The Plight of the Provo Bachelor: Online dating

How many people out there have gone on a date with someone they first met online? How many of those dates have been successful? Who would be able to restore my faith in it?

The appeal of using dating sites was pretty strong when I first started checking them out a couple years ago. Meet people with similar interests as yours? Talk online and see if there's any chemistry, then meet up if there is? Sure! Let's do it!

I've never had more headaches in my life.

I seriously might just be cursed as far as online dating goes, but I've never had a lasting positive experience from it. I say lasting, because I've had a couple positive experiences, but nothing that ever had a follow-up to it. Let me just go through them all, and hopefully by the end I'll have proven my point:

1) Went on a first date after talking online, and subsequently through texts, after about a week. Went to a nice Mexican restaurant, had a great conversation, food was good, and while dropping her off at the end of the night happened a litter sooner than I usually prefer, it was for a good cause; her little sister was opening her mission call and she wanted to be there via phone/Skype/whatever. We kept talking through texts for the next couple days, and when I mentioned meeting up for a second date I stopped getting any answers back. Was she not interested after all? If she was, why did things seem to go so well when we met up? Let's continue.

2) Met online, made plans for her to come down from Ogden (over an hour's drive to here) so that we could get some dinner and then see Iron Man 3 in theaters. I bought tickets beforehand, wanted to be all prepared because things looked like they were going well through our conversations online and over the phone before we actually met up. So we met, I drove her over to the restaurant, we had a pretty good conversation (from what I could tell) while we were there. Then she got up to go to the restroom and was gone for about 15 minutes. Now, I'm perfectly fine with needing to take care of natural processes, or even just wanting to take a minute to primp up a bit. That's totally okay, as I'd hope for the same allowance should I feel the need to do so myself. But for that long? I started to get a little worried.
While driving away from the restaurant, she got a call from her sister that seemed a little tense; she explained to me that her sister wasn't in the best relationship, yadda yadda yadda, and she tried to call back but never got through. Tried to call her dad to see what was up, no answer there. She said she needed to go up to South Jordan (where her sister lived) and see what was going on. Me, trying to be understanding of the whole situation, said that that was fine and that we could just pick things up another day. (I ended up asking a friend to come with me to see the movie once it was clear that this date wasn't going to stick around, and we ended up having a great time.) I did ask for her to text me later to let me know what happened, and she said she would; never got a text back, even when I sent one myself asking about everything. Checked on the site we met on, and she's deleted her profile.
I'm not really sure exactly what happened there. I mean, if I messed up during the date, wouldn't you at least have the decency to tell me, instead of just leaving me high and dry? Was all that time she spent in the bathroom used to ask her sister (if that was actually her) to call her later on? Did she just get scared of it all, and it seemed too overwhelming?
Some questions that I don't think will ever be answered. Moving on.

3) Met someone online, traded pictures of each other. She seemed cute, but only sent pictures of her face. I was initially okay with that, but when we eventually met up she looked way different in person. The pictures must have been taken years before, because in multiple ways she had changed from what I'd seen. (A tattoo, a couple piercings, and, well, a lot more weight than I'd anticipated, to be perfectly frank.) I was willing to overlook all that if the date went well, but the whole time she kept quiet and barely spoke, even when I asked her questions about herself. The most that she did talk was when she was remembering the margarita night she'd had before (which she hadn't made any mention of before that date). Awkward beyond all reason, and the only time that I've ever felt the need to end a date early on my own terms. It just couldn't have improved in any way, so I stopped it before it got worse.

4) Tinder. Oh, the infamous dating app where all you have to do is swipe left or right to show your interest in someone. Multiple times (also on other dating sites, but prominently on Tinder) I've had conversations with someone and it seems to go well, but I never get any level of commitment to meet up. Even if there's a "90% or higher chemistry" on some sites, I can talk with a girl and start to set up plans, but then last minute they cancel on me. If they even get to the point of setting up the plans in the first place. (And all that goes without even mentioning the various scams that can occur with apps and sites like that.)

5) Probably the one that's given me the biggest headache of all, and I'm still not even sure what happened with it, was when I met someone who answered an ad of mine and she was pretending to be someone else entirely. I ended up talking with this girl for months, getting to know her, making plans together… except I never actually met her in person. She claimed to be working in another part of the country and would be back in Utah later in the year, so we'd try a long-distance thing at first and go from there. The chemistry seemed pretty instant, but the fact that she never ended up being able to contact me through ways besides phone calls, texts, or emails – she didn't have a Facebook out of "personal preference" – started to bug me after a while. Incident after incident started to happen that kept delaying her return to Utah, including multiple broken bones and diseases (everything from a bad staph infection to diabetes to cancer), and even when it seemed like she was going to stay there we never had a video chat. (Despite her having an iPhone through her work, which is more than capable of doing video calls.) And then the weirdest part happened: she said someone was trying to steal her identity, and that it'd happened before. I looked up on Facebook this supposed thief, but the more I looked at it all the more it seemed like the "thief" was the real one and the girl I was talking to was the fake. It started getting to the point that I'd see pictures on the Facebook account before this girl would send them to me over the phone. To this day, she'd probably swear that it's been an elaborate scheme to not just steal her identity, but everything she has… which still doesn't make much sense to me. The fact that the girl who did have a Facebook profile had mutual friends with me pretty much confirmed the fact that this first girl that I "met" was the phony, but because of how consistent she was in everything she told me, it made me wonder if they were both the same girl, just with a multiple personality disorder. That would make more sense in the long run.

I try to be totally honest about what I put online, without revealing anything too personal. I feel like I make clear my goals, intentions, expectations, hopes, all of that. I don't mean to come across as too forward, and I definitely don't want to rush things in a relationship with anyone, regardless of how we meet. But if I'm not supposed to talk about all that… if I'm not supposed to be open about my feelings and what I'd like to have happen after a first date – which is almost always a second date – then please correct me and help grow what little hope I have for trying to meet people online. Because at the moment I've all but given up on it.
Which, for the time being, I think I'm going to be all right with, because certain prospects are starting to open up outside of this virtual world. More on that as it actually develops, though. I just needed to rant tonight about… well, everything you've read so far.



Got a new movie coming in the mail soon through Amazon: Hot Rod. LOVE this movie, and a bunch of my friends do as well, so as soon as I get it I can imagine a movie night happening.