I wasn’t ready to date after my husband died suddenly a year ago. I felt heartsick. But I also felt lonely. I had spent the previous 30 years writing alone in a room, which was great when I had a family who magically materialized at the end of the day. But now, with my husband gone and my daughter off to college, writing alone in a room all day no longer seemed appealing. I needed someone to talk and laugh with, face to face.
Or F2F, as they say on the dating sites.
Online dating sites were offering Valentine’s specials:
“Valentine’s Day is a celebration of love and friendship. Join now and get two months free!”
That sounded good, so I signed up, choosing “female seeking male” from the dropdown menu. I added that I was looking only for friendship.
Shortly after I filled out my profile, I got an alert, “Robert flirted with you! Flirt back!”
The flirt-alert, I discovered, is a button. It provides no opportunity for nuances or fine-tuning. You either flirt or you don’t.
I didn’t.
To make communication even more clumsy, when you hit “reply” to a question, a pre-composed message pops up. If you aren’t careful you can end up sending a message like, “Let’s meet F2F!” when all you wanted to say was “Hi.”
In “The Politics of the English Language,” George Orwell notes that “prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”
The tacked-together phrases on the dating site are a hazard. It’s like trying not to step on the end of a loose board that could pop up and clunk you on the head, which is exactly what happened when I inadvertently sent a man called George a message.
“I like hugs!” it read. After that I had a hard time explaining to George why I didn’t want sex. When I told him that I was still in love with my husband, he argued as though it was a matter of semantics (how did I define “love”?), or a metaphysical impossibility. I could not be in love with a man who was dead, he insisted. (Actually, he whined.)
At this point, it finally got through to me that men on dating sites are looking for romance, especially around Valentine’s Day.
This got me thinking. If I couldn’t find a man who was okay without the sex, maybe I could find a woman. So I changed my profile setting to female-seeking-female.
It’s the chicken-salad sandwich strategy from the famous diner scene in “Five Easy Pieces.”
Bobby, played by Jack Nicholson, is sitting in a diner, arguing with a waitress, who informs him that he cannot have a side order of toast.
Bobby: What do you mean, you don’t have side orders of toast? You make sandwiches, don’t you?
The waitress informs him that she doesn’t make the rules.
Bobby: “Okay, I’ll make it as easy for you as I can. Give me… a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast — no butter, no mayonnaise, no lettuce — and a cup of coffee.”
The waitress writes down the order. “Anything else?” she asks.
Bobby: “Now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, charge me for the sandwich, and you haven’t broken any rules.”
I didn’t break any rules either, and I found two new women friends who are happy just to be friends, just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Bobby rigged the system by breaking up Orwell’s prefab henhouse (or, in his case, diner menu) then reassembling it without the chicken. I performed a similar sleight of hand with the dating site.
My only casualty was the rooster.
Jane writes children’s books and nonfiction and tweets at @austencats.
