How To Be Matchless

At Irving a couple weeks ago, I glanced over at the adjacent used car dealership to find an attractive man perusing the merchandise. Sighting an attractive man near my age in Quaint Coastal Village is kind of like seeing a timber wolf up in the county; you hear about these things happening, but don’t really expect to come across one yourself. My thought process, as I pumped half my paycheck into my gas tank, went as follows: Good looking, got all his hair. No obvious wedding ring. Oh. Oh, he’s looking at the F-250. Oh, he’s opening the door. Does he know the gas mileage those things get? A guy who would buy an environmental hatchet job like that in this day and age? Probably a Republican. Oh, and what’s he drinking? Coffee? Coffee leads to coffee breath. Yeah, and what’s he doing in Quaint Coastal Village, anyway? Waiting for the bars to open? Well. That was a close one.

Too picky? Perhaps. And knowing myself as I do, I should have suspected from the start that despite the optimistic advice I received from a number of sources, I am probably the last person who should attempt the process of humiliation that is online dating. So it’s no tragedy that my trial membership is about to run out at Match.com, a site I joined in a pout one night. I was pouting because the man who broke my heart, who from this point forth will be called Tito, texted me to tell me that he wasn’t actually going to drop by to visit and make amends, after all. Fine, I thought. Actually, fine is what I thought after I thought a lot of other things, but eventually I mopped myself off and plunked down my credit card number. I thought, I’ll show him.

I did not show him.

My first problem might have been my refusal to post a photo. While I may have stooped to the level of online dating (online cruel judgment of others is more accurate, but we’ll get to that), I have not been reduced to the place where I’m willing to sling photographic proof of such depths around the internet. So yes, first truth: without a photo, no man is going to latch on. I get sniffy about this until I realize that I am the same way. Clearly, the unphotographed men on the site cannot possibly share my desire for discretion. All of them are obviously hiding major physical defects, like third degree burns, or wart colonies, or unseemly tan lines. So I can’t really blame anyone for not breaking down my electronic door.

But this isn’t about my shortcomings; it’s about the shortcomings of others. After receiving periodic emails that alert me to “my matches,” I have come to reassess the way I am viewed—the way others see my dating potential. This summer, a former student told me that she wanted to introduce me to a guy she knows. Despite my obvious reluctance, she persisted. “He’s tall,” she said. Well, okay. “And he really likes John Deere and going to the lobster boat races and he rides a street bike and he works construction,” she finished in one breath.

Um.

This is a young woman to whom I taught Shakespeare. I taught her about Beowulf, about Transcendentalism, and how to write a sestina. I made her memorize “To be or not to be,” for crying out loud. I introduced her to the best way to make a cup of tea, and to my favorite movies, which are German, with subtitles.

Call me a snob, but I’m fairly certain that Mr. Crotch Rocket and I would not have much in common. And as someone with neither third-degree burns nor even a single wart, much less a conflagration of them, I feel that I might be able to aim higher on the dating totem pole than someone who enjoys watching boats go really fast. Go get 'em, Scuffy.

I don’t know why I’d expect a computerized dating service to have any more insight into my dating preferences than a real live human. My friend’s sister, who met her husband on this exact site, told me, “Do it! Just keep your expectations low.” Then she repeated herself. “Looooow.” I got it. Low.

Apparently my expectations were not low enough. Perhaps in more densely populated areas, this whole scene is slightly more vibrant. In Maine, however, the categories of men can be shaken down as follows:

--Men who think it’s charming to post those one-handed self-portraits— sometimes, if they’re really creative, taken at a 45 degree angle— so that the primary view one gets is of their nostrils and goatees. They all have goatees. In my imaginary meeting of these assembled men, the dialogue runs thusly: “Hey, we all have goatees! We all don’t have dates. Wait a minute…”

--Men who can’t spell. Your and you’re are not the same word, and never have been. Neither are who’s and whose, its and it’s, or our and are. Embarrassed is not spelled “imparassed,” though you get points for creativity. Capitalization may be going out of style, but with standards going down the toilet everywhere, the accurate use of an apostrophe may end up being the key to my heart.

--Men who post photos of themselves without shirts. Men who post photos of themselves without pants. Men who post photos of themselves with children, presumably to display their potential as a future mate (“Yes, he may have a prison tattoo, but that child clinging to his back tells a different story. Sign me up!”) Men who claim to be looking for “that special someone,” or who claim to love spoiling women. I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of my own gagging.

--Men who claim to love hauling a tent to the middle of nowhere and roughing it. Come on now. If everyone who claimed to love camping actually loved camping, the Plum Creek issue at Moosehead Lake would never have arisen, simply because those nutty developers wouldn’t have been able to afford the bulldozers needed to shift all those goateed men out of the way. It’s a purely academic debate anyway, because I can’t stand camping. I’ll spend all day outdoors without complaint, but I like a bed and shower waiting at the end of the day. And in the incipient stages of a relationship, the last thing I want to contemplate is what a relative stranger would look like waking up after a night spent al fresco. I’m fairly certain that I wouldn’t be that stoked about cuddling up with Jake Gyllenhaal after a night in the forest, so a guy in the dire straits of online dating is certainly not going to light my fire, pardon the pun.

--Men who post photos of their trucks, boats, crotch rockets, or all of the above. Is this the fluttering of the tailfeathers? Are you showing me all that can be mine if I simply wade through your questionable prose? Is it not enough to tell me you love your truck? Must you also present visual proof of this romance?

--Men whose lists of interests includes “dragons.” Okay, that was one guy. But still. It was one guy who winked at me, twice, as if he possessed some sort of cyber-tic.

A wink, for those of you who actually have companionship on Friday nights, is a phenomenon in which a person can send you something that says, “He winked at you!” I still fail to see the purpose of this. My response is always a sullen, “What?” Which means I don’t respond. Which means I don’t have a great attitude about this game. But that was clear already. When you receive a wink, Match.com suggests that you “send an intriguing email!” in response. Which makes me laugh, because at the beginning of the school year, I had a senior boy whose use of the phrase “that’s so gay” got on my nerves until I actually lost my temper with him. He and I made a deal that in the future, in a nod to the idea that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy, he would call those things he did not understand “intriguing.” His vocabulary has improved, but the word “intriguing” is forever ruined for me. So while an “intriguing” email may double my chances for finding “that special someone,” I’m holding off. Male or female, my potential online dating partners will soon be a distant memory.

Thing is, I think “dating” is too hefty a term for me. I need to be outsmarted when it comes to romance; the men who succumb to Match.com’s invitation to describe their interests, best features (this one’s a drop-down menu, which, because it did not offer “collarbones” as a choice, I left blank), and perfect match, are, only by fault of their just being there, too overt for my tastes. This is why Tito was so successful; he was just always around, here at a friend’s Christmas party, there at a summer fireworks show. Sometimes we’d meet by chance in a parking lot, and we’d argue about the merits of teaching Shakespeare to high school kids, or whether it was really possible for my car to get 40 miles to the gallon (not only possible but true), and then without warning, I was in love with him-- a hard, screeming meemie kind of love-- and the rest is a very sad story for another time. Point is, all this cyber-preening becomes meaningless. These men are not humans to me; they’re simply fodder for my judgment. And though the shirtless guys are asking for ridicule, the others are probably just as tired as I am of eating pizza for one. I wish them luck. I, however, plan to continue to walk in a straight line from point A to point B, and assume that someday there will be someone on the other side of the pizza. It’s bound to happen. Just not inside the cab of an F-250.