Last Friday, I shared my personal experience with online dating. Today I’m going to list some more general objections that I often make when being pushed to try online dating.
1. Let’s not forget that online dating is a business. A very profitable one. For one thing, it’s not in its financial best interest for you to find the love of your life right away. For another, like many businesses, it seeks customers by marketing to their unmet desires and vulnerabilities. I hate advertising that hits people below the belt about their most important relationships, or lack thereof. The worst offender, Christian Mingle, takes it a step further and brings your theology into it too. Its tagline is “Find God’s match for you,” as if a) their algorithm is divinely inspired and b) God can only work within the confines of their matching pool. Here’s a direct quote from the commercial that makes me the most furious: “Sometimes, we wait for God to make the next move, when God is saying it’s your time to act. The next move is yours.” I’m not here to debate all the subtleties of that statement, but I doubt Jesus would be on board with its manipulative spirit. As if no matter how thoughtfully and prayerfully you’re living out your singleness, it only continues because you’re too stubborn or lazy to join Christian Mingle. As if God is rolling His eyes waiting for you to get on board. I just don’t want to support that.
A while back, CM ran a lot of testimonial ads on Entertainment Weekly Radio during the evening rush hour. I deeply resented having my happy pop culture time interrupted with emotional grenades like “If I’d never joined Christian Mingle, I wouldn’t have this beautiful family.” Like Hey, online dating hater, I hope you’re enjoying this Town Hall with Daniel Radcliffe, because you’re going to die alone!
Full disclosure: One of my best friends, who has much fewer hangups than I, met her boyfriend after 48 hours on Christian Mingle. I’m very happy for her and I refer to their relationship as “Results Not Typical.” (It should be noted that in that 48 hours, another guy broke the ice with her by asking for her views on infant baptism.)
2. Online dating is corporate, impersonal, and high-pressure. You’re essentially being interviewed for the position of someone’s life partner. Some might argue that all dating is like an interview, but that hasn’t been my experience (yet). As the comments section of every popular website proves, the internet can steal your humanity. People treat others like products or prey.
Some of my best friends (including the one I just mentioned) are women I met online, and our friendships are real and alive. I’m thankful for them every day. But we were drawn to one another as people. We chose to be friends. There was no evaluation or series of getting-to-know-you questions. Nothing was herding us along. We just connected naturally. For me, that’s key. If I naturally find myself talking to a guy or having things in common with him, in person or online, I don’t feel threatened because we’re just two people talking. There are no expectations. It’s all good. But having to decide based on a profile, a picture, and a few quiz answers whether I want to Buy It Now? I get heart palpitations (and a powerful sense of ickiness) just thinking about it. Men don’t do online dating to find friends. They don’t take kindly to you “wasting their time.” For me as a woman, once I move forward, there’s a sense of obligation. (I object to that too, but male privilege is too big a topic for this post.)
3. I can’t speak to all online dating services, but at least on eHarmony, long-distance relationships are strongly encouraged. Their blogs and literature imply that if you don’t want one, you’re not giving God room to work or whatever. If you don’t have a very large match radius, they send you multiple e-mails about expanding it. Obviously this is a personal preference, but it’s one they ought to respect. I’m not saying I’d never enter a long-distance relationship, because there are a few circumstances that would make it more okay for me. But with a complete stranger? You don’t have any firsthand or backup knowledge of his family, his friends, or anything about his day-to-day life. You don’t know if you’d even get along living in the same city. All you know is what he tells you. It’s a relationship in a vacuum. He could easily be married with three kids and you’d never know. And even if everything is on the up and up, a long-distance relationship can only end one way. Someone has to move, and in a “traditional” relationship where the man takes priority, guess who that’s going to be?
4. Online dating makes it much easier to lie about yourself. I know, I know, people can and do lie about themselves and their activities in any circumstances. I got snowed in my own marriage. But in person, you pick up on cues you just can’t sense through a computer screen. And if you have mutual acquaintances, you can confirm facts or check into things that seem fishy. (See #3.)
5. THIS.
If online dating worked for you or someone you love, great! Really, I’m happy for you. But it’s not for everyone. As with everything else in life, we need to learn to respect each other’s different personalities, needs, and principles regarding dating. We need to stop treating online dating like a trump card – it makes singles feel even more hopeless when they play the card and it doesn’t work. I know that when you find the right person, how you met is irrelevant. For all I know, I’ll change my mind eventually and find the perfect man on one of these sites. But it’s unlikely. I personally can’t open myself up to a relationship if I don’t feel at ease, and online dating makes me deeply uneasy for all the reasons I listed.
I’m undecided as to whether there will be a Part 3 of this series. If you’d like me to address anything in particular, tell me in the comments!
6 Comments + Posted in: dating, singleness
Venus Trapped in Mars is doing a TotalSocial linkup today, and the topic is Firsts. My originally planned post has been delayed, and this seemed like fun, so I thought hey, why not? Plus, Karen‘s doing it. :)
First movie seen in the theater: The first movie I can remember seeing is Return of the Jedi. I was scared of Jabba the Hutt and hid behind my blankie whenever he came on screen.
First professional sporting event: My parents took me to a Miami Dolphins game when I was a few months old. And thus I embarked upon the rough life of a Dolphins fan.
First best friend: Kristi and I were in the same kindergarten class. I moved away after fourth grade, but I’m happy to say we’re still friends. I see her whenever I’m in Miami. Her kids are now older than we were when we met!
First bicycle: It was a purple one-speed with a rainbow banana seat, decorated in a unicorn motif. I also had a “Miami Miss” Big Wheel which was turquoise and hot pink (the unofficial color palette of Miami in the 80s).
First literary obsession: I was equally obsessed with Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books, and The Baby-Sitters Club.
First date: My first boyfriend took me ice skating at the Mall of Memphis right before Christmas during our freshman year of high school. While there, he gave me a my Christmas present, a stuffed orca whale (I was crazy for marine mammals). It was really sweet. The mall was torn down a few years ago, but I still have the whale.
First album I ever bought for myself: Debbie Gibson, Out of the Blue. 1988. Confession: I still know all the words.
First concert: Michael W. Smith and DC Talk, 1993.
First international trip destination: Madrid, Spain. It was the first stop on my trip to Europe when I was fifteen.
First “real” job: I worked at the Hallmark in the mall during my senior year of high school and then off and on in college. I enjoyed it and learned many life lessons there, one being that some grown women will cut you over Beanie Babies or Cherished Teddies.
First car: A 1984 Toyota Camry with a sunroof. It was a great car and I still think of it fondly. Years later, the whole undercarriage fell apart while my dad was driving it downtown.
First roommate: I didn’t know anyone moving into the dorms at U of M, and I was assigned an… eccentric roommate. She was smart and friendly, but she also frequently locked me out to have guys over (among other things), which got old pretty quickly. After one semester I moved in with my suitemate, Kathy. We went on to live together for seven more years and she remains one of my BFFs.
First home of my own: Several months after graduating from college, I moved into an old but full-of-character(s) apartment complex near campus. First I lived there alone, then with Kathy, and then with my ex-husband. Many of my most important life events happened in that apartment (literally; my ex proposed in the living room) and I’ll always be sentimental about it.
First day as a blogger: April 15, 2010
First tweet:
Yes, I joined Twitter to follow the Tigers. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
4 Comments + Posted in: linkup, memory lane
Jules-Adolphe Breton, The Last Gleanings (public domain)
On Mother’s Day morning, I woke up thinking about the things that bind women together. Not the things that separate us.
In much of the Christian world, there’s an implication that childless women are deficient, that motherhood is the pinnacle of femininity. I’ve bought into this lie myself. I’ve believed myself a broken, insufficient picture of womanhood because I don’t and may never have children. But I’m in a real Eowyn mood lately, and I’m currently convinced that I’m no less a woman than a mother of five.
In her book Ruby Slippers, Jonalyn Fincher talks about the common core of woman, the traits that we all share (beyond the gender-role boxes taught in Sunday School or John Gray books). One of them is that women, mothers or not, are cultivators of life. I woke up yesterday with that phrase in my mind, thinking of the many wonderful women I know and the diverse ways in which they cultivate life. They create art that brings beauty into the world. They educate children and adults. They provide loving homes for pets. They nurture businesses and ministries. They speak truth with compassion. They inspire others to try new things. They help people break free of shame and oppression. They bring hope and laughter into dark places. They invest in their city. They bring about the kingdom of God on earth, a little at a time. And most of them do all this while also raising their own children, which is definitely a hugely important job in itself.
I’m a cultivator too. In summertime I grow a vegetable garden and tend my flowers to help them become strong and beautiful. I fuss over my two cats a little too much (ask anyone). I try to be a positive influence and fun aunt to my niece and my friends’ children. In my writing and my relationships, I strive to make people feel encouraged, understood, and valued for who they are. When I do these things, I feel more alive, in general and in my womanhood. I’m getting more purposeful about cultivating life through my everyday actions (which I’ll talk about more in my monthly Alive post next week).
Let’s start paying attention to how each of us uniquely cultivates life. And then let’s celebrate it!
6 Comments + Posted in: one word 365, womanhood
Before we begin, you should know that I’ve been sitting on this post for years. Every time I try to write about dating, it turns into a rant about online dating, which I delete and try to forget about. This week I realized it’s not going to leave me alone until I let it loose. I talk a big talk about daring greatly and writing my truths, and it’s time to walk the walk.
Most single adults in America have been hassled to try online dating. For some reason, coupled people of all ages see it as the only plausible way for their loved ones to find romantic partners. You can tell these people a hundred online dating horror stories, but they’ll shrug them all off because their friend’s co-worker met her husband that way. They don’t care about your reasoned, thoughtful, personal objections. Online dating is the answer. It will provide your perfect match, reverse global warming, and cure cancer. It is the fairy godmother of your nonexistent love life, and if you choose not to partake of its magic, you have only yourself to blame.
I signed up for eHarmony in the summer of 2012. I had been divorced for two years and, unlike every other divorced person I knew, still hadn’t dated at all. Nor did I have any single male presence in my life. I just wanted to learn to interact with men again, to see some hope, and it wasn’t happening naturally. So, with trepidation and a little shame, I filled out my first ever online dating profile for the shortest allowable term: three months. I limited my radius to about a three-hour drive, because this was going to be tough enough without the added complications of long distance with a total stranger. Even so, I wasn’t expecting perfection, or to find my soul mate. I just wanted to feel excited about getting to know someone, and hopeful that I could someday have a good relationship. I was willing to try.
Well, most of my local matches’ profiles featured bicep-flexing bathroom-mirror selfies, or posing next to dead deer or fish, accompanied by a few fragmented, misspelled sentences. Still, admonished by others to give people a chance and not make “shallow judgments,” I went through the lengthy, automated getting-to-know-you process again and again. The results were all flavors of weird and uncomfortable. One match stated in his profile that God had placed a very important calling on his life and whomever he was with would have to be on board. I asked him to tell me more about this calling, imagining missions in the Congo or something. It was to create a Christian video game. Then he offered to tell me about the New World Order and the approaching end times, of which he had special revelation. (Months later, I found out that a friend was also matched with this guy and actually went on a date with him.)
Many other matches self-importantly stressed their requirements for a “Proverbs 31 woman” and/or a “helpmeet” to support their endeavors. DELETED!
So it’s no wonder that, even though it wasn’t what I wanted, I caved to eHarmony’s aggressive “suggestions” to expand my radius. I had some okay e-mail conversations with faraway men, but nothing outstanding. Eventually, I was only talking to one guy, who lived in Florida. We started talking on the phone. Then he wanted to visit, and got annoyed that I wasn’t available right away. He was nice, but the whole time, I felt unbelievable pressure to develop feelings that just weren’t there. Like I owed it to him, people in my life, even eHarmony itself to go along with it regardless of my hesitations. After about six weeks, stressed out and unhappy, I broke it off. I had confirmed that a manufactured relationship with a total stranger, especially long-distance, wasn’t something I could do.
My online dating experience resulted in zero actual dates, and I ended up worse off emotionally and relationally than when I started. To add insult to injury, I forgot to actively cancel my account and ended up with three more months when I just wanted to be free of the whole thing. I mostly ignored my profile from then on and deleted it as soon as the term was up.
It’s been two years, and sometimes I think about trying again with a different dating service. But honestly, I think it would still be miserable for me. Like it or not, I am a quality-over-quantity girl. I’d rather keep holding out for a real live man, an organic connection, than waste time and energy looking for a mate in a vacuum. If that makes me narrow-minded, or too picky, or not submissive to God’s leading, well, I guess that’s what I am. But even if I die alone, I will do so at peace with myself.
I’ll get into some generalized concerns and complaints about online dating in Part 2. But it felt right to tell my story first.
PS: I’m not against meeting someone online “in the wild.” In that case, something drew you to one another as people, in a context free of instant expectations.
32 Comments + Posted in: dating, reflections, singleness
Last weekend I trekked to Alabama again, with my parents, for Niecy’s birthday party. It was held in Lance’s hometown of Cullman, which is a lot closer to us than where Debra and Lance live. I can’t believe this child is already two years old!
My sister planned a really cute Elmo party! She scored many of the decorations at the Target dollar spot, and assembled snack plates that looked like Sesame Street characters… idea from Pinterest, of course. (While helping her make the grocery list, I said “It looks like they used olives for Cookie Monster and I know that can’t be right.” Grapes. Hello.)
At Debra’s request, I made a mix CD for the party because playlists are my love language. Niecy’s first birthday had a “Little Miss Sunshine” theme, which was easy to match musically. But this was a purely kid theme, and it turned out most of my music isn’t very suitable for toddlers. That has been remedied. I added the Cha Cha Slide to the end, because its instructions are easy and Niecy likes to dance, but she wasn’t in the mood. My mom and Debra humored me though. When I’m pleading for people to dance with me at a two-year-old’s birthday party, it’s probably time to get some regular dancing back into my life.
We were both excited about her new basketball goal. Future WNBA!! (She is in the 99th percentile for height.)
It was great to see my sister and her family so much recently, but being away two weeks/weekends in a row has really caught up with me. I have a garden to plant, summer clothes to take out, and about a million other chores, not to mention friends with whom I really need to reconnect and lots of May activities to participate in. I don’t know how regular travelers manage.