wickedqueen.net

This may come as a surprise, given the title of my last post, but yesterday I decided to give eHarmony a try (you can cancel your membership for a full refund within the first week).

So far, I have been rejected by five people to whom I have never spoken. I didn’t expect eDating to be so much like junior high.

I actually think that being able to “close” matches at one’s own discretion is a good idea. It’s very annoying to be cruising, say, OKCupid and getting the same top ten list of people every time, three of whom are taken, one of whom you work with, and five of the remaining six of whom strike you as indistinctly, yet definitely, off-putting. And they just keep reappearing.

Two of the people who closed me out said that they were “pursuing another relationship,” so it’s good to have that option, too.

Actually, I was wondering if I was going to be one of the people that eHarmony identifies as “unmatchable.” I’ve known several people who proclaimed that this had happened to them. They chose to put it forth as a kind of badge of honor, which I’m sure I would, too, if eHarmony said I was “unmatchable.” They don’t come out and say that you are destined for the shelf and had better get some cats; they just say that you are too weird for their algorithms.

You know what they mean.

It wasn’t really surprising that I was not unmatchable. I have always felt that my basic interpersonal needs and desires were pretty simple, although why I persist in attempting to meet them with the Ugly Sweaters of Personhood* onto whom I routinely latch on, I cannot say. As I commented to my friend frippy recently, I will be lucky if my next boyfriend is not a 50-year-old research scientist with Asperger’s permanently stationed in Antarctica.**

Anyway, given that last year’s project (weight loss, remember?) was so successful, I was thinking that maybe I should attempt to improve another area of my life with a little technological assistance. I do occasionally cruise OkCupid, but I figure that a site that actually charges money (and boy howdy, do they; you may be surprised how much) weeds out a lot of the timewasters in the beginning. Also, I have that week to cancel my membership. If eHarmony cannot produce anyone intriguing in that time frame, I will just cancel and move on to Plan B, which probably involves joining a book club or something.***

I will say that thus far, things are not looking great for eHarmony. One guy referred to the most influential people in his life as his “personal board of directors.” Then again, perhaps my disdain for this kind of metaphor is why I keep ending up with neurotic manboys. Maybe.

I’ll tell you one thing: I once went on a blind date with a guy who told me that he only read books if he “couldn’t understand the movie.”

This will still be grounds for immediate dismissal.

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*I’ve been saying for awhile now that my tendency to love sweaters that are so hideous they are cute is okay when applied to sweaters, but not so great when translated into “that guy over there is so emotionally damaged that I am powerless to resist him! Perhaps he’d like me to write a volume of poetry about him!”

***Craigslist ads for love are down at AT LEAST Plan F.

I’ve never understood people who got depressed about their own birthdays. Birthdays are great. For one thing, you get loot, and people pay attention to you–I have always enjoyed having people pay attention to me–and “Getting Old” was never a particular concern of mine, probably because I was so used to being two years younger than everyone in my immediate social reference group and mostly I just wanted to be of legal drinking age already, dammit.

That said, I am turning 25 on Monday and I’m depressed about it.

I don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m Getting Old, exactly, but there are definitely aspects of my life that are Not Going As Planned. 24 was a very up-and-down year. Also it turns out I can’t have a “Probably Not Schizophrenic” party because women are typically diagnosed later than men.

And I have to move two weeks after my birthday, and I don’t know where I’m going to live in Boston, and I haven’t been able to find someone to take over my Madison lease yet, and I worry about money and logistics and my cats. I hate not knowing what’s going to HAPPEN.

I don’t even like the number 25. I dislike even-numbered ages, but I think being divisible by 5 is just as bad.* 27 will be a good age, and then at 28 I can have the “Older Than a Rock Star” party. 29 is prime; I like that in an age. I’m hoping my 30s will just be light on emotional turmoil, for the love of god.

At least there is going to be karaoke. Also Indian food. These things are good. I am going to get ripped and sing a lot of songs–I have a list, in fact, gleaned from the King of Clubs’s full karaoke catalog, which was available as a PDF on their website until said website started having issues. Bolded songs are those I have sung before; those marked with a star are songs I would particularly like to sing:

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Picky, Picky

I did once nominally break up with someone not for drinking girly drinks, but for being totally convinced that drinking girly drinks would make everyone think he was gay–and for being really upset about it. That doesn’t seem that picky to me. But I guess if these things ever SEEMED trivial, you wouldn’t stop fucking other people over them.

Sure, you might pretend you think it’s silly, because otherwise your friends and family might think you were weird.* But you know.

(Thanks to Owlet for the link.)

ETA: I should note that I don’t think the post title quote was actually terribly appropriate to this phenomenon; being barfed on is something that pretty much everyone agrees is distasteful, so I don’t think it qualifies as the kind of petty little detail the author is discussing. (Although I did once throw up in front of a guy in high school with whom I went on to have a torrid affair-type thing.) But I love Wayne’s World.

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*WeirdER, anyway. Or just particularly likely to die alone. They might think that anyway. I think my mother might think that. As a friend commented to me recently, all her parents’ romantic advice to her seems to be focused on the singular point that she should just DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO MAKE HIM MARRY YOU, DAMMIT.

Hey, creepy people: I know I’ve been working out and lost a lot of weight and regained my mojo confidence and stuff, and am thus now totally smoking hot, but actually? This means that there has never been a worse time to hit on me.

I’m not saying your odds were GOOD when I was out of shape and depressed and filled with self-loathing, but they are even worse now.