The waiting

I made fun of online dating on this blog (http://fallingovergirl.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html) a while back. But now I’ve decided to try it, using a free site. Some thoughts a few days in:

1. As in life, the men I like and those who like me are two different categories.

2. Being a 36-year-old baby mama does not make me part of the most popular demographic in men’s eyes.

3. I seem to fare better in bars, where my age and parental status are not immediately apparent. Online, it's like they are written on big signs that people see before they register anything else.

4. But I have to try it because all the couples I know met online.

5. Because relationships that start in bars are unlikely to lead to feeling loved.

6. And Christmas break is coming up—the time when my grad-school friends leave town. Might as well go out with strangers so as not to asphyxiate of boredom.

7. Dating sites subject you to a lot of junk-email from folks who CANNOT SPELL OR USE GRAMMAR.

8. Yet they also increase your odds of having an important encounter with someone you wouldn’t have met otherwise.

9. If love is a hotel, online dating is like the hallway. As you walk through, checking out the people passing by or beckoning you toward slightly-open doors, you think: “In the past, I have always just rushed into a room in this hotel. And then I woke up 12 hours later, bruised, robbed, and with no real idea what happened...”

10. It would take only one really good date to make this worthwhile.

And this, from T.S. Eliot (in “East Coker” from Four Quartets):

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.”