Curvy Jones on: I Wish I Could Quit You…

Let’s chat about something sort of taboo. Something people used to think was the sign of the Lahoooosaherrrrr. Something people attribute to the desperate and needy and undateable.

That’s right. Internet dating.

If you’ve followed me on Twitter for any amount of time, you know that I have a personal vendetta against eScamyourmoney (eHarmony), for no other reason than it didn’t work for me and it seemed scammish when I joined. Twice. Whatever, shutup.

There’s a lot to the story, and someday I’ll get drunk and rant it all, but HATE. IMMENSELY. And their commercials SUCK. I love how they pretend they’re not a hideously overpriced, judgmental, overly religiously based internet dating site. eH is no better or worse than Match or Yahoo! Personals.

So anyway. A long, long time ago, back when the internet was something nerds used to log into their AOL accounts and their alt.geekshit.incomprehensibleterms.net chatrooms, online dating was a really innovative way to meet new people. It was a very romantic idea to think that your Prince Charming, or reasonable facsimile thereof could be around the corner, or across town, and you’d never know it, and if it weren’t for the internet, you might never meet them.

The internet was rare, and it was slow and you had to be really dedicated to getting online. It was hard work, and it required a home computer and a little bit of know how. The people that you’d meet online where there on purpose. They weren’t just bored, or paying bills and happened to jump in a chat room for a second (online banking didn’t yet exist, neither did Pandora. Or for that matter iPods! Hang on, lemme turn the tape over on my Sony Walkman Sport Edition– this walk down memory lane is taking awhile).

Then the internet became slightly more available and with it came the abundance of websites taking over cyberspace, including dating sites. They were kind of hokey and clunky, but I remember logging into Yahoo! Personals (remember when it was free??? Wow…) and reading through some ads, kind of amazed at it all. Felt the same about Match when it launched. And Love@Aol! SIGH. The good ole days.

With the rise in convenience and reduction in price of the home computer, it became even easier to get online.  Now any creep or weirdo or psycho or perv with a phone line and a computer could log into the internet. Add cable internet and WHOA!  Internet trolling at high speeds!

All this innovation really meant that people could get more done in less time, thus creating empty space in which to fill more things. Suddenly we’re so busy we don’t know if we’re coming or going, and if we see ourselves on the way out, we should ask us what we’re having for dinner. We’re caught up in the world and being a swinging single, which is great when you’re young and footloose and fancy free. But the older we get, the less likely we (women at least.. okay ME! ) are interested in bouncing around from person to person, testing the waters and giving of oneself over and over to gain nothing in the end but a dent in the couch the size of your last man. We (I) wanted someone to spend quality time with.

But we (I) was shy. Terribly. And socially awkward and kind of a nerd. Gone were the days where I would feel comfortable online, a nerd among nerds. Now there were jocks and teachers and scientists and bankers. People who were more cultured or more sophisticated, made more money, lived in better areas, drove better cars. And those were just the men. I always check out the competition. There was a lot of it. Women with longer hair and whiter teeth and brighter eyes and thinner figures, who were comfortable with themselves and their bodies, and not ashamed to have a racy tagline.

Well, I bit the bullet and did it. And for more than ten years kept doing it. Over the course of those years, I met some nice guys. Happy to say I was never kidnapped, no one ever stole from me. The guys I met were the guys I expected to meet online: the slightly-less-than-handsome, the totally geeky never-had-a girlfriend, the I-don’t-know-what-I-want. Which was fine, because I was awkward, slightly-less-beautiful-than-a-supermodel, nowhere-near-thin, totally-geeky, never-had-a-boyfriend-before, had-no-idea-what-I-wanted-or-what-I-was-doing.

I also met the jerk, the guy only looking for thin/white/lightskinned/exotical girls, the guy only looking for sex, the “Christian” who could have been classified as a gigolo, the guy who was brutally honest  (“yeah you look fatter in person”), the guy who cried… a lot…and the one that I thought I fell in love with.

When that last one and I broke up… via email, mind you… after a whirlwind four months in which I thought I was the luckiest girl ever, I never made it back onto the online dating horse. I found it hard to open myself up again. Call it walls, call it being leery or careful or safe, but yahoo!personals and match.com and ugh…ehscamyourmoney just didn’t hold the same appeal. I felt like I was meeting the same guy with a different face, and they all wanted something from me without having to give up so much as a middle name. I felt uncomfortable and like I should be thankful someone was even interested in talking to me because, especially in Atlanta, men were seeing the droves of women coming at them and figuring out that there are more of us than there are of them. They didn’t really have to work that hard for attention and were definitely believing their own hype. In fact I had one guy tell me, “what you won’t do, 101 other women will. You’re lucky I chose you to talk to. It’s up to you.” I chose to walk away.

After a few blah, boring, lame dates filled with the toothless, the bald, the dirty, the boring, the ‘oh, I forgot to tell you about my daughter that I haven’t mentioned in the three weeks we’ve been talking for several hours a day’, I decided to hang up my mouse and call it quits. I was done with online dating– I wasn’t finding what I was looking for, it was a waste of money and time, and I really felt like I wasn’t what anyone else was looking for, either. I can meet a man in the grocery aisle just as easy as I can meet a man at Match.

I have… for some reason… one last profile up. And I can’t delete it. I don’t even like the site, really. It’s free, so it’s really klunky and simplistic.  I’ve never really found anyone there that I really wanted to talk to or interested me… except the man I thought I was in love with.

It’s become fuzzy, after a few years, but I remember just nonchalantly tossing up a line.  The usual picture and a paragraph and after it was approved was the usual wait. Wait to be noticed, wait for someone to have the balls to contact me, wait to check their profile and see if they looked crazy.  This handsome chocolate thing with light brown eyes sent me a message. “Hi.”

He had me at Hi, ya’ll.

I answered back. And he answered back, and two hours later, we were still chatting. The next night we moved to AIM. And three nights later we moved to talking on the phone. That weekend we met. And he was awesome. So cute, very quiet, funny, very much a gentleman. I couldn’t believe my luck. Our first date was cool– we went to the Martin Luther King Center tour, then lunch, then neither of us felt like ending the date so we got some movies and went back to my condo. I have no idea how Hotel Rwanda ends…. we were busy. (Mind you, we didn’t ‘get busy’ but… yeah. Busy). Later we watched Anchorman and laughed until we were sliding off the couch onto the floor. Our second date was the next day. We went to a movie-Crash, one of my faves– in which he held my hand and lent me his jacket because I was cold. We took a walk through Piedmont and got some ice cream at Cold Stone and went back to my apartment because the NBA playoffs were on. Bliss. I was in heaven.

He was my first. Boyfriend, love, person to really care about me in that way. For awhile I really thought he was The One. I don’t think he thought that, though… because at about month three, right as I’m feeling really comfortable and really start to open up, he starts to change. Or maybe he starts to revert back to the old him. No matter… the man I was dragging through our relationship was not the man I met. He became standoffish and inconsiderate. I always felt like it just……wasn’t enough. I hated that feeling that I wasn’t getting enough from him. He was always at arms length, emotionally.

When it fell apart, I was devastated. It took a long time to get over him and to not think about him or talk about him. I kept his emails forever, years after. I always delete the phone number in the first few hours, so I don’t call him.  There were pieces of him all over, though. Pieces I kept around, to remind me of him, remind me of how I felt and how I was able to let myself even consider being in love, remind me of how I felt when I thought he loved me. And to remind me how, if it was that great when it wasn’t right, how much greater it will be when it IS right. When it WILL be enough. When he WILL love me.

So, that site sort of has a special meaning for me. Maybe I feel like I’ll meet another HIM there. But the real Him. Or maybe I’ll see him there, again and he’ll be all ‘I should have never let you go, we could have been married by now’ and I’d be all ‘well we all make mistakes, wanna start over?’ and he’d be all ‘yeah, sure’ and we’d live happily ever after. Or not.

Every Monday, I get a piece of HIM in my mailbox. I get an email from that site, saying ‘new matches, take a look!’ I never look. I know, for sure, there’s no one there I’m interested in talking to. It’s the memory, the piece of him, the feeling I’m reminded of, once a week.

I need to unsubscribe from this site. I can’t seem to let it go. I shall challenge myself to do this. I’ve deleted all the email, all the pictures. Long since deleted the texts and voicemails. This is the last piece.

Letting go of this piece means I am 100% free of my memory of him. No more reminders. Clean slate and things like that.

And then I can really rebuild and heal and try to tear down the walls I have up… not about him, just in general. I want nothing more than to be open and loving.

I find this incredibly impossible at the moment. I want it to change.

Curvy Jones is a northerner playing a southerner who is living, working, playing in metro Atlanta.

Curvy Jones

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Tags:  2010 · Him · internet · online dating · walls