v1.2 Aug 8, 2003 I have it on quite good authority that I am not a loser, though appearances can be deceiving: I am, at present, a guy who has managed to remain single to the ripeness of forty three and one-half years of age. But I am not I loser. Why, no less a source than the front page of the Sunday NY Times says so: "Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com". As I enter my eighty-eighth semester of singleness, I decided to sign up for match.com. I think it was the pages and pages of female faces smiling out of the web browser that seduced me - if seduced can be the right word given my current state of affairs. The match folks have it down to a science - you can sign up and search for free, but if you actually want to send or reply to a message you have to pay. I was non-committal about this until the charming "hunawoman" sent me a "wink", so I dropped match.com the fee and joined in. Now I am a full fledged member of the club - the club that's not for losers. Ah, Huna, I never knew thee; won't go out with me because of religious differences. Well, we'll always have Paris. Having forked over the cash, the match.com folks helpfully begin to send me e-mails with photos and descriptions of women their e-yenta thinks I'd like to meet. Oddly, for some reason my ambivalent answers to all the questions describing my special someone (Religion: Any, Body Type: Any, Smoking: Any) seems somehow to indicate a thing for girls from New Jersey. Or did it just notice that hunawoman was from across the Hudson? I know I said that I'd like my match to live within 25 miles of my home in Brooklyn, but is the woman for me really in Spotswood, wherever that is? Honestly, I swear up and down I have nothing against New Jersey - not a trace of the New York snob in me - but isn't there someone a bit more urban available? In Queens, say? On the site there's a "Mutual Matches" page. There's a column of women, accompanied by numbers measuring the computer's ranking of our potential chemistry or something. I don't know how it figures it out, but it's quite definitive: reported on a scale from 0 to 100%. I study it obsessively, on the assumption that their technology knows something that I don't. About third on the list, at 99%, is a woman I know who lives a couple of blocks from me, whom I run into on the street from time to time. She's a good friend of my ex-girlfriend, and recently this woman told me she didn't feel comfortable talking to me any more. I'm wondering if match is presenting me to her as her near-ideal mate as well. A few weeks later she seems to be gone from the service. Somewhere further down the list, rather to my surprise, is my ex-girlfriend herself. "barilochick" gave me the heave-ho a year or so ago. She's from Argentina, and her childhood summers were often spent in the resort town, Bariloche. I have to say I am amused at the cleverness of her handle. (It's much better than mine, a rather lame "s_boy". I guess thought I would leave it to the girls' imaginations to think of what the s stood for.) I hate to admit it, but I feel a certain small, slightly sadistic pleasure finding her here. Still searching a year later, eh, Bari? You had to join notlosers.com as well? It's the window to the mind of the ex that is the most tantalizing prospect - maybe by studying her profile I can figure out precisely what got me dumped. But, unfortunately, there are no great revelations. Instead, mentally, I'm editing her profile: First of all, Bari, lose that photo with the curl of hair falling down over your right eye, as you gaze into the distance. Your wild curly hair always was one of your sexier aspects, but this picture seems sort of posed and affected. And you say your apartment was "always clean for company". C'mon, you should know yourself better than that - your apartment was always totally immaculate. Bari, did you feel inadequate about it, somehow? Hmm, maybe there's more to be gleaned here after all, if I think it through carefully enough. I move on down the list of matches. I find a friend of another ex-girlfriend, a woman who was very smart and nice but actually quite heavy. She describes her body type as "about average". I haven't seen her in a few years, so I suppose anything's possible, but it would be a considerable ways to get to "about average". Actually, this is starting to feel a bit claustrophobic. As the weeks pass, it's taking me a while to ease into the scene. I am still not ready to start sending out messages. Instead, during my nightly logon I am perusing the pages of available babes, and assembling my list of "favorites". This is a match.com feature that is a sort of bookmark page, so I can set aside the ones with whom I share a mutual attraction - at least in my mind. It's quite enchanting looking at my harem. A whole bevy of single femaleness all looking for that special someone: me. I keep selecting until I exhaust the site limit of 25 "favorites", and I start writing their handles down on a pad I keep by my laptop. But I'm still not ready actually to start trying to talk to any of them. I get another "wink" - this time from a heavy woman from Goshen, NY. I look it up: Goshen is up in the Borscht Belt, more than a two-hour drive away. I send her a polite but nugatory e-mail thanking her for the compliment. Is it my destiny only to meet women from the far suburbs? I think I'm hypersensitive about these things, but it sort of gets to me. A few more weeks in, and I find "Arkansas_gal". Ah, the beautiful Ms. Gal... She was someone I had an intense, month-long affair with, until, for reasons that still remain a mystery to me, she cast me overboard. I was quite smitten with her: totally beautiful, smart, with a southern twang that I'd never expected I'd find so attractive, and seemingly, for a few blissful weeks, totally into me - there she is on the World Wide Web, advertising for a match. With all the rest of us who aren't losers. If I took a small pleasure in finding Barilochick, seeing Ms. Gal there is a total victory. One feature of match.com is that it shows how long it has been since the person last logged on. Why, AR has been online within the last 24 hours! Wow, she's as obsessive about this thing as I am... and she's the sort of woman who couldn't walk into a bar without beating the men off with a bat. Of course, if I can see when she was last online, she can see when I was last online. A creeping paranoia starts to afflict my logins. I almost feel like not going on anymore, just to make sure she doesn't see me looking around. Still, giving up the prospect of all these women is quite a lot to ask just to conceal myself from someone who's unlikely to have even noticed I'm here. I put my worry aside, telling myself, "Hey, I didn't dump her, she dumped me, so I am the one with the power in this online situation" (unlike our relationship). I'm also editing Ms. Gal's profile. Change the head shot, AR - it has that vaguely blurry, round-faced look that you see in pictures of someone who's overweight and trying to look thin. And that pearl necklace - if you want to get a smart nyork_guy, you don't really want to look quite so much like a sorority girl. But the most interesting part is where Ms. Gal describes the person she's trying to meet. I know, dear reader, that you are going to have a hard time believing this, but the person she is describing is... me. You will think this hubris on my part, but I can solemnly assure you that I am not someone to imagine or exaggerate these things. It is actually rather striking. I even contemplate just using her words to replace what I have written for my profile (excising, of course, the part about being a Razorbacks fan). The paragraph ends with this: Even with all that, sometimes there's no chemistry - I wish I knew why, but sometimes it just doesn't ignite, so whatever makes that spark has to be there. The familiar quote! "I wish I knew why I was breaking up with you, but I don't." Really, AR, chemistry wasn't the problem, you know that... Besides, why say this and scare off the next s_boy - or is it match.com as a group therapy session? Ok, so last week I was finally ready to send out a message. I perused my "favorites" trying to find one that looked like a good place to start. Upon such very serious examination, I noted that some have certain oddities that make them look like they'd probably be weird or incompatible. I selected "jamie22", a 35 year old Jewish Manhattanite who peers coquettishly but seriously over her shoulder at me. She has a graduate degree of some sort, so I figured that she's got some good features. Outside of cyberspace, on planet earth, I'm not too bad at the game of meeting women. The hardest part is getting the conversation started without seeming glib, weird, a boor, or a dolt. The key here is to don a confident, yet non-threatening aspect (called a CYNTA by technicians) and find something, anything reasonable to start talking about. If you can get past that, what you need to do mostly is sustain an somewhat intelligent, somewhat pleasant conversation for a few minutes - usually not too hard a task - and then ask for the phone number. Took me til my 30s to figure it out, but in the end it's not all that difficult. Online, this turns into a much harder problem. How can I adopt a CYNTA using a courier font? I mean, I selected my photo (cropped from a picture taken in the hospital with my 88 year old great aunt) because I thought I was wearing just exactly that sort of face, but there's no body language in it. The site helpfully offers me 7 hints to sending a great greeting, but as I try them I feel quite slimy or silly. I work on my two paragraphs for nearly 45 minutes, but still what I said to jamie22 seems a bit leaden, complimenting her on being someone who's interested in learning and asking her what her graduate degree is in. Actually, I'm guessing it's an MBA. I'm sad to say that jamie22 never got back to me - or at least she hasn't yet. I'm pretty sure she never will, because the next day I checked and I saw that she had gone online. Now Ms. 22, aren't you a nice Jewish girl, raised better than that? If you're going to blow off a friendly guy like me, at least tell me you're blowing me off, right? I know it takes 30 seconds of work, but do you really get so many messages you can't bother? I mean, even Sen. Schumer's e-mail has an autoresponder. It's not like I'm a loser or anything. The next day, I tried two more. With the first I still found it hard to find the CYNTA groove. And I've still gotten no response, though she seems to be out of town. With a friendly face like hers, she seems like just the sort of person who'll at least give me a proper blowoff. Or so I am still hoping. The second was a Puerto Rican Jewish woman who lives in Larchmont. Actually, she comes across as a bit high-maintenance for my taste, and yes, she's in Larchmont, but still she's really quite cute. Most importantly, I actually knew how to approach the starting line: as it turns out I know a goodly number of Latino Jews - Barilochick and her family of course, but several others as well. That's the hook. I reread the message before I send it. Yep, this one's a go. Except that I still haven't heard anything. A couple of nights later I decide that the key is immediacy. Maybe I can recapture some of that casual air if I'm talking in real time. I look for someone who is online now, in order for the first time to say something using the match.com chat feature. I find a svelte, 38-year-old Manhattanite who says she's looking for someone who's a combination of two characters from Gilligans Island: the professor and the skipper. Now, I used to be a professor and I actually own a sailboat, and I laugh out loud. I open the box and I say I'm a professor and a skipper and I thought I'd say hi. Jesus, did I really just say that? Doesn't that seem like a horrible pickup line in a bar? Is she at least going to take the time to look at my profile and get the joke? I guess not. She declines my chat within seconds. The browser rings a system beep - the same one the computer emits when you empty the recycle bin. Then she blocked me altogether. Wow. Batting 0 for 4 - I usually do much better than that. I figure there's something wrong with my profile. I've been around marketing people long enough to know what to do next: a focus group. I carefully read what these girls are saying about themselves, and I find out something odd and interesting: they all think they're athletic and outdoorsy. Take jamie22: "I would rather be doing something outside... biking, hiking, skiing, scuba, swimming." They're all like this. I swear I think I'm looking for women who live in Lake Tahoe and not in midtown. Now outdoorsiness is not really one of my long suits. Truth be told, I'm really the sort of person who'd be perfectly happy if I had to spend the next six months in a theater watching Iranian art films. OK, get me rewrite! Like all good advertising, it's a matter of putting things the right way - not really lying exactly. I do have a bike rusting down in the basement, and I really do haul it out a few times during the summer and take it for a couple of spins around the park. I need to mention that. And I really do go for walks in the Brooklyn Botanic garden during the spring. Hey, that has the added benefit of emphasizing my feminine side! And while I'm at it, I need to make sure I mention that I've had a successful career that I've been happy with. Isn't that the sort of thing these girls say turns them on? Up to now, I just reported it - I need this discussion to be chatty and fun. And I need to wax a bit more poetic about why I have the sailboat. I'll talk about the sun and the wind and the sound of the waves. I'll tell them I don't have to work out to stay in shape - I just have good genes! And if you have my babies, girls, they'll get some of them! Now... that's better! Okay! I am psyched up and ready to go! I am *not* a loser! Just ask the New York Times!