Online Dating

It all started with AOL. I remember that was my first real introduction to reaching out to other people via the internet. AOL chatrooms? SON! Those things were so much fun. You had to get used to the pace and become a “regular” before anyone would really talk to you. A/S/L? You know the routine. Run your stats and jump in the mix. Then there was Blackplanet. Oh goodness. Honestly, I never really got on BP too hard. I think I could tell early on that it was mostly for people trolling for ass. College Club. THAT was my shit! The chatrooms went slower than the ones over at BP and I liked the interface better. Those were all precursors to today’s online dating which is much more aggressive and streamlined (MySpace, Facebook, Match.com, Chemistry.com, etc).

I’ve had a few “relationships” with people I met or knew of primarily from online communication. While I think that online dating isn’t bad and really has opened up a new world of dating for many people, in retrospect it hasn’t worked out for me all too well. Let’s run down a few instances:

1. The first guy I met online, we’ll call him Frank. I met Frank on AOL my sophomore year in college. He went to a nearby school and we went out on a date. He was pretty cool and after that we talked all the time. Eventually, things transcended to a more-than-just-friends level, but didn’t go much further than that. Frank sorta became the person you call on in between relationships. We enjoyed each others’ company and above all else were good friends. It just never worked out that we ended up in a relationship. Eventually, though, Frank let me know that he DID want to be my man and that he wasn’t into being the in the meantime, in between guy. So we scaled things back significantly. I’d still say Frank and I are friends. We just don’t talk much now that I live in another state. Overall, I’d give that online relationship a B-.