I realize the danger in being overly curmudgeonly, and I am about to indulge in some curmudgeon, so let’s review some things I really like about yesterday, and Canada: the weather (apart from one short rain) has been amazing, and no time more so than yesterday. I made the best time I’ve made this entire trip - a moving average of 15.4 MPH, which is pretty insane considering the pack I’m carrying. I did 103 miles yesterday without even breaking a sweat. If what you’re interested is the actual quality of the cycling, and if you like nice straight, flat roads, then you can’t do better than the north shore of Lake Erie. I biked past a beautiful sunset, wind at my back, and the pedals turned as fast as they could in the highest gear I had. And, generally, people are friendly - a lot of people have asked me about my trip. And I’m still absolutely having a great time. But, boy, am I ready to be done with Canada!
WHEREAS The nation of Canada did charge me $7 for a hamburger combo with a Medium Diet Pepsi, and notwithstanding the extremely hot high school girl behind the cash register, didst dispense to me a 12 oz. soda in a cup, and whereupon upon presenting it for refill I was informed that another 12 oz. soda would be full price, and
WHEREAS A goodly portion of the north shore of Lake Erie dost smell akin to the hindquarters of an animal, and
WHEREAS The nation of Canada did charge me $37 one night and $35 a subsequent night to pitch my tent, without water or electricity, given that their policy is that you cannot pitch a tent in city parks or on private land, and didst attempt to charge me $46 the third night, whereupon I said “F this” and got a motel [seriously - $46. In Montana you could just bike up to a state park, put $8 in an envelope, and camp and fill your water bottle. In a lot of cities you can just camp in their park for free], and
WHEREAS They just can’t let go of this British Empire thing, and didst name their roads things like Imperial Way and Queen St and Gentry Ave, and didst name their cities Chatham and Kent and Charing Cross, and put the Queen on their money, and
WHEREAS The price of a 6-inch sub and a diet coke at Subway was $11.50, and
WHEREAS They don’t sell a single sticker in the entire nation of Canada, making me sad that I couldn’t put any on my laptop, and
WHEREAS It is 100% impossible to ride, or even carry or walk, your bike from Windsor to Detroit (OK this is half the U.S.’ fault),
SO DO I DECLARE WAR on the infernal nation of Canada and all who she holds sway, forever and ever Amen.
Change of topic. Because basically nothing happened yesterday, and it’s on my mind, I want to talk about a subject that I told myself I would leave off for the trip: online dating. For various excellent reasons, I cancelled or stop using all of my online dating services before I left for the trip. But one of them - Coffee Meets Bagel - just kind of kept ticking along; they have a model where they send one person each day, and they just kept doing it. About a week ago, I got bored in a hotel room and clicked “Yes” on one of them - a moderately attractive 30-year-old blonde named Alissa who I liked because she was dressed to go to a Giants game. We exchanged a few meaningless text messages, and then I offered to chat on the phone. Late one night at the hostel in Buffalo, I walked to the Tim Hortons and we chatted on the phone for over a hour. I say “chatted”, but in reality she did all the talking and I just listened. She was some sort of professional working in the South Bay. Honestly she spent almost the entire phone call complaining about dating in the Bay Area. She talked about how she’d been doing it for years, and it was so shallow, and nobody wanted to make a commitment, and she really wanted to have kids, and men were just bad, and online dating was so fake, etc., etc. I actually listened, because it’s a story I’ve heard before - from myself - and so I could commiserate. I remember noting especially that she went on and on about men judging her for her appearance; she went so far as to tell me that she “wasn’t petite” and ask me if that was OK. (She was not at all large, although I wouldn’t have said she was petite either). It made me slightly more interested in her because I felt like we might share a common approach to dating and I could trust her to take this all seriously. I rang off with her at midnight my time and we agreed we would talk again soon, and I gave her the address of my blog.
I didn’t hear from her for a few days - which is not unusual, and perfectly fine - but she popped in my head yesterday, so I sent her a quick text asking how things were going. She responded - and I quote “Work has been crazy and have received some bad news from a friend. Unfortunately, dating is tough for me right now, so taking a break.”
I wish I could say I was surprised by this, but after years of online dating, I’m not surprised by anything anymore. I wrote back briefly, asking if I should wait, or if she just wasn’t interested, period. This time she wrote “Not sure that you’re physically my type. Was hard to see in your pics on CMB [Coffee Meets Bagel] originally. Sorry - but want to be honest.”
So there you go.
Again, I wish I could say that I was shocked, or abhorred at this behavior. 6 years ago, I would have been. Now, it just makes me a bit sad - for myself, certainly, and also for the Alissas of the world. The city of San Francisco is littered with people whose approach to dating is so fundamentally backwards that there is absolutely zero chance that they will ever positively affect anyone’s life, most especially their own (through dating, anyway; they may be awesome people to their friends, or professionally). They are so lacking in self-awareness that they can’t help anyone. But here’s the thing I want to emphasize - online dating makes this kind of behavior so, so much worse. I do not believe this woman would have acted this way if we met in person. There are a lot of things that bother me about this situation - it’s a waste of time, it’s demeaning (to me, certainly, but actually to her as well, even though she doesn’t realize it yet), and of course it’s a waste of money too. But there’s two things that bother me the most. The first is that it hardly ever seems to work. Oh, sure, everyone has “that friend” who met someone online that they’ve had a great relationship with. I know it happens. But it seems like the odds would be better if I just sat on the front porch of this restaurant and threw rocks at reasonably attractive women until I happened to knock one of them out and drag them back to my cave. There’s another thing that bothers me even more, though, and that is this: not only doesn’t it work, it also doesn’t work. What I mean by this is, I have no idea - zero - whether Alissa would have been a good life partner for me, and - if she was being honest and had the self-awareness to realize it - she has no idea whether I would have been a good life partner for her. And isn’t that supposed to be the entire point? It’s like that restaurant I went to in Oregon, where the decor was nice, the service was good, but the food was lousy. If online dating doesn’t actually tell you whether someone is a positive person for you to, you know, date, than what is the point? What’s the point of all the questions, and profiles, and pictures, the meaningless texts back and forth? Why not just throw everyone’s name in a giant bucket and pull randomly? (I guess they do, that’s basically what speed dating is). In 6 years of doing online dating - and almost every service out there - I have not detected any value in any of it, as far as the primary purpose of screening potential life partners goes. Zero. In fact, I could make a cogent argument that choosing randomly would actually be *better*, that the process *subtracts value* and *obscures valid emotions and ideas*. It’s like trying to navigate the city of Chicago by using a map of Atlanta - not only is it of no value, it might actually be misleading, unless you immediately throw the map away.
