Guide to the internet for the not-yet misanthropic

Gosh I had such an interesting experience recently – I got to meet someone I had met through the internet!

Yes the sarcasm is deliberate. I’m just so tired of men flirting and chatting and texting, but all the excitement is in the chase and not in the kill. I now am convinced that about 80% of the men who use the internet are not really serious about finding a partner – it’s just a game to them.

The real challenge for those of us who are serious, and who are reasonably intact psychologically, is to “do” the internet with hope and sincerity while not becoming completely misanthropic.

Honestly, a person could go off the human race if the people inhabiting these sites are anything to go by. In my darker moments (and, yes, shrinks have them too), I wonder if all the good men were taken about 10 years ago and it’s the dross who now surf the internet highway.

But back to the guy I met. He approached me initially and of course there was the flutter of excitement when my inbox revealed a note from the site saying someone had written to me.

Do you have that feeling too? Hope jumps in you, as if it’s been defibrillated by a gowned medic in an emergency room, having almost stopped beating after months of quiet despair.

Perhaps this is the one, perhaps it’s the prince, not another frog (toad, whatever). So, of course, after reading his brief message – Gosh, I can’t even really remember it now, but it was vaguely flattering – I went to his profile.

And there he was: young, not unattractive, intelligent. But (yes, you knew there was going to be a “but”, didn’t you?) there was one big problem. The site I sometimes use has a cute little facility where they tell you if you are a “match” for this person.

Of course this is amazing because, in a zillion years of dating and loving men, I have never found a formula that works for me. But anyhow, they manage to work out if you are a match based on how you answered a whole set of questions.

Truly, these questions are deeply banal but you fill them out anyway. So now they’ve worked out a match based on 20 vague questions that most of us lied about anyway. But what leapt out at me was that we were incompatible because of one major problem: I was the wrong gender! Believe me, this has occurred to me before and, as a teen, I flirted with the idea of gender re-assignment (or gender alignment as it is now more properly called – either way it’s a major makeover of the body).

I don’t believe I’m transgendered, but it seemed then that it was easier, socially anyway, to love men as a woman than as a man (I never had the surgery by the way, in case you’re wondering).

So, you ask (as I did) what does this dude want with me if he’s looking for a woman? Ok I’ll cut to the chase – he had never been with a man and he was essentially using the gender issue to mask a search for a man.

I learnt this because we exchanged an email or two and then loads of text messages. I learnt also that he was smart, sensitive, young and needy.

So, pretty smartly, the text messages got more intimate and affectionate – oh come on, you’ve done that dance. On Monday you start with: “I really like you” and by Friday, if you haven’t actually had phone sex, you’ve at least seen some pics of him in various states of undress (mostly shockingly lit and poorly executed, though I have to say, I’ve seen some really good shots of professional quality. How do they do it?)

So I decided to take the bull by the horns and wrote a long e-mail about projection and fantasy and dreams and hopes. You know, something along the lines of: “I can’t say I love you back because I actually haven’t even met you”.

Now there’s nothing like an earnest, pompous shrink to deflate a sexual flirtation. But to this guy’s credit, he hung in there (now that’s a Freudian statement if ever I heard one) and we actually got to meet.

Oh dear, it was hard (well it wasn’t actually, but I think you know what I mean). The poor man could barely look me in the eye he was so uptight and he kept looking around the coffee bar in case anyone he knew saw him.

So we had a very stilted hour together and it felt like I was giving a “homosexuality 101” lecture. Nothing else happened (no sex – yes occasionally I am capable of restraint) and since then he’s been pretty quiet.

As the title of a great book on therapy goes, I was “love’s executioner”. But hey, at least we got to meet and, for me, that was great. For him, I’m not so sure.