Don't Worry, It Gets Worse Read online

  Friend 1: Danny and I can never get TOO serious because he doesn’t have an air conditioner in his house and I can’t just have him at my apartment ALL THE TIME, you know?

  Me: BLearrrppp bERRRPPP

  Friend 2: I know what you mean. I just wish I would stop gaining weight from going out on an average of three dinner dates a week with very nice, responsible men.

  Me: (Falls on the floor, pool of vomit around mouth, nobody finds her for days because nobody loves her.)

  Dating, to me, was like the Billy Joel song “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” specifically the long, beginning part that nobody wants to really listen to where he yammers on about various bottles of wine. It was for people who were willing to hang around guys who remembered things like when your birthday was or your last name. I was ignoring the part of me who desired that, replacing it with “What kind of amusing story can I get out of this guy I prefer to keep at arm’s distance?” It was all about single-lady power! Feminism and freedom! Lackluster night leads to five-minute tale to keep friends on edges of barstools!

  Which is why I was thoroughly offended when, over dinner, a friend of mine suggested, “Alida, maybe it’s time you tried the whole online dating thing.”

  The whole online dating thing?! I couldn’t tell if that meant that everybody was doing it or it was shameful and gross and therefore I deserved it in my cretinlike single state. Were people worried about how I was single even though I went out of my way to make self-deprecating jokes about it? I thought I was doing the best job I could of being the friend who didn’t ever go out with anybody, so other friends could tell themselves “At least there’s Alida,” when they were particularly upset about being the only single girl in the world. I wasn’t the sad type who pleaded for friends to find somebody for her! I was the one who handled being the third wheel like a pro, and that wasn’t a badge I proudly wore so I could avoid vulnerability. Not at ALL.

  I gruffly took a large bite of my hamburger, mouth full of gristle and medium-rare cow murder, and told her, “You can’t SELL me!” Her suggestion was insinuating that I was willing to drop a piece of my pride on the floor and stomp on it by admitting I was in need of some lovers. Some company. Some hugging.

  She chewed on a cucumber for what seemed like ten hours before finally saying, “Calm down, Alida. Online dating isn’t a big deal. Don’t get mad at me. It’s not like I’m saying your life is some sort of modern twist on a Cathy comic. You’re not pathetic, you just don’t try.”

  Ouch. Now that was the way to go about it—using the most tragic heroine of singledom as a point of reference for my situation. If Cathy comics even still exist somewhere on the saddest of sad-lady refrigerators, there is most definitely one about her trying online dating. She would say, “Ack!” and get really emotional about chocolate and bathing suits and then try to meet guys online.

  There were two major reasons why I didn’t find online dating appealing: first, because their commercials were terrible and always featured Waspy New England-looking couples, and second, because I didn’t want to deal with CRAZY ATTACKERS, come on! Didn’t the foundations of made-for-TV movies cross anyone’s mind anymore? Sure, the specifics fade, but there are definitely at least twelve of them with these plots: Beautiful, innocent girl trying to be a nurse in a small town gets chopped up by attractive man she goes out with on an online date “just this once.” Beautiful, innocent girl trying to be a dental hygienist in a slightly larger town gets buried underneath a construction site because she turned on her computer and just looked at a GeoCities Web site for singles. Those movies taught a valuable lesson that has stuck with me for years: The moment you seek solace in a stranger, a man wearing a boxy leather jacket will break into your house and chase you around before you have to kill him in a swelling conclusion of self-defense.

  My friend was gently persistent. “Come on. Everybody does it. How do you think people meet these days? In the grocery store?”

  Grocery stores. Bars. Dark street corners. Anywhere but the Internet, a place that primarily caters to lonely people biding their time.

  She and I began debating the merits of it, a moment I had been unknowingly waiting for since I was voted Most Valuable Debater in my tenth-grade history class. “But I can find somebody on my own!” “But you haven’t.” “But I don’t trust the Internet!” “Alida, you have a blog, and I’ve seen you post your home address on it, asking for people to bring you cheese sauce. That dam won’t hold, sister.” “You’re right. If I meet my next boyfriend online, I will no longer have anything accomplished outside the virtual world. That would make me a weirdo!” “Fine, Alida, I met my last boyfriend online. Can you shut up now?!”

  I almost choked on my own self-righteous spit. Whaaaaaaat?

  She didn’t stop with her own relationship. There were more. My sneaky little friends who said they had dates that night with someone they “met at [insert a normal place to meet someone]” actually met their significant others through Internet algorithms that matched their mutual interest in lo-fi bands and a similar appreciation for visually pleasing bookshelves as a centerpiece for the home. Those bastards! Those happy, happy bastards. All this time, they were making me feel secretly bad about my inability to meet people, but as it turns out, they were just workin’ the system that I had assumed was meant only for pedophiles and divorced women.

  I left the dinner feeling insulted, but also a little intrigued. After a healthy dose of Facebook stalking, looking at these friends and their boyfriends and girlfriends who met through the Internet, I started to reconsider. Who was I to judge them? They all seemed to have normal, happy relationships. I should be judging myself, the cruel and loveless judger.

  Maybe online dating wasn’t all murders and Nantucket white folks. Everybody was online dating, and this appealed to me in the same way the whole “everybody was jumping off a bridge” thing appealed to me when I was a kid. WHY was everybody jumping off a bridge? Was the world ending? Was it a small bridge and would it just be fun? Do I want to live in a world where all my friends and family were dead? I had always secretly thought, Yes, I would jump off a bridge if everybody I knew was doing it, and this currently translated to dating trends on the Internet. Jump I would.

  * * *

  Like any worthy experiment, online dating appealed to me in that I could do it without ever getting off my couch. So a few days after the confrontation, I turned on the ole MacBook, ready to talk about myself enough to warrant a message from somebody else talking about himself. But what site to choose? Christian Mingle? Not with the dark forces on my side. JDate? Promising, but I didn’t want to give any Jewish mothers a big April Fool’s when they see how Jewish I look and how Jewish I am not. Match? You might get my dignity, but you’re not getting my money, pal. So I went with the obvious, youthful cheap-person pick—OKCupid.

  The creators of OKCupid must have sensed how anxious their users are, because their home page is reminiscent of a pediatrician’s office. It’s all warm colors and cartoons and soothing jokes to try to make the whole process more comfortable. It might as well have had a poster of a kitten that said “Hang in There.” The information you had to fill out was asked in the kind of way a very nice madam might ask a john at his first cathouse. “You looking for a guy? A girl? Don’t be afraid to tell me what you want, hon. Sure, it’s legal.”

  I clicked “I am a woman who likes men,” because even though they have been a source of headache for me, I do rather like the gents. This was easy! The cartoon lady then prompted me to choose a username. This proved to be harder to decide. I hadn’t had to make such a life-altering decision on the Internet since my parents let me get AIM in eighth grade. Should I go with my old school handle, Chatterbox888? Should I go with the one my parents wouldn’t let me get—ThisPrettyYouthIsAloneAtHome?

  I settled on FritesandGeeks after twenty minutes, an insatiable hunger, and a little inspiration from the earlier work of Jason Segel.

  Next up in the process were th
e all-important photos. How did I want my future soul mate to see me? A beautiful candid of me wearing the latest fashions, photo retouched by a guy with a very big task ahead of him? Dream on. I couldn’t have a flattering picture of me taken by Annie Leibovitz even if I was in utero in Demi Moore’s body. The dude of my dreams would have to put up with having Cheetos dust pawed all up and down his clothes, so I went with a picture of me shoving popcorn down my throat at a bar. Then another with me smiling widely next to a goat that seemed to be the same height as me. Let’s not create any illusions right off the bat, here.

  I was way more excited to fill out the profile portion where I could talk exclusively about myself, which is why people want to go on first dates, anyway—to talk about themselves in a very, very positive light. The person who you project on an online dating site is a carefully crafted version of you—it shows the person you’d really want to be and the person you think you are. I came into this knowing I would talk primarily about my love for action movies and graphic novels and horror movies, which is somewhat true. I like horror movies, but it’s not like I’m a dripping blood Hot Topic model. I just want to be seen as the cool chick or the girl who all the guys are like, “Hey, she totally knows what a machine gun is.” If I wrote something about how much I also liked makeup, I assumed I’d be judged as a girly girl who would want to cry into Ryan Gosling’s mouth during The Notebook. I had to be both cool and datable. This was a problem, however, because to me, this is what datable is:

  Girl: I’m wearing a pretty dress.

  Boy: I love you.

  I spent a lot of time creating what I felt to be the perfect image of myself: funny, cool girl who could take a joke and a drink. It didn’t come across as well as I had hoped. In some sections, you really had to wonder if I should just marry a sandwich and call it a day. I closed my MacBook feeling okay about the whole thing. Now all I had to do was wait.

  * * *

  When I woke up the next morning, I had the same kind of dread that comes after a night of beer and dropping your phone in the toilet or eating six pounds of cheese fries. I felt vaguely embarrassed but also really curious to see how shitty and rock-bottom my life could get. I told my friends I had “worked really hard to seem charming,” neglecting to mention the photos and overly aggressive use of Pitbull lyrics.

  But lo and behold, I opened up my account to find eight messages from potential suitors. All right, I thought. The underdog reigns. But my excitement quickly turned into disappointment when I started to read these messages. It seemed all of their keyboards were totes broken!!!! because it was impossible for these guys to stop using emoticons and exclamation points. I wanted to send them all to a nice community college that could teach them grammar and words to call a woman other than “h0n.” Granted, online dating makes you judge people on the dumbest, most petty things: syntax, why people think it’s okay to take photos of themselves shirtless, love for movies with Ethan Hawke. Many of them are probably lovely people who go out and help old ladies and have great parents and are nice. But I had to judge these people hard because I was looking into the darkest part of their souls: the part that thinks that pictures of them wearing Crocs on a mountain or doing a keg stand on a boat were THE COOLEST PARTS OF THEMSELVES.

  I realized if I were to have any success with my online dating profile, I would need to get really specific with it. A little weird, even. I needed to find the kinds of guys who wouldn’t send me generic stock messages about how pretty my eyes are, because the guys who are interested in me wouldn’t lead with a compliment about my face. They would quote Arrested Development.

  So I made my profile a little less polished and a little more…me.

  On a typical Friday night I am: Seeking revenge.

  The most private thing I’m willing to admit: I talk about the movie Pearl Harbor, starring Ben Affleck, significantly more than other people do. I do not like this film.

  First thing people notice about me: My four eyes, two of which are brown.

  Six things I couldn’t live without: I could just say “brunch” six times.

  You should message me if: I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills—skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

  (That’s Liam Neeson’s monologue from the movie Taken, by the way, and something my soul mate would love as much as he does the speech from Bill Pullman in Independence Day. And if you don’t think that is one of the most badass speeches in cinematic history, then you should close this book. You disgust me, but let’s move on.) My profile was updated and fresh and much more me. Its purpose was simple—I didn’t need to be bombarded by messages from a lot of people. I needed just one person who thought I was funny, who was also funny, and who might want to hang out and crack some jokes with me.

  * * *

  A season passed. I chatted with a couple of guys who weren’t put off by my weirdness, but I never felt excited enough about our banter to go out on a date. To appease my friends who said, “You’re not doing it right, Alida,” I eventually decided to go out with the next guy who would meet me in a public place that all my friends would know the location of. This burden landed on Craig, a new transport to Brooklyn who had large-framed glasses, a nice face, and a respectable love for Mystery Science Theater 3000. We met for drinks, where I sat for a couple of hours, drinking gin and tonics, making small talk in a comfortable way that prompted me to sit cross-legged in a bar booth and tell him stories I knew I was good at telling. It was a very nice time. He was not a murderer.

  Try as I might, though, I couldn’t get it out of my head why he was there in the first place. For things I listed. For pictures. For five messages that barely skimmed the surface of the ocean of things to learn about a person. When we said good-bye, we hugged. When he texted me the next day, hoping to see me, I told him I would be busy for a while. He bowed out gracefully because there was no stock lost with the absence of me. I didn’t tell anybody about my date other than “it was fine,” and then disabled my account a couple of days later.

  Dating online isn’t for me, I concluded. I didn’t want to spend countless hours trying to think of the right thing to say for a couple of hours with some guy who rated me on a Web site. For some people, better people who don’t get so anxious in dim-lit bars and with new people, it is exciting and interesting. A hope perpetuated by lovely success stories. But not for this girl. I began to accept the truth about myself: bitter girl was a die-hard romantic at heart. Bitter girl was happy being single, sustained by a love of alone time and bad TV shows, but also secretly sustained by the invisible face of someone she believed she could fall for. The mere fact that I could allow myself to hope these mushy mashed potato feelings made my stint with online dating worthwhile, a reprieve from being blasé, the return of the girl who used to cry at YouTube wedding videos, even if she made fun of them afterward.

  I think somebody is out there, sure, but I won’t find him online. He and I will meet somewhere where I am already comfortable because I know everyone there; we’ll talk for hours and drink till dawn and kiss under a streetlight even though that’s a cliché. It could take months or years of waiting. But one day? One moment. One guy. One game changer. That’s what I would gamble for, that’s what I wanted, and admitting it to myself made the “single girl” not a guard, but an invitation. For some dude, some adorable goof who may or may not love Liam Neeson monologues as much as I do.

  After all, the way I see it, it takes only one person to murder you. It also takes only one person to fill your heart with the kind of joy that slaps you straight off your high horse. For the first time in a long time, I found myself believing in the possibility of both.
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br />   It’s Your Day, Now Let Me Talk

  No matter how many times I listen to “The Sunscreen Song,” nobody will ever call upon me to make a college graduation speech. For good reason, though. Twentysomethings aren’t exactly known to be fountains of great advice. We haven’t chewed all the stuff we’re learning yet. We haven’t paid back our alma maters in full. And some of us, ahem, haven’t stopped wearing ripped fishnet tights on occasion.

  However, this book is not a college graduation ceremony, and I feel like I have some worthy advice to give after a few years of being away from school. I have processed some things—things I would have preferred to have known about sooner. I would go as far to argue that most of this stuff is 100 percent right, which is the sort of overconfident statement that only a twentysomething would make. I’m not trying to say that this advice is totally unique or mind-blowing. Old people probably learned these lessons at one point, too, but now time has rotted their brains and made them obsessed with 401(k)s and mortgages and other things that make me wish I could put all elderly people in homes to keep them from discussing these topics with me. If it helps my credibility, though, you can read this in the voice of an inspirational geriatric. But read it, dammit, and pass it along to your woefully naïve friends. And hey, Emerson College, if you want, I can come back and rouse audiences with drinking stories and how I half-assed all of your papers during my spring semester of junior year. I promise I’ll watch my language and won’t make fun of your Quidditch team. Too much. Anyway, here goes: