Internet dating? Internet dating? Oh geez. Internet dating? Wow, don’t get me started on that. Seriously, you’ll regret it. You mean those internet sites where you post a photograph of yourself and give millions of people the opportunity to actively reject you? I mean, isn’t meeting someone in real life stressful enough? Does she like me, does she find me attractive? Am I being charming, will I sweep her off her feet and be some kind of a, a, a medieval warrior in a, a lustrous metal costume? Sure all that’s there face to face, but it’s done in an instant. Like that! Ephemeral. You can go home and replay it al in your mind, embellishing if the need arises, or you can forget it completely once the bruises heal. I fool myself into thinking people like me all the time, and I don’t remember if they don’t. There’s no hard evidence against you. That’s why I never write letters. I once went out with a girl who got angry with me because I didn’t giver her a birthday card. But I can’t leave a paper trail. It’s incriminating! That’s the first thing they teach you when you become a politician. Yes, I bet you didn’t know that about me, I tried to be a politician. I would have been a great Congressman, a really fabulous Senator. It’s just that Washington, D.C. is so muggy. I’d have to wring out my suits when I got to work every morning. Do you know what my dry cleaning bill would have been? And I sleep with a crappy dehumidifier, my dead aunt gave it to me and I couldn’t replace it with a better one. It’d kill her.
But the fact is if you meet someone if person, when it’s over it’s over, you can move on if the need arises. If you do this internet dating, this e-dating, and you a rtecord of the whole affair. You have emails now. So you look at the pictures on your match.com and you see all these beautiful women. You want to meet one, naturally, so you write to her. You gotta make this good, kiddo, y’know? It’s your only shot and there’s no body language, no reading her expression. You’re a doctor diagnosing a patient with no symptoms. That’s one of the first thing they teach you in medical school, to look for symptoms. Yes, I went to medical school in Belgium for a year. I wanted to be a neurologist. But I ended up having to drop out because all the classes were in Flemish, and I have very bad allergies. You have to write like Oscar Wilde for god’s sake, but, let’s be honest, not too much like Oscar Wilde. You have to channel Shakespeare or Henry James or, or, or William Safire. Who has the stamina and mental acuity for this?
Or, maybe you’re lucky enough, somebody saw your photograph and, and they’re attracted, or you lied and put up Clark Gable’s picture or whatnot, and now you have this note from some mysterious woman. All these carefully chosen words strung together, each one dripping with some kind of meaning or, if you’re lucky, innuendo. You can read it over and over and interpret and reinterpret, get Freudian analysis to see what this woman thinks of her parents, how much of a giving lover she may be. You subject the note to Rorschach tests and see what kind of anagrams you can make. You end up with pages and pages of data to reconcile and you need multi-variable calculus to figure it all out. I should know, I was a mathematician for 4 months, specializing in numerical relationships. I studied with von Neumann at Princeton until they kicked me out. I don’t want to get into the reason why, I’m embarrassed to say, but it had something to do with my misinterpreting the meaning of the word “squash”. So now you have this note, this email to ponder over. Did she mean this or that? Was that misspelled or a word I never heard of? Are those hugs and kisses or is her real name Xoxo? There it is. Hard evidence to get the neuroses flowing.
Ok, so let’s be optimistic for a moment, and assume hypothetically that this all works out. E-courtship turns to actual courtship. There’s some chemistry, your mind is blown, and you decided to make her an honest woman. And at the wedding reception everybody wants to know, how did the bride and groom meet? How did they get together? I wouldn’t want to tell people the truth. How embarrassing you couldn’t meet someone in real life. Everybody there would know and you’d forever be that couple who met on the internet. Even the priest would laugh at you. Believe, I was one for 3 weeks. They stripped me of my post for ideological reasons. I wouldn’t eat the host. First off it’s rude, and second, it’s not on the Atkins diet.