Dating and the Internet: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good:

You can meet a shitload of people these days over the internet.  Back in the day you met potential mates at a bar, church, a party, etc.  It required you to remove your ass from the couch, get all gussied-up, and actually walk out of your house if you wanted to meet someone (unless you were looking for a nice Jehovah Witness, in which case you just needed to answer the door).  There were far less potential partners to choose from.  Maybe you met one or two at a party, three or four at church and a half a dozen at a club. This is not the case anymore.  I can sit on my couch in my pajamas with bedhead and no makeup and meet dozens of guys online. Based on their profiles, I can also determine their level of literacy (kind of a deal-breaker for me) before the sappy love-notes even start (that I would feel the need to correct for spelling and grammatical errors and return to them).  I can “ignore” them if I choose, or email them if I want more information.  It’s awesome in an incredibly lazy kind of way.

The Bad:

Choose a previous Antics blog post.  Read it.  Insert story here.

 

The Ugly:

When I was younger and fell head over heels in love with a guy (and it ended in a fiery inferno), I admit that a few times I would show up at his work or his house to see if he was (a) where he said he was going to be and (b) with someone else in that place he said he was going to be.  Some people would call that stalking.  Stalking is such an ugly word.  I prefer “Curious As To His Whereabouts And Company” (or CATH WAC).  Doesn’t that sound better??

Whatever you want to call it, back in the day before Facebook and cell phones, one could only CATH WAC someone for a relatively short period of time before they had to be at work or do their laundry or get other shit done.   These days, with all of the technology we have at our disposal, you can CATH WAC someone from the comfort of your own home, or car, or sitting on the fucking toilet for God’s sake. Sometimes, it is whether you choose to not. 

For example:

 A good friend of my daughter’s broke up with her long-term boyfriend when she left for college.  She was pretty upset that the relationship had ended.  She did her best to put on a brave face but her first mistake was remaining friends with him on Facebook. Inevitably, every time he made friends with a new chick, it came up on her news feed (Hello, Salt! Please jump into my wound!).  Then of course, she would creep on those girls’ FB profiles (let this be a lesson to you, HIDE YOUR FB PROFILE FROM PUBLIC VIEW!!)  She tortured herself daily, hourly and even secondly at times; literally watching him move on from halfway across the country! (Clearly we have come a long way from sitting in our cars in front of someone’s house.)  To make matters worse, when she wasn’t creeping on FB, she would get text messages from “friends” telling her all of the shitty things he had done/was doing while she was away. She couldn’t get away from it even if she had wanted to.  

Eventually she got smart and blocked his ass on Facebook and told her friends to knock it the fuck off, but the damage had been done.  What should have taken a few weeks to get over and begin to heal took a lot longer because technology kept pulling the scab off.  (Yes.  That would be the ugly part.)

Seriously, how many people do we know that may have stalkerish tendencies that soon turn into full on get-a-retraining-order-whack-jobs because of the ease of technology? My guess is that it is far more today than ever before.

And don’t even get me started on camera phones and camcorders!  I am forever looking for holes in the walls of department store dressing rooms…

So what do you think? Has technology helped or hurt the dating scene? Has anyone had any similar experiences with break-ups and technology?

What's in a Name?

When I was a little girl, my nickname was Weiner.  This should have been telling. 

I have always been a girl who gives nicknames.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a person, a pet, a place, a houseplant and even an inanimate object.  Perhaps it is my love of words that makes me want to play with them; or maybe I’m just nuts? (Still up for debate)  Either way, I love to give nicknames, especially nicknames that only I use.  

Many of my immediate neighbors in my neighborhood have been given nicknames. Very few of the names are created out of malice. (Ok, there is one lady we call “Pleasant”- because she isn’t- but the majority of the names are not meant to be cruel).  In fact, most of the names come up as a matter of necessity.  We either don’t know their real names (or we didn’t know them at the time the nickname was created) and rather than say “you know the people down the street that have five kids in a townhouse…” we just say “you know, the Duggars!” (named after that crazy family with the 19 kids).

A few other neighborhood examples:   “Lancelot” (because of her Sir Lancelot haircut), Band-Aid Nose (the only time the guy has ever stopped and spoke to us he had a huge Band-Aid on his nose), Hot Cop, who is married to Hot Nurse (seriously one of the most attractive couples I have ever seen), Mustang Sally (that guy loves his car), The Fudds (his name is Elmer) and the Cat Lady.

Some of our nicknames are not short as nicknames usually are.  Case in point: “Majestic Ice Tires.” Majestic Ice Tires is a name that evolved about three winters ago when we had an extraordinarily icy winter.  Our neighbor was terribly upset one icy day because she had bought brand new tires that she was told were supposed to drive on ice. No, seriously.  She was livid that they did not easily drive the 20 feet to the mailbox (that she refuses to walk) on the icy hill in front of our homes.  She was so mad she was going right back to the store to return them for better ice-driving tires.  Perhaps the kind of tires with spikes on them is in order?

Needless to say, the guys I have dated are no exception (if you haven’t already, see the story of Musk from an earlier blog).  Some of the nicknames are obvious: i.e., Shorty, and some are not so obvious like a guy we called Lizard:

Quite a few years ago I had dated a guy for a few months and it became clear that we were not on the same page.  Having recently been divorced, he really wanted to get married again and….well….I don’t.  Furthermore, we both had younger kids and his parenting style was much more lackadaisical than mine.  So while we were out to dinner with our kids, I am correcting my daughter for her behavior or bad manners and he was letting his kids do whatever they wanted.  So I got to the point where the relationship was basically over but not to the point that I let him in on that little fact.  For me, that is usually the place where little things they do start to drive me crazy.  Lizard had this quirk that when he would go to kiss me he would stick his tongue out before he actually got to me.  By the end of our relationship it drove me so crazy that it seemed like he came at me with his tongue out from across the room.  Hence: Lizard.

There was a guy that I dated that we dubbed Missionary Mark, who clearly didn’t have a sexually creative bone in his body (pun intended).  It makes me yawn just thinking about him.

There was a guy I dated that we called Snidely.  It was an incredibly crowded relationship.  There was me, there was him and there was his mustache that he liked to twirl. A lot.

There was the Marlboro Man who very definitely looked like him and even smoked Marlboros to perpetuate the identity.

And then there was a guy that was home on leave from the Navy when I met him out at a club.  We had a fun little tryst and I thought we both understood that is was just that: a fun little tryst.  After he went back to the boat, he ended up calling me (a stalker amount of times), he wrote me love letters and proposing to me via letter.  He basically scared the shit out of me.  He created his own nickname: Psycho Navy Guy.  Granted, it wasn’t very original but I really didn’t want to think about him long enough to give him a good one.

The upside of being given a nickname by me is that you will never be forgotten (even if I wanted to, Psycho Navy Guy).  And who really wants to be forgotten? 

Love,

The Weiner