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Fleshly Pleasures: Meeting face-to-faceBy Tom GellerI just got off the phone with Kris, a woman who picked me up on America Online. About three weeks ago, she read my profile (under the "Members" menu), liked what she saw, and decided to send me an Instant Message. We only had a chance to chat for a few minutes before AOL went down for its nightly "system maintenance" (grrrrr), but that was enough time to find out that we're about the same age, live 15 miles apart, and wanted to trade mail. And that's just what we did. She described herself and her job; I sent a GIF and told her about The Net. We kvetched about work for five or six letters before catching each other online at the same time. When we chatted then, it became clear how afraid we were to talk in depth about ourselves, about our personal histories or what we liked to do in bed -- even about what we hoped to get out of a relationship with one another. We had both held back because she and I had each been burned in the past by what I'll call the Cyrano Syndrome: we'd been taken in by good online writers, only to feel misled when we met them. Fortunately, the online medium provides several ways to pre-screen candidates before our candid dates -- but you have to know what those methods are before you can use them. The most useful pre-screening tools in brief are: personal profiles, which display a basic public "face" for surreptitious viewing; message boards and chat rooms, where you can see what someone is like in a group setting; and online portraits, which tell you whether someone is within your acceptable range of attractiveness. And e-mail is still one of the best ways of getting a feel for your potential mate's personality as you carry on the tradition of flirtatious correspondence that's as old as the written word. Love may be beautiful, but meeting someone for the first time is too fraught with pitfalls to be romantic. We want to be sure that a potential partner is (at least) not an ax murderer and (at best) compatible with our hopes and dreams. In the end, you have no way of knowing whether someone is for real until you meet him or her. Before that first meeting, as Kris said, "You could be a 92-year-old named Harriet for all I know. Or a 12-year-old named Harriet, for that matter. You could be anyone at all." That's why I always insist on a phone conversation or two before meeting someone: I may be able to write like a 12-year-old girl or a 92-year-old woman, but that's damn hard to fake on the phone. Back to Kris and me: she's read my description and seen my picture, we've traded e-mail, and she's heard my voice. We've whittled away our reservations until there seems to be no reason not to meet. She even asked to make sure I had all my body parts ("I was surprised when this one guy turned out to be missing a leg," she said.) We have a date on Wednesday. Wish us luck!
This page was last updated on Monday, February 09, 2004 at 3:07pm CST. All contents copyright 2005 by Tom Geller.
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