Conversation piece

My best friend Bec just sent me a TED video in which a woman talked about how she had managed to crack the code of online dating, find and marry exactly the kind of man she was looking for.  Amy Webb created an algorithm and point system to narrow down the men that she would go on dates or even consider having a relationship with and each time they fell just a few points foul of the 900 required, she said sayonara immediately.  

She's feisty and I really admire her discipline, but I while I fully intend to be as careful as she was, I'm just not built that way.

The truth is (and I wish it wasn't) that I'm too soft-hearted and I can't bring myself to be so regimented about it.

Of course, I'm getting better at this.  

When I first started online dating, I talked to everyone who wanted to talk to me with the idea that I shouldn't rule anything out; that maybe I should be as open-minded as I could possibly be.  "Babe!" Bec said one day to me after I'd told her I was considering someone patently unsuitable.  "Stop making exceptions!"  

Now, I am quick to cut things off at any lazy, casual pick-up lines, inappropriate conversation or any hint of a possible dealbreaker.  But I still find it tough.

Getting to know people that you meet at school or at work or through common interests is a delightful process.  Effortfully trying to get to know people who could be bots for all you know is altogether more painful.  It's tiring, so much so that I'm sometimes tempted to stop weeding the duds out with so much vigour and just give in to chatting with the people who want to chat with me.  

Even bigger than the inertia though, is the fact that despite everything I've been through, all the heartbreak and lying and cheating and pain, I still want to see the best in people.  Maybe it's naive and gullible, but I always wonder: what if the person on the other end is just like me?  Maybe they're shy to start with, not particularly eloquent but with the best intentions?

And so, despite what some people have warned against, I do my best to engage people, to give them a second chance because if I thought that I might really like someone, I would want them to give me a chance too.

I am very possibly wasting my time.  But if I accidentally said something stupid in a moment of folly or stuttered with shyness and failed to have a sense of humour when it mattered, it would break my heart to be written off.  Besides, as a former journalist, I've talked to hundreds and hundreds of random people on the streets and I firmly believe that most people are more interesting than they seem.  I suppose with that in mind, I'm willing to take a chance.

So I'm talking to a couple of guys consistently now.  I'm not necessarily sure about them, but unlike Amy Webb, I can't just put a sudden stop to it.  Eventually, natural attrition takes care of the people that aren't a good fit, but I have to admit that each time another contact crashes and burns, even as I tell myself it's just one person closer to someone that matches, I feel a little sad about it.

It makes me wonder how many such small endings one has to encounter before they find someone.  Or give up.

At one point, I was texting a guy I'll call George.  Initially, he seemed decent, smart, hardworking, fairly mature.  But a couple of days of conversation quickly revealed that things weren't going to get off the ground.  He had a couple of stock phrases that he would reuse in every conversation, stopping it dead in its tracks.  

One of his favourite lines was "Someone is working very hard".  

"What are you doing?" he would ask me, and when I told him I had just gotten home from work, he would invariably respond, "Someone is working very hard."

When I told him that I was making a powerpoint presentation on governance one weekend, hoping it would slowly ignite some kind of a conversation, he simply said (you guessed it), "Someone is working very hard."

In an attempt to be interesting, I sent George a picture of a Batman stamp I had carved out of rubber one day (my colleague Wan Ping gave us a wonderful lesson on stamp carving!) and all he had for me was, "Batman is interesting."  I suppose it is.

Contact between us didn't last for very long, but while it did, during that small window when I thought that maybe this was someone I would enjoy getting to know, I told Amanda about it.  

BFF that she is, she listened excitedly, asked lots of questions and then said, "Oh, George!  Come on, George!  I'm rooting for you!!"

And it was at that moment that I realised that no matter how much some connections missed the mark, I believed that most of them were just regular people like me, drifting around on the great Interwebs, looking for someone they cared for.  

And the truth is that I am sad when things don't work out because amid all the craziness, I am rooting for them too.