Late last night, tooling around TVGuide.com and hoping inspiration for the TWoP homepage poll would strike, I came across the following tidbit at the bottom of their “Entertainment News” section:

Fox is developing a reality show in which nuptial-hungry folks will be paired off in arranged marriages — with viewers playing matchmaker.

Where to begin? (Aside from the locution “nuptial-hungry,” which…ecch.) On the one hand, if such a program actually succeeds in reaching the airwaves, the grisly demise of human civilization is obviously imminent. On the other hand, I kind of want to go on the show myself and let the American public marry me off to the toenail-biting horror show of their fickle choice, because I have just about had it with dating.

Ironically, the dating itself is not the problem. I’ve gone on several shockingly good dates lately, and anyway, I sort of enjoy the process of dating — I get to put on the fancy shoes, muck around with the Take Me Now Ha Ha Just Kidding Except Not Really No Seriously Take Me Now Red lipstick, and trot out stories I haven’t told in ages because everyone else I know has already heard them a million times. Even when a date heads irretrievably south within the first five minutes, it’s still fun. Okay, it’s fun in that “only the fact that this has an outside chance of making a good story one day is preventing me from smashing my pint glass and shredding my jugular with one of the shards” way, but I can almost always find the humor in these situations. Or the humor finds me on its own, like the time my date showed up unshaven and clad in a cornea-splitting blue Cosby sweater that looked like a sheep had eaten Fugly Smurf and thrown him back up; delivered a barely comprehensible monologue on the corruption riddling the Algerian government which he only interrupted to accuse me in a decidedly non-flirty way of “hogging” the olive plate; and looked utterly confused and bereft when I swallowed my entire glass of wine in one gulp, told him, “I have to go now,” and walked out of the restaurant without another word of explanation. True story. The guy actually swatted my hand away from the olive plate. I would have gone out with him again if I thought I could arrange for Algerian diplomats to bag him with a butterfly net outside the men’s room.

So, as you can see, it’s not that I fear and loathe bad dates. In a perverse way, I almost like bad dates — I think it’s the same twisted part of me that makes me want to laugh when I hear the sound of glass breaking. It’s a good thing I like them, too, because I’ve amassed quite a collection. By the time I’d turned eighteen, I’d already gone on a few of the most hideous, traumatizing, malodorous, surreal, and just plain stupid dates in the history of heterosexuality, and if that didn’t break me, nothing will.

On my first real date — a date neither party genuinely wanted to go on, but our respective best friends had a thing going, so we humored them — we went to a movie. A nice time, but nothing spectacular, until the ride home, when the young man’s attempt to ease out a fart silently not only failed in a rather squeaky fashion but also unluckily coincided with a brief silence on the radio. I clamped my molars down on a section of the inside of my cheek, but just when I thought I had the straight face under control, the odor wafted over to my side of the car, at which time I observed through gritted teeth that it had gotten “mighty hot in the car, don’t you think, so why don’t I just roll the window alllll the way down and hang my entire head out of it — no, fine, just, ah, getting a little air. What? No, nothing’s funny, I just can’t seem to stop…coughing! [Hack, hack.] Just a cough. Not laughing at all. Nope, nobody pooned in this car. [Kaff.]” At the house, I thanked my date for a lovely time, ran to the house, and responded to my father’s “so, how’d it go” by collapsing in a guffawing heap in the front hall and laughing until I wept.

My ultra-mature handling of that situation led to a predictable non-flood of dates over the next couple of years. In fact, I had exactly one, set up by an old friend who had fallen in with a — well, not a “bad” crowd, exactly. Let’s call it a mulleted crowd. Anyway, Agent Weiss swore up and down that “he’s cute, really, and he loved your picture!” “Your mom took that picture at my seventh birthday party.” “But he loved it!” Fine, I said, I’ll go on a date with him. The “date” consisted of sitting around a dank basement rec room watching Led Zeppelin concert videos, then stiffening in horror when, after nearly an hour of grunty silence, he lunged in for a kiss out of nowhere and wound up licking my hair. I don’t remember how I extricated myself from that — I believe I lunged away, and kept lunging until I got home — but I never saw him again.

My senior year, I reentered the fray in earnest. I’d gotten together, sort of, with a nice college boy, and one chilly night, he drove up from school to take me out. The night of the date — only our second — found me a dithering, flailing basket case, not least because I obviously had to kill my parents and bury their bodies in the basement before my honey arrived, but I’d spent so much time deciding what to wear that I’d run out of time, and would therefore have to let them live to embarrass me. Arrive he did, and in my haste to get him out of the house before my mother could tell a story about how I used to run around naked as a toddler, I whipped open the closet door to get my coat and whanged the door full-speed into my face. The nice college boy rushed to my side: “Oh my god — are you okay?” “Yeff, I’w fiwe,” I chirped, mortified, as my lip swelled up audibly and tears of pain threatened my carefully applied Great Lash. “Leffs juff go to dinneww.”

But it didn’t end there. Not content to seduce him with my Angelina-Jolie-meets-Gorgeous-George pout, I followed up that performance of Home Botox Theater by bringing him to a meeting of my church youth group. Church…youth group. Just let those three words…sink in…for a minute. Yeah, I’d “told my friends I’d stop by.” Doesn’t mean I should have done it.

So we get there, and Scrapper, marooned at a faith-based sleepover, pounced on the chance to do evil by informing my terrified escort with a gleeful grin that I’d beaten her up repeatedly as a child. Happily, he didn’t believe her, but only because he’d seen for himself that I lacked the coordination to land a punch of any kind. Still. We made our escape and went to a diner, at which time I accidentally winged a grape into his coffee. Don’t ask.

No, seriously. Don’t ask. Don’t ask, and don’t order fruit salad on a date, and if you do order fruit salad, don’t touch any of the round fruits in the bowl, and if you do touch the round fruits in the bowl, spear them with a fork. Hard. On the first try.

Anyway. Fast forward to the next boyfriend. On our first date, I got nearly naked with the guy — whom I had met for the first time two hours before — in the furnace room at his friend’s house. After a while, his friend walked in on us, yelled, “Oops! Saw Sarah’s boob!” and slammed the door. You’ve probably read that story before, the last time you looked up “classy” in the dictionary, but I thought I’d tell it again just in case.

And then came the saga of my first true love…the Billy Joel tapes…the kissing in the rain…the not-far-enough-Off-Broadway drama…but no bad dates. Well, except for the time when my mother, who hated him anyway, announced in his presence that I must have fallen in love with a vampire because she couldn’t remember ever having seen him during the day. Nice one, Ma.

Then came college, where we didn’t really date so much as hang around with and/or sleep with various people, but I did manage to achieve a few all-time lows in the date department nonetheless. For instance, going to The Doors with a boyfriend, laughing all the way through it because it sucked so royally, and getting yelled at afterwards — and I mean the real veins-a-poppin’ kind of yelling — because he’d loved the movie, and my snickers of derision offended him. It’s not bad enough that I paid to see that piece of crap; now I have to pretend I don’t have eyes in my head? The break-up came two days later, a direct result of my refusal to acknowledge Oliver Stone as an unassailable genius, and I laughed all the way through that too. In fact, I started laughing again just now, thinking about it.

And the list goes on. The guy, known to history for obvious reasons as “James And The Giant Turtleneck,” who wouldn’t let go of my hand even to season his food…the guy who called the next day and played his Casio keyboard into my answering machine…the guy who couldn’t stop scratching his forearms and refused to explain why…the guy who took a call from his girlfriend mid-date…I’ve had just about every kind of bad date in the book.

And I’ve dished out quite a few, too, most notably the time my tuxedo-clad date had to haul me back to my dorm in a fireman’s carry because I drank too much champagne, smoked a joint, and decided to take a leeeeetle nap in my plate. Total length of date: One hour and ten minutes. And the time my date went to the trouble of renting a tuxedo, and then we never quite got to the formal at all. Heh. And of course we can’t forget that time I talked about my cats for twenty minutes on a date. Oh, excuse me. By “that time,” I meant “every date I’ve gone on in the last two years.” I hate it when that happens. Fucking cats.

The Biscuit got hit with a vintage episode of Sarah’s Neuroses On Parade back in the day, too. We’d just started “really seeing” each other, and he invited me out to a little Italian place in the East Village. When he began a sentence by mentioning that he’d had a really good time the last time we saw each other, I took that as my cue to slam down my fork, fold my arms, and interrupt with, “And you ‘hope we can stay friends,’ right? Yeah, fine. Great. God, I KNEW IT.” As it turned out, the sentence didn’t end that way at all. The poor man stared at me for a full five seconds before remarking mildly that maybe I could let him finish what he wanted to say. I did so, and tried to enjoy the taste of foot. That date had a happy ending, all things considered, but still. Any bad dates I’ve had, I’ve probably deserved.

So, you know, it’s not the dating. It’s not the bad dates that cling like burrs, and it’s not the good dates that don’t go anywhere. It’s the stigmatized weirdness which continues to surround Doing The Internet Dating Thing. I mean, I work on the internet, so I don’t feel weird about it, but when I mention to real-life friends that I have a date, they’ll do that slide-whistle “ooh la la” thing with their voices, and then it comes out that it’s an internet date, and they get that look — that “welcome to your intervention, now put the beer down” look — and they stammer, “So…how’s that…going, anyway?” like I just got back from a course of chemo. People? Not everyone with email access is a child pornographer. I didn’t order a Russian guy out of the back of Playgirl. Simmer down, jeez.

And it’s mostly us women who get that reaction, too. When men put up a profile on Nerve.com, it’s kind of quaint and sensitive and with-it, but when women do it, it’s like, “The…internet? But…there’s nothing, like, all that wrong with you. Right?” I mean, I like going on the dates, and I really don’t have a problem with the internet factor, but admitting the internet factor…I should just pretend I pick these guys up in bars, because apparently that concept is a lot less disturbing to other people. “Soooo? Where’d you meeeeet him?” “Thnnnrff.” “Sorry, where? That’s on Avenue A, right?” “Thnnnrff.” “Whe– the INTERNET? But he’s probably a PERV! He’ll kill you WITH AN AXE and take PICTURES of it!” Oh yes. He probably will. In a Starbucks. Yep, that could totally happen. Not. Leave me alone. It’s the same as when that girl at the office asks if you brought a date to something or other, which you didn’t because it’s an office party and who cares, and she pouts all sympathetically and says “oh, you’ll find someone, don’t worry” and then pats your hand, like, I know I will! I don’t worry! But the more I say that, the more it sounds like I do!

So, go ahead, Fox. Arrange me a marriage so that the world will stop caring what I do on Friday nights. And get your own goddamn olive plate — this one’s mine.

November 4, 2002

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