Three Cheers For The Internet! — Thinking Comes Later

If not for the Internet, these two uggos never would've hooked up.

Today I found myself staring at a sidebar ad on Facebook. A gorgeous blonde coed was posed in a senior picture-esque tableau, and the caption read “WANT TO MEET GIRLS?” Well, yes, I do want to meet girls, but I can do that without your help, sidebar ad. Hell, I live up a flight of stairs from 20 girls, most of whom I’ve met. This is what I’ve never understood: guys are always complaining about there being no good place to meet girls when it’s really not that hard at all – just go outside. There’s literally hundreds of women on Earth, all of them positively waiting to be met if you’d only go out and meet them. If you’re too lazy to do that, just hang out in the women’s bathroom long enough and I guarantee that you’ll meet a lot of women, and maybe a few angry policemen to boot. But of course, they weren’t asking me if I wanted to meet girls, they were asking if I wanted to date girls, and despite my better judgment I do, so I clicked the link and found myself at an online dating site.

Dating is an awkward, nerve wracking, embarassing experience, and adding the Internet to the equation has only made things worse. Dating is characterized (sometimes) by a search for love and affection, while the Internet is characterized (always) by a search for pornography and free mp3s. Why combine the two!? Looking for love on the Internet is like looking for healthy, nutritious vegetables in a sewer, or trying to find good qualities in a Republican presidential candidate. When you meet a girl and ask her out in real life, you incur a lot of risks. Maybe she’ll turn you down (I’ve been there), or maybe she’ll be a complete psychopath (I’ve been there)* who’ll dope your food with laxatives while you aren’t looking in order to fulfill some bizarre sexual desire (I haven’t been there yet, but I’ve heard stories). But dating on the Internet? That makes things even more dicey! When you meet somebody in person you can at least get some general idea of their personality, looks, and gender, but on the Internet all of that can be changed!

*To put any of my ex-girlfriends who are reading this at ease, the psycho of which I speak was neither half Eskimo nor vegetarian nor a business major. You three dodged a bullet this time, but if you get on my bad side you’ll have a one way ticket to Scathing Blog Entry-ville. That’s no lie.

The site’s main page featured several large webcam pictures of breathtakingly attractive women that it claimed were members of the website, women so mind-bogglingly beautiful that I wondered why they were spending their evenings searching for love among the anonymous geeks of the Internet when they could just as easily go into a bar and have the Duke University lacrosse team buy them drinks and possibly roofies at a moment’s notice. I searched the site for users from Portland who considered themselves “Smokin Hot”, and found myself with the profile pictures for 11 buff, shirtless guys and one girl who was probably 16 and didn’t correspond to my definition of the term “Smokin’ Hot”.

I guess people will defend Internet dating forever as it gets more advanced. Apparently eHarmony.com has distilled love, an ambiguous term that robots can’t understand, into a 250 question test (which gays aren’t allowed to take, because eHarmony is owned and operated by evangelical Christians who were personally told by Jesus that gays can’t feel love). No matter how many relatives I have to disappoint, though, I’m going to stick to my skepticism of Internet dating. Geeky guys have been getting together with good looking women for years without the Internet’s help – for proof, just look at my Dad’s senior picture alongside my Mom’s.

Truman Capps has made jabs at his ex-girlfriends, evangelical Christians, and his father in this update, and no doubt one of the three is going to get him back before next week.