The 15 Minute Dating Blog

by Tony G. Rocco

Do you want to know what it’s like to be a single 51 year-old in the modernday dating world? It’s a lot like sticking your eyeball in a bunson burner or jamming your left arm into a tree shredder. It ain’t pretty. Let me formulate a definition of Dating as it is practiced by most men and women today. For that, I cite pearls of wisdom offered by a therapist cum dating coach to whom I turned, in a moment of weakness, for advice and succor.

Dating, I was informed during our one-hour session together, is the process by which two (and only two) people determine whether they want to be life partners, mates, spouses, and such or just despise each other from a comfortable distance. It is a series of hoops and hurdles either successfully negotiated by both parties, resulting in a blissful romantic union, or not, resulting in dejection and disappointment.

Sounds pretty sexy. If you could go through this ordeal in a coma or on mindnumbing antidepressants, it might be tolerable. Otherwise, it’s like getting a colonoscopy without narcotics. It might work out for the best in the end, but the procedure is a bitch. And bitch though it is, we’re happy to go through it time and again.

Methods of Our Madness

In the dating marketplace (and dating is basically a mercantile enterprise), we are searching for a commodity called a Relationship and we want just the right model to match our ideal of Ms. or Mr. Right. We want someone with all the right attributes, whatever they may be - looks, brains, talent, income, prestige, style, religious beliefs… the list of requirements goes on and on. So we peruse, compare, evaluate, and consider, until we find the relationship commodity that best fits our requirements. Then we attempt to acquire it.

Let’s begin by examining the methods we use to pursue the Dating enterprise. I submit for your approval, Exhibit A: speed dating, a subject about which I have much first-hand experience.

I went on a speed-dating binge a few years back in the misguided hope that it would yield a garden of delightful dating possibilities and ultimately lead to the holy grail of a Relationship. What I found was a modern-day practice that panders shamelessly to the relationshipas-commodity attitude prevalent among middle-class, middle-aged daters, and all the attendant ills of modern-day relationship shopping.

Speed dating is an organized activity in which relationship shoppers evaluate each other (as best they can) in a rapid-fire series of face-to-face, 3 to 10 minute interviews or “mini-dates.” Then, after experiencing a smorgasbord of up to 40 potential dating acquisitions, and sizing up and comparing all the available merchandise, they make their choices; those who reciproca e each other’s interest in this sweepstakes receive each other’s email address so they can follow up later and further evaluate each other without time limits.

Speed-daters approach their task with grim-faced seriousness. Bargain shoppers at a blue-light special are no more determined than these people. Everyone sits poker-faced (wouldn’t want any revealing emotions to give them away), scribbling notes like reporters at a news conference as they interview each other, one candidate after another. At regular intervals, the men process past the women like penitents as the women sit solemnly in their seats of judgment.

The conversation is light and superficially friendly, trivial, even:

“Have you ever done this before?” is a usual opener.

“No, this is my first time.” It is everyone’s first time.

Then all the dumb things people ask each other when they first meet:

“Where do you live?”

“Where do you work?”

“What do you do for a living?”

“What do you do for fun?”

Time’s up, and the cycle repeats itself with the next candidate.

Don’t be misled: behind the small talk and chit chat lie the cold, calculating minds of serious relationship shoppers sizing each other up and evaluating each other against a checklist of requirements.

After the serial inquisition is complete, the parties do the hard work of ranking, rating, and evaluating to determine who will be the lucky picked rather than the picked over. Would-be suitors and suitees are notified of the results by email the next day, thus lending the whole event an air of thrilling suspense. Ah, quelle romance.

Speed dating is only one example of the tawdriness and depravity of current dating practices. Modern-day Internet technology has aided and abetted the relationship shopping process and taken it to degrading new lows. I offer for your consideration, Exhibit B: the sordid world of on-line dating, another realm of activity with which I am well-versed.

Online dating services provide one of the largest and most popular relationship marketplaces today. The crassly evaluative and objectifying quality of speed dating is easily exceeded by on-line dating - Match.com, Yahoo! Pesonals, Matchmaker.com, True.com, ad nauseum. At least speed dating involves real people. Online dating takes objectification into cyberspace, where it can flourish unimpeded by actual human contact.

You may credibly ask: why not employ modern communications technology to facilitate the process of meeting a potential mate? Why not reach out and touch someone, virtually speaking? It sounds perfectly reasonable on its face, but in reality it is a painful disaster. The eBay approach may work well for selling used electronics, refrigerators, and motorcycles, but it turns dating into a dehumanizing exercise in relationship shopping, cyber-style.

Imagine a medium in which all your physical and characterological attributes are on display for others to view, evaluate and compare, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. (I call it the 24/7 meat rack.) Things that would normally take weeks or months to learn about you are floating in the ether (no point in hiding the merchandise), so there’s no frustrating sense of mystery, no intimate revelations or surprises after you meet someone.

Your looks (pics are a must), height, weight, body type, income, profession, education, interests, taste in books, taste in movies, dietary preferences, sexual proclivities, smoking habits, and so forth are spelled out in every detail. The whole world can know everything about you; the only thing people can’t know is you. Only your attributes matter in the contemporary relationship marketplace.

The fallacious promise of on-line dating is this: there exists a good correlation between the personal attributes displayed on web pages and the actual person with whom the attributes are associated, such that an alignment between the attributes of two persons indicates the likelihood of romantic sparks flying and “compatibility” existing. It’s basically modern-day divination with a technological twist. You might as well believe in phrenology or searching for water with a forked stick.

About the author: Tony moved to the Bay Area in the waning days of the 1970’s, when San Francisco glowed with an eroticism and sensuality people only dream of today. After spending his youth hanging out on the punk rock scene, taking drugs, and having sex, he decided to buy into all the silly yuppie crap everyone else buys into. So, he became a software technical writer and moved to the ‘burbs. Today he gives expression to his rebellious spirit by volunteering with two non-profits and writing irreverent articles about the silly conventions that rule our lives, like on-line dating.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 4:20 am and is filed under Dating and Relationships Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.