OKStupid: My Online Dating Experience Part II
I know that my last post made it seem like there was no light at the end of the tunnel and that OKCupid was awful for me in every possible way. That isn’t the case.
I had my fair share of discouraging and depressing experiences, but they weren’t all that way. I met more than a dozen really nice guys that I could talk to about my day or about this and that and they were truly normal. For most of hem, things didn't work out. They were too far away, or the chats stagnated.
I have met six people that I met on OKCupid in person. To me, that seems like plenty. I was very thorough about who I was willing to meet and who I wasn’t, and after that there were only six who made the cut. Three of them were one-date-only types. One made it to the fifth date mark. The other two are notable though, so I thought I would talk about them a bit. They are both aware that I’m writing about them.
Pablo (not his real name, his choice of fake name) was one of the first people to send me a message when I first started my account. My account had stated that I had a morbid fear of taxidermy, and he sent me a message saying that he also was made uncomfortable by our stuffed friends. I will be the first to admit that there were some red flags. He lived in Montana, but had his location as a remote location in northern Europe. He was also a lot older. Inappropriate-to-be-messaging-me older. But he wasn’t creepy. I sent him a message back, and that soon became a conversation that stretched across weeks. Pablo decided that his OKCupid journey was over, and we switched to email, talking nearly every day for months. We’re still great friends and talk to each other regularly and have met up periodically. It certainly wasn’t what I was looking for, but it’s become one of the most meaningful relationships I’ve had since moving out here. It’s never been anything but platonic and I think that’s what makes it so great. It just shows that sometimes things don't work out quite the way you thought they would, but they still work out.
The other success I’ve had isn’t much of a surprise. His name is Ben, and we’ve been together for a while now. When Ben started messaging me, I was actively seeing Mr. Five-Dates (his name is Nick) and contemplating taking down my profile. But Ben was nice, and I figured it was worth messaging him a few times to see where things went. Things didn't work out with Nick, but this turned out to be a not-awful thing.
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| From my recent post on sledding |
The thing that struck me most about Ben in the early days was how he always seemed to know exactly what I wanted. Just as I was thinking it was time to move our conversation to texting instead of online, he asked for my number. When I was thinking that tonight would be a great night to go for drinks, he asked me out. Ben has been a delight and I don’t want to jinx things too much by saying that. He challenges me in the best way possible and is up for all of my this-might-suck adventure plans. Without OKCupid, we wouldn’t have met. We run very different circles and it would have been an impossibility.
The take away that I felt from my time plumbing the deeps of the internet was that there is this hopeful optimism that you’ll meet someone nice and well-adjusted. It isn’t impossible and those people are out there. You just have to wade through the sludge to get there. And trust me, there's a lot of sludge.