The fear

There's been a bit of upheaval in my life, and I only just decided that I would start blogging again.  I don't know if anyone still reads here or even remembers it, but I thought it would be cathartic and besides, I'm starting to get back into taking photos regularly and this is as good as place as any to display them.

Six months ago, I went and met someone and lost my head.  Again.  

I didn't see it coming.  A year of painful, unsuccessful online dating (one guy emailed me about the female orgasm after the first date) was enough to make me swear off men forever.  And just as I was starting to appreciate the solitude, my whole life tilted violently on its axis.

Of my last relationship, the one that ended in a heartbreak I thought I would never recover from, I talked constantly.  After years of having my guard up, I was so determined to experience and live it fully that I waxed lyrical to anyone who would listen.

This time, I am frightened beyond words.  In six months, I don't think I've truly talked about any of this with more than a couple of friends.  I am dumbfounded by the thought of explaining things to my family in detail.  My standard answer whenever people ask me things is, "I can't answer that right now."  Because there are a lot of things that I don't dare to say but I will say this: against my will and better judgement, I'm in love.  And if you've ever been in love second, third, tenth time around, you know just how terrifying it is.  You understand what it's like to worry that it's going to sour or disappear any second, just like the fourth time, the fifth, the seventh.  You've felt the way your heart quickens in the late night darkness when doubt is your only bedfellow.  You know just what I mean.

The thought of having to get to know someone new and growing and learning together all over again can be anxiety-inducing.  This isn't my first go-round.  I know what happens at the end and how difficult things can be.

What can I say though?  It happened.  I'm in love, and he is wonderful.  He was single for a long time too, and things took some getting used to.  After all, we're both older, more wary and all too aware of how things could go.  But that also makes us more careful, more gentle, more willing to try.  In the last half year, we've managed to weather death, job issues, disappointment.  Every day, I'm working on being more practical too, teaching my head to balance out my heart.

Unlike the last time, when I naïvely trumpeted the idea that things would spin out into a dream future, I am now more circumspect, the caginess of a dog kicked one too many times.  But you know what they say: if it's worth having, it's worth fighting for.  And something tells me this is absolutely worth fighting for.

I know that he understands.  "I'm scared," he said suddenly to me one night.  He tucked his chin into my shoulder and I felt the kind of butterflies I had forgotten even existed.  I took his hand, large and warm in mine.

"It's okay.  I'm scared too.  We can be scared together."

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.

First impressions

Beautiful book stitched by Rebecca

I wasn't sure about writing about this initially, but after a couple of people told me they would like to read it, I thought I would chronicle my fledgling experiences with online dating.  Yeah, I said it.  It's a mildly embarrassing topic to broach, but I'm a big fan of honesty, even when it's awkward, so here we are.

I never thought that I would try it out, but I have several friends (two of whom are now married) who have met their other halves online and who have recommended it.  I work in a mostly female environment and I've grown to love spending most of my spare time with my family and friends, so, more out of curiosity than anything, I decided to give it a shot, just to see if there's a chance of stumbling upon like-minded people on the Interwebs.  

To be completely honest, I don't expect to meet someone.  I'm well aware that my coupled friends are the exceptions.  I just want to see what's out there.  I imagined it would be quite a strange process (my many, many friends who have tried it have corroborated this) and decided to treat it as a social experiment.  I'm giving myself at least six months to get a real feel of what it's like, and if nothing else, I'll have done something new and completely out of my comfort zone.

Two weeks into the venture, I haven't physically met anyone but I've communicated with several people and met with a whole bunch of rejection.  And the vibe I'm getting so far is: this is hard.

I've never thought of myself as someone who has particularly high standards and I'm trying to keep an open mind, so my only criteria is that we match on basic values, we communicate well, he doesn't have a kid, and, this is key, he seems fairly normal.  

You'd be surprised just how rare that is.

When I told my friends this they seemed amused because sometimes I'm quite a strange person to be around.  The thing is though, that I don't actually believe that anyone is really "normal".  I love that people are quirky and different.  I'm just looking for someone who's reliable.  Someone who is who he says he is and isn't looking to play pretend or get entangled in weird games.  

My good friend, who started her own online experiment around the same time as me, showed me a message from someone who wanted her to know right off the bat that he was currently "pansexual, sapiosexual and polyamorous" but that it might change at moment's notice and that he had worked (and loved working) in an adult toy store.  I don't think the revelations were quite so strange as the fact that he had chosen to open with them.

My experiences have been somewhat tamer.  One man lied to the system to get "matched" with people and a couple messages in, revealed that he actually had a child.  Lying?  No.  

Another dude, codenamed Harvey, seemed to be interested in nothing but my taste in movies, as if he was judging me completely by what I liked to watch.  Each time I answered, it was as if I had passed another level of a test and was attacked with increasingly nuanced questions, for example, "And what do you think of comic book adaptations of movies in the last decade?".

One guy, whom I'll call Ray, started a perfectly innocuous conversation about books and recommended something he enjoyed.  When I said, "Oh cool, I'll try to get my hands on it," he responded, "And I'll try to get my hands on you!" which was wrong to me on so many levels that I was, at first, completely tongue-tied and then confused about whether I was being overly prudish (instinct says no).  He called me some odd endearments later on and I finally told him that I felt really uncomfortable and that I honestly just wanted to have a simple chat.  His response was that in his experience, everybody liked flattery, flirting and endearments, some people just hid "their blushes" better. 

In general though, it's just been a slow plod through conversation after awkward conversation with people who either don't find me interesting or don't seem to want to talk beyond asking how my day was and what meetings I'd attended.  

I think in some ways, that's been the most weird thing about it.  Without the process of face-to-face meeting at work or in school, there is no slow buildup through friendship.  There are no awkward sidelong glances or outings in large groups that slowly whittle down to two or moments of bonding over projects or long conversations on the phone.  There is barely any time to see what the person looks like without a mask on.  From the get go, everyone knows what everyone is looking for, and that makes the process at once easier and more difficult.  

People that you might get the chance to know slowly in real life are passed on in the click of a mouse, and in the same length of time, pass on you.  Candidates are so inundated with random messages and pop ups that meaningful things can get lost in all that noise.  Those that we would be forced to give a chance in life thanks to the rules of courtesy can be ignored.

And conversation is a rare privilege.  

Today, while attempting to talk to someone who only answered my questions with "Oh, that's nice" or "I see", I felt a sudden pang of longing and I realised that I missed my exes for no other reason than the fact that I could talk with them.

Part of the magic of meeting and slowly falling in love with someone is the long, meandering conversations that you have with them when you're trying to learn each other, when you're slowly unwrapping the layers to reveal something increasingly beautiful.  Each bit of dialogue is something to be remembered and savoured and thought about later on and the talks stack on top of one another, becoming a scaffold for all the things you've survived.  

Here, it's different, guarded, careful.  It's hard to find someone who actually wants to move beyond a couple of lines about where they come from or what they do for a living and the few times that I've attempted to talk about random things that I enjoy or something out of the ordinary, I haven't been greeted with much enthusiasm.  I can't figure out if it's just the people I've been talking to, or if everyone online is equally disinterested.   

I'm trying my best not to write online dating off too quickly and just participate in the process.  Amanda has told me that I should just treat it as something that's happening on the side of my life, which, if it works, great.  If it doesn't, I can just let it slide away.  This, I can do.

At any rate, I'm busy enjoying my friends, family, time alone and time spent on hobbies.  And we have plenty of wonderful conversations and discussions between us.

I'm not so sure about love online, but my faith in communication is not going anywhere.