I'm Your Happy Accident

When Julia and I finally broke up, I did what everyone in the mid 2000s did – I asked myself if internet dating would be too pathetic a level to stoop to and, then, if I had any right to be pretending that pathetic wasn’t the level I had found myself at. This is before OK Cupid and Bumble and Grinder and Christian Mingle and Farmers Only established their hegemonic sphere’s of influence over everyone’s sex life. At this point, the only cool game in town was Nerve, a now forgotten sex blog that had established what used to be called a personals section. Sure there was Craigslist, but everyone knew that Craigslist was only for people with kinks and desires so niche that they could only be found between a used lawn mower and an acoustic guitar someone earnestly thought they’d learn to play. Eventually, Nerve’s personals section would become the main thrust of their business, squeezing out the writing, and then it’s success would breed enough competition to drive it out of business entirely. That’s why you have never heard of it, Millennial/Gen Z’er, but for a hot moment, it was doing something that everyone had previously thought would always be impossible – it was making online dating cool. At least for some folks. Not for me.

My internet dating experience would end up being quietly sad. Like a French period film about loneliness and war, but one where everyone is thinner and four years younger in their SS wanted poster than they are in real life.

Unlike some things where you spend the rest of your life wondering what went wrong, I know exactly why internet dating hadn’t worked for me. The reason internet dating did not work for me is because I failed to meet the education requirement. The Nerve site had all of the usual fields for you to put in all the facts about yourself, the ones that would become the standard format for these things in just a few short years. There was the basic profile stuff, your stats as it were, then a little space for free associative narcissism, and then a series of fields where you could indicate what qualifications you were looking for in whoever might respond passionately to the section where you talked about how much you liked to travel. That was the first thing I noticed about the majority of the profiles I looked at. They would all start with “I love to travel.” You would think everyone online was checking their dating profiles from the open doorway of a boxcar. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that “I love to travel” is code for “I have money. You should also have money.” This was followed up with some discussion about how they “love new experiences,” a phrase so vague it can mean anything from “I have never played badminton” to “pee on me.” The next thing I noticed was that almost all of the profiles I looked at, when I got to what they were looking for, they wanted a guy with a college degree. I do not have a college degree.

Now, there was a flirtation with a community college art program, which means that there was a community college art building very near to the woods where I was getting stoned. There are many reasons why college didn’t work out for me, but they are too numerous and stretch too far back to go into in this post. I am like a bullet fired by a sniper who had an itchy nose; the trajectory was just off from the minute I left the barrel. I have had friends who have encouraged me to lie about this, mainly on resumes, but I have never been able to do it. I don’t know why. If I was the kind of person who was deeply invested in the social contract that being honest on your resume represents, I would probably have gone to college anyway. Regardless, if I couldn’t do it on a resume, I certainly couldn’t in a romantic situation. But that meant that every online profile I looked at had me stopping short about halfway down the page and moving on.

This had never been that much of a problem for me before. Not when it came to dating. When it came to romance, I had carved out a niche for myself as a happy accident. On paper I look terrible, struggling writer and performer with no college education, bad news. I was the guy no girl went looking for and never saw coming, but at some point, three months after what they had figured was a one night stand, when they were figuring out where we would go for brunch and when they would tell their Mom about me, they would stop and think, “Huh, whaddya know?” But, computers are math, ones and zeroes, a calculation, science. Not a place for a happy accident.

Eventually, it got to be such a sifting process that I would have had to hire an intern to do it. And it was depressing. So, I decided I would just stop and see what came to me. Rather than have to sort through all the women for whom a college degree was a top priority, I would wait and see who volunteered. And the women who came to me were the broken and the tired. Like the Statue of Liberty for the lonely, I became a beacon to those running away from whatever spirit crushing horror their dating life had been up until that point. But rather than the light of a distant shore of hope and new beginnings, I was the land of “He’ll do.” Or as a friend of mine put it, “I was not bad looking for the kind of toothless, meth addled rapist who doesn’t go to college.” I would get a message on my Nerve profile, go and have a look at the profile of the sender, read about how they love to travel, stare at a photo that I would later find out had been taken in times that were happier and still filled with the will to live, and make a date. Then I would go to the bar and wait for someone who would show up with bags under their eyes and a gray hoody zipped up to their chin, which was often still stained from an earlier session of binge eating their feelings. Then we would drink in silence because it wasn’t exactly the same as drinking alone.

Then finally one night, I didn’t even finish the drink. I had sat across from this woman for ten minutes, wordlessly measuring one another’s levels of despondency, and I just couldn’t do it again. I said, “Thanks but I don’t see this going anywhere.” It was harsh, but this had become about survival. The woman sitting across the table simply stared at me, because her soul had died. Then I got on the subway and rode back to my neighborhood. On my way home from the train I noticed that a new bar had opened up. I stopped and had a look at the menu. While I was doing this, an attractive woman came out of the bar, lit a cigarette and asked me what I thought of it. Her name was Michelle and she was a bartender there. She had also just gotten off work and asked me if I wanted to come in and have a beer with her.

In the morning, when Michelle was leaving my place she seemed to be in a very good mood, but she also seemed kind of beside herself. She got to the door of my room and looked back at me, cocked her head, and laughed. She seemed to be laughing at herself or her predicament. She had not intended to wake up in my bed and clearly was a little shocked that she had, but still happy she had done it. It had been an accident. A happy accident. I was once again a happy accident. Which felt much better than being a bad resume. I never went on an internet date again.