Try online dating, if you haven’t already. You might like it. Rewind to last summer, before snow fell on the ground and grey skies clouded the heavens. I was sitting at an Italian restaurant’s white linen-clothed table in lower Manhattan with a married Brazilian woman and one of her redheaded acquaintances. We were three women having otherwise unremarkale dinner conversation until the girl with orange hair asked the Brazilian, “How did you meet your husband?”
The wedded one avoided eye contact. “Through a friend.”
Liars usually lie when they’re uncomfortable with the truth. I knew the once-bride met her then-groom online, but I didn’t call her out on it. Experience has taught me, when you confront liars on a bald-faced lie, they get angry. Not at you, at themselves. But, they still take it out on you anyway.
“Really?” The unwitting acquaintance continued talking to the married Brazilian, “Which friend? Maybe they could set me up!”
The wedded lady moved her hips to shift weight, forked food around her plate, and awkwardly lapped her tongue up and down to partially confess, “I met my husband through a guy who set us up on It’s Just Lunch.”
The puzzled acquaintance tried to push ill-fitting pieces together. “You know someone works at It’s Just Lunch?”
“N-n-no, I didn’t know them,” the woman with the ring stuttered. “We were just matched through the service.”
“That’s … wait … So, you didn’t meet through a friend?” The redhead’s eyes bounced from the married lady to me and back again. “Why didn’t you just say you met online?”
The married woman looked at her plate.
In Austin next March, at my South by Southwest (SXSW) panel Sex, Dating and Privacy Online Post-Weinergate with Rachel Kramer Bussel, Violet Blue and Samhita Mukhopadhyay, I’ll delve into: online dating & stigma, how the internet has changed the nature of “privacy,” the politics of sex scandals, and why this matters in the lives of everyday people & their coworkers. In the meantime, for now, let’s stick to simply talking about adults who date online.
The dating service industry includes 393 entities who employee nearly 3,125 people and generate $928 million in revenues. Recently, HowAboutWe linked up with FUNKY BROWN CHICK®, gifting me with an account so I could write a review. Separating my personal love life from my professional life, when I create my profile I’ll specifically include something like: I run FUNKY BROWN CHICK® and I’m on HowAboutWe to write a review.
If you’re not familar with the site, based on New York City’s Lower East Site, HowAboutWe lets you post date ideas and/or tell someone you’d like to join their suggested date. I could post, “How about we take off our clothes and go skinny-dipping in Carsten Höller’s Experience at the New Museum?” Interested parties could privately message me or click “I’m intrigued.” (Fret not! Just example; I’m not literally going to suggest an exhibition.) What I like about HowAboutWe co-founders Brian Schechter and Aaron Schildkrout‘s approach is this: they creatively match people by common interests instead of body type, height, or other things that ultimately don’t matter. As a result, you’d meet potential dates online similar to the way you’d meet them offline.
“[O]nline dating, now, is tantamount to dating,” Sadie Stein writes in her Jezebel piece Has online dating really lost its stigma? “Especially in cities, it’s simply a useful shortcut, and for every self-aggrandizing frog, there’s the great guy who [...] you date for two years.” Maybe longer. Perhaps, one day, you’ll sit at an Italian restaurant’s white linen-clothed table in lower Manhattan, boldly telling someone: “I met my husband online via HowAboutWe.”
My next post will be a full HowAboutWe review. Until then, please feel free to use the comments section to tell me about any of your online dating experiences.




