By Jamie Miller
In the words of the vampire Angel, “This socializing thing is brutal.”
Dating, it’s how we humans seek a significant other, maybe find a spouse and if we’re really lucky find love. Now in the old days, there were apparently a variety of ways to do this, you could put on your best leather jacket or whatever outfit was hip at the time and go to your local watering hole, though the reliability of that method is questionable. Another old method was of course going on a blind date. Someone, normally a family member or a friend, would tell you about this so-called amazing girl or guy they know who is “just your type,” and once again the results were often unpredictable. Well, the overlords of the internet saw this and decided to cut out the safety of having a person you know screening your date. Yes of course I’m talking about the dreaded and horrific…Online dating. Yes, online dating is something I know all too much about and I wish I didn’t. You see I’ve been on what sometimes seems to be an almost unholy pilgrimage through online dating sites. I’m only looking for a significant other. What I keep experiencing is scenarios out of an SNL sketch.
Facebook Dating, my oh my. If I thought MeetMe, the site I used to use, was bad, Facebook Dating is somehow even worse. While MeetMe has proven to be little more than a waste of my time, Facebook Dating gives me just enough results to keep me coming back, like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill hoping that this will be the time I push it up there only for the rock to roll down yet again. I got into two relationships from the app and now I have two exes.
One of them, who I’m going to call “Cassie” for this column, proved to be manipulative and toxic with me having to block her on Facebook due to her unwillingness to accept the relationship was over.
The other relationship proved to be even…stranger. I met a girl who I’ll call “Becky.” We dated for a while after meeting and everything seemed at least to me like it was going well… and then she asked me to stay the night at her place and meet her family and in retrospect, I wish I would have said no. I thought it might be a bit awkward, her father might threaten to hurt me if I break his little girl’s heart. I was not prepared for her father to walk around the house in nothing but his literal tighty-whities, which were too small if you ask me. But it gets better. While sporting nothing but his undies, he directed my attention to his gun safe. I guess it was a kind of threat though in reality, I was trying not to bust out laughing from the sheer absurdity of it all. Not to mention how bad of an idea it is to tell someone, who to you is a complete stranger, where you keep your firearm. It only got better from there as the night went on I got to witness him and Becky’s brother get into a heated argument. And then if that wasn’t fun enough, he proceeded to go on what could only be described as a 90-minute racist rant. As he spewed the most horrible, hate-filled stuff you can imagine as I looked over at Becky with a “help me” look whenever her father’s attention would be momentarily drawn away, but she was completely oblivious having her earbuds in and was playing on her Nintendo Switch the whole time. So as you can imagine, I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Becky dragged me into that scenario and she did not exactly inspire a glowing praise of the Facebook Dating app. It’s like throwing a dart at a board blindfolded and hoping you don’t land on a serial killer. And she was just one of legions of women I have swiped right on to little results. Yet still I persist.
