There are things I learned the hard way:
- An online dating profile is essentially an advertisement for Me, a hard-to-sell specialty product.
- What I say about myself when I’m dating should be honest but does not have to be true.
In recovery, there’s so much emphasis on being honest. Rigorous honesty. How does that apply when I go on my first date with a stranger from the Internet? For me, it’s a journey of trial and error, and after tracking through a whole lot of bullshit, I’ve finally figured out what works for me: selective omission.
When I meet someone on a dating website, I am not meeting him or her. My personal advertisement is clicking with this human’s personal advertisement. The site’s algorithm is assessing us, playing matchmaker and nudging us together. Did we both mention how much we love Neruda? Do we use lots of adjectives when we describe ourselves, or stick with strong verbs, recounting our adventures? Do our metrics complement one another? When I look over someone’s profile, I always scan the statistics. Height? Body type? Oh, and most importantly: what’s his relationship with drugs and alcohol?
When I first started dating again (after I separated from my ex-husband in 2010) I used a personals site called Mercury LoveLab, which was run through the local weekly paper. (It is now defunct, which makes me feel kind of old.) LoveLab let users put custom responses into their profiles. I saw at least one body type that said “centaur.” For me, in the boxes that asked, “Do you drink?” and “Do you smoke?” and “Do you use drugs?” I wrote “Not anymore.” In the box that said, “Want kids?” I wrote, “One is plenty.”
Now, a close reading of this would imply what is true of me: I’m a non-drinking, non-smoking, non-drugging single mother of one child. To my great surprise, only one of the many dates I went on was able to suss this out.
Was I lying? No. I was choosing to obscure the complete truth.
I did this for two reasons. One, because I wanted to protect my child. I’d heard horror stories about men preying on single mothers with children. I never showed my son in a photo on a dating website, mentioned his name to someone I didn’t know, offer to bring him along on a coffee date or bring him on a walk through the park. That seemed like common sense. The second reason was that I was seriously hurting from my divorce and I just didn’t want to talk about it. Any of it. I didn’t want to have to say, “I’m an alcoholic,” because I didn’t want to share my story. I was willing to answer questions, but not about that. I found ways to avoid the topic of alcohol and drugs. I went on daytime dates, or sipped club soda and lime while I watched my date stammer his way through a couple of double bourbons.
“Not tonight,” I always said whenever someone offered to buy me a drink, leaving out the part where I wasn’t interested in ever having a drink. It was easy to get away with, but to be honest, I rarely had a second date so it didn’t really matter. My sobriety felt like an open secret. A part of me was always a little disappointed to find that my date—this stranger who had pored over my photos and picked through my favorite French films—somehow skipped over the fact that I don’t drink anymore. How smart could this guy really be if he’d missed that?
Frankly, I found drinking and drinkers boring—taking alcohol out of the equation changed the way I dated. Aside from more coffee, tea and club soda than I thought it was possible to drink, there was also more conversation. I got very good at talking about myself without giving too much away. Most of the men I went out with were interested in the big picture: work, school, politics and sex. Nobody scrutinized or cross-examined me. I was younger then, and pretty. All I had to do, I learned, was smile and change the subject.
I had a terrible fear that nobody would want to have a serious relationship with me because of all the things I was. If I had told the complete truth in my online profile, it would have said very clearly that I wasn’t what you were looking for. Divorced single mother. Doesn’t drink. No fun allowed. Which is stupid, because I wanted some fun in those days and the anonymity of online dating let me just be a stupid 26-year-old. I got to act my age, leaving my heavy worries, labels and responsibilities off stage for a night.
I’m sure I wouldn’t have had that freedom if I’d laid everything out from the beginning. Besides, I wanted the kind of intimacy that happens slowly, naturally. Something about relating to someone’s statistics is just so…unromantic. I think part of me was hoping to be discovered, unraveled and enjoyed by someone who wasn’t afraid of what he found in me. I was lucky to have a couple of relationships during my years of dating. I knew they were keepers because they didn’t flinch or run away when I finally said the “A” word.
Although I’m way more open now about who and what I am, that self-trust came to me slowly. I had to learn to have faith in my recovery—I had to get used to it, the way you get used to waking up next to the same person every day, until finally you start believing that he’ll be there no matter what.
Also, so what if I’m hard to sell? I’m not a Roomba: you don’t need to see my product reviews before you decide to take me to a show. (Believe me, my last boyfriend didn’t give me a five-star rating.) The first time I had coffee with the man I’m dating now, I looked him straight in the eye and told him the truth: I’m a sober heroin addict and an alcoholic, I took my last drink in 2007, I had my kid the next year and got divorced shortly after. There was no need to beat around the bush for two reasons: first, because I am okay with who I am. And second, I deserve to be with someone who’s good with me, too.
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