I was a recently divorced man at the age of forty-five when I first tried Internet dating.
Back then, in early 2001, on-line dating wasn’t quite a novelty any longer but it also wasn’t something everybody had grown up with. In that period before Tinder, Instagram, and smartphones, people were still trying to get the hang of meeting partners through their desktop computers.
At first, it was quite exciting for me, not being the most extroverted person in the world, to start approaching and chatting with women online. I’m a little vague now on the technical details, but messages were sent through a site’s server like those on a message board, I suppose. I think I did have my first email account by then. I was soon was also using text messaging (or instant messaging as I knew it) for the first time.
I found out about a few sites from my ex-wife, of all people. There was a new boyfriend in her life, a guy I had met when picking up my kids for a visitation. She admitted to me that she had met him through a certain site and advised me that I should research others.
LavaLife was a big one, and they used to advertise in the New York subways. There was even something called Love at AOL. I did arrange a few dates in the early months. Perhaps I would have done better if my financial status was more in order, but I was impressed that, after two decades of marriage, I could talk (or write, really) women into meeting me.
None of these dates went beyond the first, and I got that I’d have to be patient and bide my time until I found someone suitable (or who found me suitable). It became clear that this was a game of numbers, and I usually had several prospects going at once. It was particularly pleasing when I was able to write a better than average profile for myself on one site and I got women contacting me. Unfortunately, one of my favorites was in British Columbia but we still chatted for about two months.
Back then digital photography was just getting started and a lot of profiles, at least half, in fact, had no pictures attached to them. It took a while for me to get around to scanning a couple of prints, and initially, I only sent them out by request.
There was a distinction between sexually explicit profiles and ones that were simply “conventional.” Some sites specialized in the former, some restricted them, and others accepted both. One woman told me that if she posted a regular profile she might get five messages per week, but if she put up one describing sexual preferences – even without a photo attached – she might get seventy. By comparison, I’ve heard that women now on sites like Tinder can get at least seventy per day.
In 2002, I backed off the Internet for a while to deal with other issues, mostly job-related. By the fall, I back to using the “spray and pray” method of contacting whatever profiles seemed to have even the slightest potential. I would even contact women in their twenties, although I knew I didn’t have the money or the looks for that to have much of a chance.
In November, just around Thanksgiving, I threw a Hail Mary pass, and a woman caught it.
I’ll call her Miriam here. Her profile was on a site that may have been Adult Friend Finder, which still exists. She did have a photo, a nude one. She described herself as a BBW, which was fine with me because I liked women of various body sizes.
It was definitely her photo that drew me in. She was a big – no, let’s be blunt – overweight blonde lady. She was in her thirties I think. Miriam had set her Rubenesque self on a table, facing sidewise to the camera, and she was up on all fours. She had short blonde hair at one end and white high-heeled shoes on the other. In between was nothing but a lot of zaftig creaminess. I found out later than white shoes were supposedly unfashionable after Labor Day, but maybe she didn’t know or care either. I seem to remember her wearing a brimmed white hat too.
Her text was sparse, which was a downside, because I often contacted women who had a witty profile, with or without an attached photo. In fact, I searched for those precisely because by then I had read so much uninspired dating prose. There was way too much about “fine dining” and “walking on the beach.” I got to writing things in my profiles like, “I can’t afford fine dining, but mediocre dining is fine” and “I don’t have a beach house, but if you do, I’ll definitely visit it.”
I read male profiles at times to see what the competition was up to, and if anything the men were even more inept. I was reminded of an Andy Warhol quote, “Someday, we will know what everyone else is thinking, and then we will find out that everyone else is thinking the same thing.”
There was a notable aspect in Miriam’s advertisement for herself. She claimed to enjoy being spanked with various implements and she wanted someone who was up to that. I had briefly experimented with that once as both a top and bottom and I was eager to try it again.
Beyond that, I only knew that she lived somewhere in Suffolk County on Long Island. That was another downside because she was a long way from where I was in New York City. Miriam did send back some desultory messages but she told me almost nothing about herself and in turn, asked almost nothing about me.
Her contact with me started to dry up but her photo stayed in my mind and I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I used a tactic that went against my usual low-key nature. That tactic, which obviously depended on the content in the lady’s profile, was sending an explicit, rude, or ridiculous message and then seeing what happened. Sometimes it would be the initial contact. At other times, it would in response to something rude or ridiculous from the woman.
On the day after Thanksgiving, I tried the rude approach. “Why don’t you put down the turkey drumsticks and talk to me again?”
She wasn’t offended that I had referred to her weight; maybe she was even amused. In any case, it worked, because I got a response. “Obviously, from my photo, you can tell that I like turkey drumsticks.”
I even got another photo from her. She was a hairdresser, and this one showed her from the chest up while wearing her gown from work. She had a nice smile as she faced the camera. Maybe my heart melted a little bit, because I wrote back, “You’re just the cutest little sub any guy could ever ask for.” Already I had fantasies of this being far more than a one-night stand. She could take the train into the city and I would meet her for good times in Manhattan.
Then we were negotiating a date, one that had to take place in her home territory. She wanted to meet me at a bar in a town on the North Shore of Long Island. The topic of spanking came up again and she suggested a plan for it. Her proposal was that, after the bar meeting, we would go to a nearby motel. She wrote, “There are some cabins in the back where no one will hear me scream when you beat me.”
I hoped that was just supposed to be a part of the playacting. She continued, “All I ask is that you rape me afterwards.” More hyperbole – maybe. All this was on the border between erotic and unnerving.
One problem was that it violated my own rule of having a drink or coffee with someone, and then giving myself at least a day or two to consider my next move. We did not have each other’s phone numbers (I had my first cell phone then), real e-mail addresses, or text messaging addresses. We did not know each other’s last names, which I had always known on previous dates. I must have sent her one of my scanned photos, so she did know what I looked like.
To top it off, I had no clue about how long this strange date was going to last. Was I going to spend the night in this cabin, or was I going to go home at two o’clock in the morning? Nevertheless, the sheer pressure of finally getting laid pushed me to a positive decision. I know, the romance of it all. Nevertheless, I had to find out for myself.
On a Friday night, I drove the two hours out there and walked into the bar a few minutes before the appointed time. It was a roomy place and uncrowded for that time of the week. No buxom blonde was anywhere in sight. I decided to wait in an area off to the side with tables but no waitress service, and I sat there looking superfluous.
I had not set a time limit for how long I would wait. The distance I had driven gave me some patience, or perhaps I should call it persistence. Several times I got up to look around both inside and outside the place in case we had missed each other. For a few paranoid moments, I thought I had been set up and some guy or group of guys would approach me and start laughing. Hey, did you come here looking for ‘Miriam?’ Well, she is us! Of course, that didn’t happen.
Probably after about thirty minutes I knew she wasn’t going to show up, but instead of leaving I had a couple of beers at the bar. Some people who were obviously co-workers ending the week were hanging around at the end of the bar – about five women and one man. Their conversations were a bit boisterous but that didn’t bother me. The jukebox was playing continuously but the sound system was at a reasonable level. Overall, I was relaxed.
That was the only time I ever heard Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning,” not exactly a tavern standard, on a jukebox. Could there really be a Midnight Oil fan in here, or maybe just someone concerned with the plight of Australian aborigines? I wondered if any of my fellow barflies knew what “Holden wrecks” referred to. I myself had to later check out the locations for Kintore East and Yuendemu.
