Restraining Order for One

It’s no secret that girls are CreepCity, Population: 1.  To mitigate my creep potential, I have a fool-proof system built out to vet whether my actions will be seen as assertive and modern, or straight up stalker with a side of a restraining order. What is that lovely system you might ask? My friends. Only problem…they are just as weird as I am.

The problem with being a seasoned marketing professional like myself is this: I’m scary good at stalking the interwebs. Add a dash of single to the mix and it’s like sticking a recovering alcoholic in the middle of Specs with one of those sweet XL pimp cups. I wish I could say that I am able to resist temptation, but it’s like that giant goblet is whispering to me saying ‘fill me and my bedazzled self up with that trash…you know you want it’. I do, Pimp Cup, I do want to give in and google every guy who could possibly be the future father of my overly-athletic children. With the help of my enterprise-grade social networking tools, that temptation is only a few clicks away. A hop, skip and a jump and I find myself fighting Kathy Bates for the starring role in Misery.

As a young professional in the dating world, I spend my evenings chatting it up with fine fellows about our respective careers. When your life revolves around spreadsheets and revenue model meetings, it’s easy to fall into comfortable conversations, relying on camaraderie built on the foundation of banality, rather than take that first step out onto the thin ice of truly getting to know someone. It’s basically either that or sports. Whichever comes first. Lord knows I’m not going to roll up into a bar discussing my incessant need to document every epic relationship failure by way of this blog. “Hey there. Don’t bother telling me your name, HottyToddy, because I’m just going to refer to you by aforementioned relatively applicable nickname in my wildly read (by 32 people) dating blog”. My night would be spent hacking up the dust left by his rapid exit.

Instead of doing what any normal human being would do, I engage in friendly conversation, ignore any hints of interest and freak out and bolt when he is about to ask for my number (because that’s the healthy option), leaving me to text my friends real-life questions like the following:

Me- “Yo, dude. One a scale of 1-Restraining Order, how creepy is it to LinkedIn a guy when you only knew his name and company to begin with?”

Her-“How many clicks did it take?”

Me-“2”

Her-“I mean it’s definitely not worse than that one time you jumped on a bike with someone in Ireland and that turned out fine…..so I’m all for it.”

Me-“I don’t know if that makes you the most awesome or most awful,friend I have.”

Her-“Awesome. Honesty is the best policy. You’ve got to go after what you want…and all that jazz.”

*Connect Button Clicked*

Her-“….but I’m typically creepy.”

Welp, what’s another restraining order, right? After about five I hear they lose count anyways…

We live in the mixed-up world where the rules our parents lived by are obsolete. A world where face-to-face conversations are no longer the primary way of obtaining information, whether it is related to a business or to your love life. Our world, and our dating, have gone online, but where is the line drawn?

The temptation to forego the tough conversations and conventional methods of asking, accepting and pursuing the opposite sex is a tantalizing enemy because one side is sticky and uncomfortable, while the other allows you the safety of your sweat pants and anonymity.

Where once we had to wait on the dreaded phone call, three days after a successful date, now ladies spend their time analyzing the number of exclamation marks and emoticons used in a string of text messages. What we thought was instant gratification has morphed into instant investigation, each female following the 48 hour rule. Don’t let the trail go stale, or you’ll find youself in 47 cat hell, wallowing in a housecoat, DVR set to a constant slough of Lifetime movies.

It’s exhausting.

This cat and mouse world is evidenced by the multimillion (maybe billion. Don’t fact check me, bro) dollar business of the RomCom. Each heroine following some zany advice of a delightfully off-kilter friend that leads to a love interest, heartache and misery, but always results in a reconciliation of epic proportions. Girls want to know what to do. They want to know that pursuit exists, that the rules they so strictly follow will result in the life Disney always promised them. They want the ends to justify the painfully repeated means.

But ya know what, ladies? They don’t. There is no prescription to this thing we call love. There are no rules to dating. Four days, three days, two hours. It is all a relative timeline in an unchartered world. We kill ourselves over the idea of fate and serendipity, but fail to realize the beauty in the unrepeatable, in the glitches and moments that skirt around the tracks.

We look so hard for the recipe of love, but fail to put the box aside and throw in a few secret ingredients, unafraid of the tasteless failure of a concoction it might produce. If everyday of your life is a beautiful unplanned mess, maybe we should also accept that our love lives may be found somewhere in the chaos.