I Love You, Let’s Meet

I honestly can’t tell. It certainly includes a few of my least favorite memes.

I don’t think I agree with this Canadian advice columnist’s answer to the 44-year-old virgin. Wouldn’t you want to know that before you met someone?

J-date opens the (back) door.

As a bit of a music geek myself, I kind of like this premise for an MTV dating show. To quote my book (look, don’t give me shit for self-quoting, it’s just that I already thought about how I want to put it) on the charms of sharing sensibilities: “Nothing feels lonelier than enthusing to someone who couldn’t care less, or wondering, “He thinks THAT’S great?” Plus there’s an appealing modesty to fans …. Fans are often shy about their strong feelings and refract them through gushing praise for a book or a mix tape of love songs. They’re grateful somebody shares their passion rather than demanding that a stranger inspire it.”

looking for gay men and mail-order brides, says this study, while the women flock to seniors, other women bitching about bad dates, Latinos, Catholics and millionaires.

Knowledge is power; now I know to sign up on gay.com, where the men are plentiful, in great shape and will go see Kiki and Herb with me.

The PUAs (pick-up artists) are storming online dating. I recognized the acronym and the terms in the headline from Neil Strauss’s “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists,” which is leather-bound with a cloth ribbon bookmark, just like a bible. It’s hilarious and pathetic, about nerdy guys who develop a system to bag “HBs” (hot babes). The writer, skinny, pale, bald Strauss, had good luck with the techniques and was swept up into their subculture for several years, even living in a group house of PUAs.

Jan. 31 I saw my book next to The Game on the Valentine’s Day table of Barnes and Noble in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It was my first glimpse of my book in a bookstore and as I stared, I started an imaginary dialogue between the two. My book said, “you think I’m falling for THAT line?” and The Game said “I don’t care, you’re not a stripper or a model.” And my book said, OK, and they coexist in peace.

for the lady Appalachians, there’s always the date-the-photographer contest….

I seem to be reading a lot of stories like these lately, and keep wondering, why doesn’t everyone just listen to me on this one so we can all get along?
As I’ve said/written a lot, but dammit, the world has not put aside its Vogues and GQs to heed me, our bafflement and disappointment with each other would shrink dramatically if we simply dropped the outdated gender roles. We all have jobs. We all like sex. We all want someone we like talking to. We don’t need husbands and wives to be supporters and unpaid domestics. A guy is right to mind paying for a woman who makes as much as he does. A woman is right to mind she’s supposed to pretend she doesn’t want to sleep with a guy or be elusive or look perfect or any of that other “feminine” crap.

Feminism’s been brilliantly tarred as unsexy, unhip, man-hating, but it seems so obvious that more equality would make everyone happier. Less striving for femininity and masculinity, more for humanity. I’m continually perplexed by how few people are on board with me here, like suddenly they won’t want to have sex or be able to fall in love if they shed stupid old courting rituals that haven’t made sense in decades — and seem to be leaving everybody pissed at each other. I can still like wearing a pretty dress; I can still like big muscular sweaty man bodies and getting fucked hard; I can still like non-sex vive la differences like they can fix the broken cabinet but they don’t even know that they’re upset about something until you draw it out of them. And so can you! You can still enjoy heterosex a lot without acting some self-limiting way outside of bed — or expecting the other person to.

I’m adding in a fantastic quote from Laura Miller of salon.com and New York Times, from Ann Powers’ book Weird Like Us. This says it so well: “Romance is all about imagining yourself in a certain role without admitting it. You want to think, ‘I am the kind of person who gets flowers, I am the kind of person who drives men wild with desire.’ If that’s what you’re getting out of your relationships, it doesn’t seem like intimacy. It’s a fantasy about yourself that you’re using the other person to achieve.’”

I was floored by the eloquence and obviousness of this point — and yet it’s radically unpopular.

all this advice is pretty sensible except the “don’t be funny” part. Don’t be funny if you’re not funny, but if you’re funny, let it show! “Baby you must be tired from running through my dreams,” BTW, isn’t.

The no-adjectives rule makes sense, but seems like it would make for a mighty long profile

she’s not an online dater, and she didn’t write about online dating but my friend Dana wrote a great article about blogs’ relationship to MSM

One of the reasons she never online dated is that she met her husband (before Internet dating took off) through a friend — who was that again? Oh yeah, ME. They’re one of my proudest yenta accomplishments.