Checklist: lather, rinse,
repeat as necessary.

1-3 October 2001—There we were, Karen and I, standing on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley at 11pm on a Saturday night, and it was clear the date wasn’t over yet. It was our third date; the first was a brief meeting in which we shot pool for a couple of hours at my favorite Berkeley billiards hall, the second a fantastic play at Fort Mason, followed by a simple, nice dinner at a place nearby. The third date was the epitome of slow, optimistic progression. For one, I was thrilled to have found someone who was as excited as I was about going to a bell hooks reading (not to mention that she was cute and smart and nonprofit-oriented, though not Jewish, unfortunately). For another, she showed up with a small pot of baby daffodils for me. For yet another, a friend of mine was there, but by herself, and Karen was fine with us all hanging out together, even getting dinner afterward. When my friend went home, we were left there on the street, wondering what to do next.

“Can we go to your place?” she asked.

And then there we were, hanging out on the floor of my room, talking easily and comfortably, nothing more. I was just happy she was there. When I walked her to her car, sometime past midnight, I recall there was a bit of hand-holding. We hugged for what felt like both a very long time and not enough. And then she kissed me on my neck. I tried to kiss her on her mouth, but she held back. She felt good about where it was going, but she wasn’t ready quite yet for that. That was fine. Another hug, and she drove home.

That turned out to be the last time I ever saw her. I had a difficult time getting her on the phone, and when I finally did, she told me she just didn’t feel the way she wanted to feel about me.

“Then why did you kiss my neck?” I asked.

“I did?” she replied. “No, I didn’t. Are you sure?”

It had taken me a while to begin to trust that she might actually like me, and just as I turned that corner, she was gone.

Fuck it. I was pissed off that she had switched so suddenly, but on the other hand I considered myself lucky that I had gotten that far, for in the year that I had been single up to that point, I had yet to have had even a second date with someone.

But as it turned out, she was nothing more than the baton-twirler at the head of the parade of flakes and cowards. In the course of several months of attempts at dating and romance, I met a couple dozen women, and I am frankly astounded at how poorly it all went.

OK, I didn’t actually meet all of them. With the exception of a blind date set up by a friend of mine, let’s say I became aware of them online through various online personals sites.

Yes, the personals. Once upon a time, in a quieter past of five or six years ago, the personals were the domain of lonely hearts who had to squeeze their stats and come-hither best into 35 words or fewer and actually mail it in to the hip local weekly newspaper (extra words cost more) and then either receive letters at the weekly’s office or call in to the personals hotline to receive messages.

Today I can (and am about to) rattle off no fewer than five different online personals sites right off the top of my head, and these are just the ones I know about and have used to some extent:

Yahoo! Personals: the original online personals place, which, fitting with the Yahoo! milieu, is fairly unfussy. It’s gotten more complex over the years, and I didn’t really use it this time around, ‘cause I didn’t find too many enticing people there anymore. I had a much better time with it back in ’96 when it was the only game in town.

Matchmaker.com: one of these places where you fill out an extensive questionnaire and get to contact other people for free for two weeks or so. It tells you who matches you to a very precise percentage, someone who is usually not well-matched at all. I think it skews to the more upwardly mobile crowd, personally. I met two nice people that way, though.

Match.com: another questionnaire place, though you have to purchase a subscription to contact anyone. Very annoying.

JDate: yet another questionnaire place, which also requires a subscription to contact anyone, but at least everyone’s Jewish, and that’s a plus for me. I was intrigued by a fair amount of women on that system, and actually subscribed two separate months, but nothing came of it but a bunch of emails and one lackluster afternoon of tea. Very nice person, though.

Salon/Nerve: Salon.com joined up with Nerve, a magazine for the hip, sex-positive crowd, and offered an introductory period to their personals wherein actions that would normally cost a credit would instead earn you credits, to encourage participating early and often. Dear me, I met three of the most enticing women this way: hyperliterate, sexy, usually advertising that they had toys in their bedrooms. Two of them were even Jewish. Alas, they all suffered from Mixed Message Syndrome, two of them with what I now know as boundary issues, wherein what seems right may not actually be right, which is only apparent later that it was wrong. Very hard to anticipate.

Craig’s List: so simple, so easy. You find everything good on Craig’s List. I found my housemate and my job this way. The personals there are just like everything else. You say what you want to say, it’s free, end of story. This is where I met most of the women I was in contact with. Even after I had given up on the whole personals thing, I was still looking at Craig’s List. It is fascinating how people describe themselves, a wonderful tool for a writer.

What can I say? I’m drawn by a bizarre force to the personals. They’re so enticing. Despite the timeworn saw that opposites attract, we still have checklists of qualities and preferences we think our soulmates ought to have. And in the online personals, you can list absolutely all of them. No longer confined to tiny spaces, these ads get up and stretch, spread their arms wide and let it all hang out, a good amount of the time, anyway.

Still, with all that space, acronyms still rule the day. In describing yourself or the person you seek, you will be hard-pressed to avoid one of these abbreviations: S=single, D=divorced, M=male or married, F=female, W=white, B=black, A=Asian, L=latino/a, H=Hispanic, J=Jewish, and P=professional, whatever the hell that means.

In addition, in our thin-obsessed society, we’ve developed various euphemisms for overweight: curvy, voluptuous, rubenesque, zaftig (a Yiddish term that’s made its way into the mainstream–it literally means "juicy"), and now, there’s an acronym here as well: BBW (big beautiful woman), for women who, though they may want to weigh less, they’re fine with it, and if you’re not fine with it, that’s your problem. And they’re right.

My favorite shorthand, however, is 420, which basically means the person smokes pot. I forget why it got this nickname, but don’t make any plans with a stoner on the afternoon of April 20, if you know what’s good for you. I’m all for people who want to get high once in a while, but there was this one woman who posted an ad every day or two who, in the list of qualities she had about herself, proudly included "daily 420." I wonder why she wasn’t getting any takers.

Here’s how I know she wasn’t getting any takers: if you’re a woman seeking a man (my experience is limited to hetero personals) and place an ad or put up a listing on one of the sites, and if in this ad or listing you don’t immediately come across as in need of help, you will get at least fifty and probably upwards of a hundred responses within a day or two. If you even hint that casual sex is an option, no matter how psychotic you come across as, you will get a hundred responses in the space of probably six hours, complete with digitized pictures of erect penises of hopeful respondents.

I feel for women seeking men using the personals (well, dating in general). As I was saying before I digressed, we use the personals because we think somehow it’s possible to put a checklist out to the world and have it returned by someone who completes it perfectly. A-plus work. Men don’t understand this concept, for the most part. They will respond to almost any ad, thinking they have enough in common with the woman to get at least as far as sex, if that’s not the end goal to begin with.

“Oh, you breathe air? Me too!” An exaggeration, sure, but not by much.

Women, on the other hand, for the most part know what having important things in common actually means. The times I placed ads, I was very specific about who I wanted to meet (someone smart, passionate about things she does that she feels benefit the world in some way, preferably Jewish, progressive/feminist, sexy, active, who shared some activities and interests). I received few responses, but they were all from women who seemed well-matched.

And therein lies a fundamental problem of the personals.

It’s not necessarily that opposites attract, it’s more that there’s an unknowable source of deep connection between two people, and even two people who share wonderful values and activities, who may have a ton in common, may have almost nothing to talk about. Even after fabulous email exchanges and maybe even good telephone conversations, meeting in person can bring everything to a halt. It’s disheartening, really. It doesn’t make sense. But then, no one ever accused love of making sense.

Another fundamental problem is that both people are single and looking (presumably, anyway–on both counts). That both people know this about each other sets up certain expectations that might not crop up when meeting someone casually, through school, work or social activities, etc. Thus the first date is often the last, for if there isn’t that initial spark, it’s assumed it won’t materialize later either, or somehow it’s too much trouble to try to find out. There was one date where I and the person I was with both thought well enough of each other, but you could actually see us trying hard to think up things to say to each other.

The worst aspect of the personals, however, has got to be the lingering stigma. Despite the fact that many, many, many more people than ever are using them (a confirmation of the idea that our digital lives have made us more remote from each other?), there’s still the internalized shame that if you’re using the personals, you’re a loser who can’t get dates the old-fashioned way, such as drunken flirting at a smoke-congested bar. I encountered far too many women who couldn’t get past their I-can’t-believe-I’m-doing-this phase, and it prevented them from relaxing and enjoying themselves. Let me tell you: If you can’t believe you’re doing it, you shouldn’t be.

Having no particular shame about the medium myself, I did end up going on dates with about a dozen people, and still, my experience was almost completely negative. It was either no mutual attraction or more interest on my part than my date’s. I confess I got more excited about a couple of women than I really should have, but hey, I met a couple of really cool people and wanted at least to be friends. Frankly, I was so shocked to meet people I felt really comfortable with after all those go-nowhere dates that I likely came on too strong.

They seemed to like me, too, but apparently not enough to want to keep dating me and perhaps apprehensive about seeing if friendship could work. But almost without exception they just disappeared without a trace. Unreturned calls and emails. I’m guilty, too; on my middling to bad dates there were usually vague mutual ok-well-talk-to-you-soon kinds of promises, but they never called, and neither did I.

I kept dating. At a certain point it was bitterly comical how poorly it was going, especially when I liked someone at least a little but it went nowhere. And yet I kept at it: lather, rinse, repeat.

After several months of increasing weariness, in late March I met a fantastic woman on Salon who liked me too. I tried to keep my enthusiasm in check, but I was fairly gone on her. She, on the other hand, wasn’t sure she was ready for a relationship, and after only a month together, she finally decided she wasn’t.

Well, that was it. I was done dating. After a while, I was looking at Craig’s List again, not to date but just, well, they’re just so enticing. But I had no intention of seriously answering any of them.

But then, one day in August, the right one finally appeared, and I would have been a fool not to respond. As more and more emails passed, each of our checklists kept getting closer and closer to perfect. Telephone calls were hours-long marathons: When the batteries on our home phones wore out, we switched to cell phones until those batteries wore out.

But when we met in person, there wasn’t quite that thing. Fucking A! It should have been there, and I don’t know why it wasn’t. Even without that thing, it was quite a long date, and it was better by the end than it was in the beginning, but it wasn’t quite what either of us wanted to feel. Near-perfect checklists don’t mean shit.

Still, I wanted to give it another shot, so I called the next day and asked her out again. She was tentative and didn’t sound too enthusiastic about it, but she said she’d get back to me. When she called the next day to say yes, I was surprised. We had our second date the next night, and things were becoming more familiar, more fun, even with the break-in my car suffered, in which my stereo and Sarah’s cd player were stolen. Our third date, two nights later, was even better. The day after that I drove by myself to Bodega Bay, and I was pleased to discover that I missed her. On our fourth date, which was a little over a week after the first one, we saw a shitty movie, had a terrible dinner, and then went up to the Lawrence Hall of Science, where we looked at the bay, and then we kissed. So sweet, so exciting.

That was several weeks ago. Since then there’s been Burning Man, the tragedy, a subsequently extended visit with Sarah’s grandparents, the Jewish holidays, a burglary at Sarah’s apartment, and much more. Quite a beginning to our relationship, but I’m thrilled.

Ah, Sarah: not to swoon too much, but she’s amazing. She engages me completely. So smart, such a beautiful person, so inspiring in the wonderful things she does. I marvel.

And she makes me laugh. As we drove back to her apartment a couple of weeks ago, she asked me if I liked hamburgers. I replied that despite the fact that I had given up being a vegetarian after a scant nine months, I never did go back to eating beef. She made this sound, “chk-chk,” and checked off a box hanging in the air. We giggled.