed me because he met the woman of his dreams, or he didn't like the Kentucky Derby hat I was wearing in my first profile picture, or he thought I was too tall, or he didn't like that I did yoga, or perhaps he was against the dog I mentioned in my list of hobbies (as in I like to walk my dog around the lakes), it doesn't really matter. It doesn't change who I am as a person, which is the woman who "loves spicy food and dive bars, going out for breakfast with friends, curling up on the couch in front of candles, and singing Bon Jovi on karaoke night." I think that woman sounds great, and like a lot of fun, and if Joey doesn't that's fine.
Especially because Jason, who likes to go running and is going to a crawfish broil for the 4th of July, wants to go out for drinks next week! :)
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