Romantic Calculus Part 2: The Dating Game

At least with this round of singledom, I've only had one strategy for finding a girl. I haven't hit on girls at work (to the best of my abilities) or at parties and I don't smile at girls sitting across from me on the train. I've never been much for that sort of thing because I've never had much talent for it. Also, I hate it. Also, I'm probably going to continue to run into them and be awkward forever after. As previously discussed, my tastes are pretty specific, so even when my charm is turned up to full blast my hit rate is abysmal, because either the girl isn't feeling it or two minutes into talking to them I realize there's nothing there or both, and in all cases I've made my world just a little bit colder.

So I use OKCupid, of course. It's the largest free dating site, which means that it is lighthearted, well-built and populous as fuck. It has mechanics for matching based on user-solicited questions and it has produced some fascinating blogging.

The question, of course, is how do I use it? Because I have a process, you see.

Granted, this is going to be a simplification. Granted also that such a simplification will make this sound cold because A) it systematizes romance and B) it sweeps away all the dirt and fluff that makes anyone endearing. To this, I have to say A) systematizing romance is the perverse joy of this series and B) if you want to see me all warm and fuzzy you're in the wrong place.

The first step, particularly with OKC since the questions are essentially a customizable matching algorithm, is answering some questions. Actually, quite a lot of questions, especially the ones about sex. Here's how they work: you answer the question, list what answers you would prefer a potential partner give and the rate how much you care about how they answered. Also, if you want you can explain your answer or even go off on a diatribe. Here's an example.

The special beauty of these match questions is that you can use them to ask questions you couldn't ask directly and wouldn't find out until much later. There are a number of questions I've rated "Mandatory", and the algorithm manages the balance of ignoring what I say just the right amount. Here are the questions I rated "Mandatory":

Once you're intimate, how often would you and your significant other have sex? Every day
I prefer to sleep ... Embracing / cuddling my partner
Are you either vegetarian or vegan? No
How well do you handle criticism? Really well
Do you like the taste of beer? Yes
Not as in whips and chains, but in general, do you prefer your partner to be... Balanced
Rate your self-confidence: Higher than average
How much can intelligence turn you on? A lot!
Guys/girls who are tall and lanky: Love it! (or neutral)
When it comes to art, do you prefer works that are abstract or representational? Representational (or neutral)
Do you enjoy intense intellectual conversations? Yes
Which is worse: starving children or abused animals? Starving children

Of these, I do a manual hard screen for "How often would you have sex?" since this particular issue has been thorn in my side for a long time. By that I mean that I won't consider someone who answered something other than "Every day", I won't message someone who hasn't answered the question and if someone messages me who hasn't answered the question I will ask them directly right off the bat (with apologies). I do a soft screen for sleeping style and vegetarianism. The vegetarianism thing is a litmus test for a lot of other ideological stuff, but it's also important because eating at a restaurant with a vegetarian will drive me crazy. I love to share meals. I *need* to share meals. Both directions.

Since I usually consider people with 80+% match ratings, chances are they match me on most of my mandatory questions if they answered them at all. After that, it's how pretty they are and how smart/interesting they come across in their profile. What also factors in is how much they've given me to work with when writing them a message. Many people say nothing of substance on their profile. If I wanted to message them, I'd be reduced to something like, "I see you like the Beatles too... what is your favorite album of theirs?" Definitely suboptimal. Even if everything else looks good, they've given me no basis on which to judge whether or not our personalities/intelligences will be compatible, so I likely won't get around to sending anything (unless they're REALLY pretty).

Now that I've messaged the person, the chances that they will respond are pretty low. The most relevant reason for this is that I have intentionally written my profile to screen girls. Why, you ask? Because I hate bad first dates. I have strong opinions, I'm socially ungraceful, and I am a misanthrope. I like everyone theoretically, but I respect relatively few, and I won't be able to have sex with them if I don't respect them, because it will be emblazoned across my face and they will not appreciate it. All of this said, some girls message me back. Some even message me unsolicited. And I tend to like the girls who do.

Once they've messaged back, I might poke them a little if their profile was light, but most likely I will suggest we meet for coffee. There's really no reason to spend a lot of time messaging back and forth. If I'm going to discern compatibility that wasn't evident in their profile, it will probably be in person. People often come across very differently in message anyways.

The purpose of a coffee date (beer works almost as well) is for something short and cheap that provides an opportunity to talk. If I were pro, I'd intentionally schedule coffee dates such that I had to leave after the first hour (as a friend once recommended). In practice my first dates have run two or three hours, but they are still pretty short and sweet. This is because the point of the coffee date isn't really to hear the person's life story, it's just to see if we have chemistry and if they're smart. I already know they're decently attractive and match me in a lot of personal ways. If things go well, at the end of the date I will say that I like them and am going to ask them out again. I might even set up the second date right then and there.

The second date is for real. The goal is to get to know the girl and, if we continue to click, to at very least kiss her. By the end of the second date, I have always felt like I had a good idea whether or not this was a person I could really like. Whether or not we will have a successful relationship is something that I won't be able to determine for a good bit longer, but the question of whether or not I want to have sex with them will have been conclusively answered.

This might not be the best dating strategy for everyone, but it is definitely working for me. I suspect online dating will continue to gain in popularity. I hope OKCupid will continue to be the beneficiaries of that trend.

Since I'm on the subject, I might as well link you to a friend of mine's sadistic OKC experiment.

Frank, you're just an asshole.

For reference: G is a year into the unflattering throes of getting dumped by a guy he'd gone out with for three or four months and fallen madly in love with. Also, I saw "her" from a distance for the second time since it ended about thirty minutes before this conversation took place. Other than (obviously) the anonymization, this hasn't been altered from the chat we had earlier this evening. I'm also going to include this link to a blog post by a mutual friend that we had both read before this conversation.

G: I had a conversation with T about you

  and she helped me understand why you were so mad at me.

  You and I have completely different ideas of what love is.

me: oh? which time being mad at you?

G: Most recent

  when I said you never loved her.

me: it was more silly than offensive. you couldnt know

G: Well, I don't think you loved her.

  But that's because of what I mean by love.

  I think it's unfathomable to leave someone if you love them.

  So like for comparison / my frame of reference.

  I thought I had contracted HIV and was going to die.

me: is it unfathomable to love someone who you can't be happy with?

G: My first thought was not "oh shit, my life expectancy"

  it was "oh no, I'll need to stay away from Sean forever to keep him safe."

  it turns out I didn't get HIV (most likely).

  but my thoughts were about the other person's well being

me: damned false negatives

G: above my own life

  and like

  for me

  that's a minimum requisite for love

  is that you have to care more about them than yourself

  and that doesn't seem compatible with the narrative you told me about your breakup.

    I think that loving someone (or something) in the conversational usage is different, it just means to be deeply grateful for their presence in your life

  but to be in love with someone, to love someone (romantically), means that you are completely given over to that person.

  that nothing in your life is as important as preserving their happiness

me: link

G: so that still doesn't see the semantic difference

  it says people shouldn't use it casually

  but there's a profound difference in the two meanings of love I laid out

  I don't think that post had that first meaning

  of thinking instinctively of her

  when harm was in your way

  rather than yourself

  not that you were in a life-threatening situation

  but like

  that reflex

  is a major part of love.

  as I understand it.

  and so given that, I don't understand how you could amicably end a relationship and call it love.

me: i guess this begs the question, by this definition are there people who are incapable of love?

G: yes.

me: well then it's just another kind of elitism

G: and I think that Sean, the guy I loved, is one of those people, unfortunately.

  But maybe not.

  I think it's for the best that he ended it, because now he has the chance to experience that with someone if I couldn't be the one he could experience it with.

me: that sounds like progress

G: no, I really don't think it's a superiority thing Frank

  I just think it's different.

  I think it's rare, and painful, and I basically lost the will to live (not suicidal, but lost all ability to imagine a happy future) post breakup.

me: in that blog post i linked

G: it was shattering in a way nothing else has ever been.

me: you are among the "poets, panderers and theorists"

  he forgot an additional kind of person that falls there: fools

G: You're a windblown douchebag who doesn't listen.

  I'm telling you that there's an emotional tie that I don't think you understand

  and I think you're dismissive of that.

  And you should just listen a minute reserving judgment.

me: i thank fate that T is from such an intensely monogamous culture, because in that context it wont be pathological

  you're screwed, though

G: Frank, you're just an asshole. I'm done talking to you.

Guilty as charged. I laughed my head off when he signed off.

Romantic Calculus

I remember thinking in college, after the rare promising, mutually interested girl didn't pan out, that the odds were against me.

50% of people are male and consequently unavailable
50% of women are spoken for
40% of women are either out of my league or I'm out of their league
     (let's say 20 and 20)
50% of women are only interested in men that share their religion
     (closer to 20% in college, though)
98% of women aren't intelligent enough to interest me
     (closer to 95% of my school's undergrads, but still extremely high)
80% of people are incompatible with my rather strong personality

I calculated that I would meet one compatible woman for every 800 students. I'd have to not only meet 800 undergrads, but talk with them long enough to know whether they were a romantic possibility or not. Since I'd just met and dated somebody who fit all those qualifications, I figured I'd blown my wad for my whole college career.

By the time I graduated, I'd realized I needed to add that approximately
70% of women don't want enough sex to make me content
and
80% of women were either too old or too young for me

So out of college, the numbers were even more daunting. One in 83,000 people I met should be romantically compatible with me. I stand by these numbers.

Fortunately, sometime in college I had an important epiphany: prehistoric humans had to make due with what they had. They lived in bands of 50-150 people and at most had a dating pool of 500-2000 people (a dozen culturally similar bands might meet or interact with one another). Even worse, our ancestors 500 years ago had arranged marriages. Their partner was picked largely for economic reasons, yet divorce rates hovered around 2% and I have to assume that they grew to love each other and were more or less content with their lot. This is all to say that we can love practically anyone. Some may be easier to love than others, but humans are far more romantically flexible than modern society would suggest. This is largely because the modern concept of monogamy is more emotionally and personally intense than 500 or 10,000 years ago. We want our spouse to be our best friend, our partner, our roommate and our only lover. We are the victims of our own high expectations.

While recognizing that our society is plagued by terrifyingly high expectations didn't change those expectations, it did go a long way toward calming me down. Humans, ultimately, have a proven ability to happily settle with far less. I thought to myself, probably everybody goes through this calculus and comes up with similarly alarming numbers, yet somehow the human race continues to multiply. There was a disconnect between those numbers and reality. This was partly because I'd stated my "bare minimum" based on my concept of what I needed rather than on my experience and partly because the very environment we choose to place ourselves in drastically improves our odds.

Living in a major city? Not in a slum? The average IQ there is much higher than 100 and hardcore religiousness is much lower than 50%. Ever date friends of friends? They are far more likely to be culturally and intellectually compatible with you. Did you count other men as people you have to "search through"? How about women who are spoken for, too young, old, ugly or pretty? These things aren't hard to determine quickly. Have you ever thought about how easy it is to judge a book by its cover? On the bus do you ever find yourself categorizing people? Immigrant, punk kid, gay guy, neohippy, educated couple, not-quite-homeless bearded old guy (probably an old hippy), second gen immigrant kids in high school, well-dressed nerd who's probably a programmer, tourists, crazy cat lady, scene kid, etc, it's so easy it's practically unconscious. How they're dressed, their facial expression, how they sit... like it or not we also fit into these categories. Only rarely (and certainly more rarely than we think) do we qualify as "genuine iconoclast" and even when we do it's usually clear what sort of people we're most likely to get along with or date.

Of course, the biggest turning point in my approach to "romantic calculus" was precipitated by finding my first girlfriend. I was forced to reconcile that I had found a compatible person against the supposed odds. If life had doomed me to a life of loneliness, it certainly wasn't acting like it.

The thing is, --and I cannot stress this enough-- there is no mathematical way to predict your likelihood of finding somebody in a given year based on established preferences. Predicting your likelihood based on past experience might have some bearing on reality, but that assumes that you, your lifestyle and method of finding people remains constant. For somebody in their twenties, this is never the case. For somebody in their forties, this is only rarely the case.

None of this is to say that thinking about compatibility calculus is necessarily a bad thing. Thinking about how you are rendering candidates with perfectly-good hearts, minds or genitalia ineligible is a good way to address systematic ways you are placing yourself out in the cold. In practice, though, it is more common for such calculus to be misused. Wallowing in dooming numbers is self-defeating, childish and oh-so-common. Everybody likes a good pity party.

Then again, pity parties are unpleasant from the outside looking in, which is why I'm here to rain on all the pity parties that you, my readers, are undoubtedly indulging in at this very moment. There is hope for all of you. Actually, there was this one lady I saw on the bus the other day who was probably hopeless... but you're not her!

Sleeping with People

A certain friend of mine once told me that she put out as a means towards sharing a bed. At the time I thought that was absurd. Sex is way better than spooning, right?

I'm still in withdrawal from the comforts of a relationship. Funnily enough, I've come to the same conclusion about sharing a bed. I miss that more than sex.

I understand that sharing a bed can often be an inconvenience rather than a luxury. A certain mother and daughter I know only shared a bed out of fiscal necessity. Apparently the daughter was a wiggleworm, especially when she was younger. I can't really speak to that. In contrast to even the previously-mentioned friend, I've never had a moment when the inconvenience of sharing a bed outweighed the pleasure.

The problem with being such a fan of sharing a bed (as possibly illustrated by the certain friend), is that classically it requires a relationship. There are other options, though.

It would be a little too awkward to share a bed with my platonic female friends. Like it or not, there will always be some sexual tension there. The good news about being oriented more-or-less completely one direction, sexually, is that I don't have to worry about sexual tension with guys. I still have to worry about morning wood and spooning is kind of out, but I'm comfortable enough with my sexuality that it can work at least theoretically.

My friend "C" visited me for a few days last month and I lured him into sleeping with me. Partly there were some circumstances that encouraged it, like not having a couch and being unwilling to give up my bed during the workweek. Ultimately though, it was an unselfconscious, premeditated attempt to fill that hole in my life.

Of all my friends, C is easily the most okay with that sort of thing. We've both actively looked for homosexual tendencies in ourselves and come up empty, so we both have that magical combination of a complete lack of homophobia and a rather complete heterosexuality.

Sharing a bed again felt fantastic. Even without any real physical contact, his presence in my bed felt incredibly comforting. Not in a "close my eyes and pretend it's her" kind of way either, but in the same real way that I remember first enjoying. I had some intensely heterosexual dreams, though. Ones that were a tad awkward to wake up to, if you catch my drift.

So I can theoretically have most of what I miss about sleeping with someone without the uncertainty of a relationship. In practice, of course, romance is usually easier for guys. I asked a close friend who lives nearby if he'd sleep with me (he just went through a breakup too) and he politely declined. Ah well, so it goes.

For you girls out there, however, sharing each-others' beds is societally acceptable. With your anatomy, it's even cool to spoon each other to sleep. I hope you're grateful and I hope you take advantage of that fact to the extent that you are able, because I am thoroughly envious.

The other option I've heard is getting a dog. I've always thought sleeping with dogs was more trouble than it was worth. Something about physical presence meaning more from sentient life. It's still a great halfway solution, but I won't be getting a dog quite yet.

Both Eyes Open

I did it to myself. I know that sex triggers imprinting. I thought about it while I was sitting there, flush with afterglow and basking in oxytocin, staring at her, willing myself to drink every bit up, to imprint as hard as I was capable of. I was similarly cognizant of my own willful stupidity when I held her casually, excessively, even possessively. I thought about it when initiating more sex than I really needed and then while we had that sex. Overkill turned out to be fun in and of itself. This will add to my pyre. When we stared into each other's eyes, I felt like she was thinking the same thing, like she was making the same silly choice. That endeared her to me even more, though her consent was likely imagined.

I knew it would end. I knew this would come. I knew it would hurt like a bitch. Hell, I wanted it to hurt like a bitch. Did I anticipate the damage to be so perverse? Did I realize the grief would seek not to make me pay in pain, but to etch its toll upon my soul? I knew it wouldn't be so straightforward as simple, immense suffering. I knew it was likely to leave a mark, and an ugly one at that. In a way, I knew. I'd at least reconciled myself to that nature of cost. I didn't anticipate the terror it would inspire, but what's terror? Poor man's pain, that's what.

I also knew halfway wouldn't have been worth it. Halfway would have been disingenuous, not to the perfection of our pairing (though I've perpetrated plenty of self-delusion, I never deluded myself into believing in perfection), but to the moment of opportunity. Opportunity to both of us. The cost of the decision was similarly equal.

Should I feel guilty? What I engendered on myself went both ways, knowing participant or not. I'd like to think she knew. I know her values and ideology were different enough for her to disagree with the principle, but did she agree with the instance? I guess I felt like it was a good decision for me so it must be a good decision for her, even if I was making it for her. That's at least morally questionable, but I try for questionability not to give me pause. You only get so many chances to dive into experience like that. I've had far fewer chances than I have hoped. Fewer than many I idolize and envy. Damned if I won't make the most of what comes my way.