by Dawne Belloise
If you like Pina Coladas and getting caught in the rain, If you’re not into yoga,
if you have half a brain, If you’d like making love at midnight in the dunes on the Cape
Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for write to me and escape” — Rupert Holmes
Up here at the end of the road in the mountains, relationships and affairs of the heart can get as sticky as a box of half-bitten Valentine chocolates. The incestuous nature of small town romances can liken local dating to sinking your teeth into every piece of confection in the box just to find out what’s inside the yummy coating. Historically, ski town populations are generally male-dominated — despite that it’s an over-used cliche, the fact remains — although the odds are good for the women, the goods are odd. Nevertheless, men find themselves in the love shuffle, and as one friend recited the mountain man mantra perched from his hunting site atop a bar stool while nursing his recent breakup, “You don’t lose your girl, you just lose your turn.”
In these high speed days of connectivity, there’s now an alternative to help mountain folk through the dark, frigid, high-altitude nights — online dating, the eBay of imported love, the modern equivalent of mail order brides and express order boyfriends. On the net, no one knows your real name or whether or not that photo of you is a decade or so outdated until the moment you meet. The New Yorker magazine’s cartoon a few years ago depicted it best: A canine sitting at a computer, manipulating a mouse over a photo on a dating site, turns to his buddy as states, “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”
Once a dirty little secret, dating sites have steadily gained popularity and are now averaging over twenty million unique visitors a month. Finding love, or at least a slumber buddy, would seem relatively easy and certainly entertaining with almost ninety million people to choose from on the glut of dating sites available in the U.S. alone. Apparently, the lonely have gotten past the stigma that it’s a sign of desperation to indulge in the internet catalog of courtship. According to an interactive 2007 Harris poll, eight percent of all newlyweds met online. In 2008, over 100,000 marriages were credited to free dating sites. Recent statistics show that over thirty percent of all Americans have either used an internet dating site or know someone who has. And the projected bottom line for all these sites is that by 2011 the industry will reach $932 million (according to Jupiter Research).
One of my friends who decided to take the online dating plunge went through a long cue of progressively stranger dates, “After hours of witty banter on a regular basis with a guy from Ridgway, we set up our first date. He was standing next to his car when I drove up and he looked nothing like his photos,” she mused. “You invest a lot of time into it before you even meet when you live in rural places like this. I went on a lot of unreal dates. For the most part they were insanely bizarre.” She recalled one date who dropped his pants to his ankles as they were saying good night and another who gave a white-knuckled Speed Racer impersonation. After calling it quits for online dating, she responded to a “wink” from a penpal-only status, which led to several days of five-hour phone conversations and a meeting. “Everything matched but I was more cautious. His e-mails had a different tone of exposed honesty. When we met, there was definite chemistry and he was a million times cuter in person,” she admitted. That was in the spring — by the fall they were engaged.
Encouraged by friends who would never be caught dead signing up for such a service themselves, I logged into the etheric region of amorous hopefuls. After finding the perfect pseudonym, answering all the pop psychology questions engineered by a fashion magazine guru and posting a current photo, my mailbox was immediately swamped — which I attributed to both being the new girl on the block and having low expectations defined by the parameters I had chosen. My criteria were simple and broad — unmarried non-smoking male, not fanatically religious, over forty-eight years old, anywhere in the world.
A few weeks passed with nary a prime candidate of compatibility — just pen pals, guys on motorcycles with trailing mustaches, old men in swimming pools, or the disgruntled with lengthy lists of what they didn’t want in a date. Until one day, delivered into my dating prospects with great exclamation, fanfare and a whopping, rare five stars out of the maximum five for compatibility was … my recently ex-boyfriend. The odds were staggering that out of the millions of men across the globe, the online matchmaker hooked me up as the perfect match for a man I had already spent fifteen years with. Cupid was up to his mischievous tricks again. There was my five-star mega-match — the man who for a decade and a half consistently balked at the idea of introducing me as his girlfriend for fear of being defined — filling in the questionnaire blanks that identify boundaries of personality and cruising the broadband hunting grounds.
As online introductions go, this is the normal procedure for weeding through the hordes of the less compatible — cheeky, inane predetermined questions you meticulously, with heartfelt sincerity, answer while trying to sound intelligent and attract the most well-suited mate. Despite your best rhetoric, anyone searching through dating sites initially clicks on the profile because the photo looks inviting. In reality, the animalistic selection process hasn’t evolved far from the Neanderthal scratch-and-sniff stage only now it can be achieved from afar.
I removed my profile the next day, after my ex and I laughed heartily about the entire match-making faux pas and went our separate ways. He, to a compatible intellectual in upstate N.Y., and I, back to my close knit family of real-thing mountain men whom I adore. Besides, when half the town is doing that early morning walk of shame, it looks more like a parade. And who doesn’t love a parade? Happy Valentine’s Day …
(Holy Cupid, don’t pay for it! Get it free here: Plentyoffish.com or OKCupid.com)
Dawne Belloise is a freelance writer, photographer, traveler and musician living with a large cat in a tiny cottage on an alley at the end of the road in Crested Butte’s paradise. Her writing and photography is published in various mags and rags. Contact dbelloise@gmail.com, website rubysroad.com.
