On New Year’s Day I got an email from a guy saying my OkCupid box was full. I had set up an OkCupid account when I was writing for Valleywag, but hadn’t logged in since. Mostly I wrote about the mechanics of the site, and not the people I met through it. I used my real name as my login, because I couldn’t imagine inventing a fake one. And it felt fair. If I was maybe going to be using anything I learned from even looking at other people’s profiles as part of a story, why not be real about that and give them something to Google me by? Which meant, by the end of this brief — what I will not call experiment because I was not going to lie and say I was only in it to sell stories against it, I was also in it to have some adventures that may or may not yield stories or good sex or good times in general — time, I existed on OkCupid not as girl-you-want-to-meet but as girl-you-can-go-read.
Since abandoning that account, I haven’t had the stomach for trying to date people on the internet. There have been exceptions. No dating sites, no fake names. But. What about whatever that interaction is, that looks like dating, that arises from the mutual admiration society of “blog culture,” and which isn’t dating at all — it’s a public performance (writing for the public, of which this person is a part) that you are temporarily consenting to take private? What about answering ads here and there on Casual Encounters and meeting up with men and not exchanging names, existing as email accounts to be forgotten?
What appear to be extremes work. Though they aren’t opposite of one another — either publishing everything for someone to read so they can, as Maura put it so fucking well, “decide whether or not to be grossed out by you before I have to bother,” or telling nothing. Either way is about a calculated decision. And even the act of “telling everything” is a fucking act. “I’m the girl who tells you everything!” There’s always going to be gaps and gutters between people where the other can fill in their fantasy of you.
On New Year’s Day I logged back into my OkCupid account to kill it and half the messages in my inbox were from men who wanted to say they liked my writing.
