The other day, I was with my mother, who is very invested in finding a good husband for her 23-year-old, overly educated, highly opinionated daughter. She tells me about an old high school friend of hers who now lives in L.A. and has two sons. One is an oncologist, and the other is a software engineer. And they're not at all ugly, she tells me. Fine, so maybe it's a little weird that they're both still living with their mother, but that just means that they value family and believe in saving money. (Yeah, okay, mom.) She also tells me that she forwarded to her friend my email address. Great. Generally, the idea of my mom setting me up with a man, regardless of how good he may look on paper, makes me queasy. I don't like my family let alone my mother getting involved in my personal life, and I'm pretty sure that the kind of guy my mother deems ideal would probably want nothing to do with a loudmouthed girl like me. That aside, I'm actually not opposed to the principle of being introduced to random boys. With luck, maybe mummy will find me a Mr. Darcy (sans reindeer jumper and bad sideburns, of course).
What choice do I have, really? In the past couple of years I've been in school, I feel like I've joined a fucking convent. Most of the few men I've met lately are already married, taken, or oblivious, clueless men. From what I hear from my girlfriends, the pickings aren't any better in other parts of campus, either. (Interesting tidbit, though, that there seem to be plenty of single women in graduate school.) I frequent the popular student hangout spots, sometimes play eye contact games with boys, but mingling doesn't really happen in such a small town. And, as my friends oh so eloquently puts it, one can't help but run into the same damn people, even with a routine change. I've done the online dating thing, too-- That experience was exhausting, traumatizing, and bitterness-inducing.
Thus, I have to promote an idea aptly called, "Viral Dating." Spread people like diseases. (And, yes, there is the risk that you end up with a virus you want to get rid of, so the pestilential connotation is totally appropriate.) If we're able to accept that networking works in our professional lives, why not use that same philosophy in our personal ones? And I'm not even talking about hooking up friends with each other, because I'm open to a variety of possible relationships: friends, friends with benefits, casual dating, serious dating, etc. (Really, I'm not looking for a baby daddy. I just want to meet people, and see what happens from there.) I'm just talking about a willingness to introduce friends to other friends and fostering interactions between people who would normally have no opportunity to get to know each other. One would think that this should be a no-brainer, right? But, the social stinginess I see on a daily basis staggers me. I can't tell you how many times I've met friends of friends, had to introduce myself to the stranger, and rack my brain for casual conversation so that we're not sitting in awkward silence. It's quite possible that graduate (and college within itself) school breeds and attracts people who lack social graces, but really, how hard can it be to just say, "Friend A, meet Friend B."
Since I've tried to implement a system for myself to get at least one date per month, I should also institute a system for spreading myself like a goddamn contagion. (A suggestion a friend of mine told me; however, she knows I'm quite monogamous so having a date with a different guy would pose as a problem. Anyone have problems just "hanging out"?)
I should just invite random groups of people to a party at someone's place, tell them to bring friends, get everybody drunk, and make the whole motley crew play embarrassing icebreaker games. I should bombard acquaintances with emails and Myspace friend requests and ask them to do random shit like go bocce balling or apple picking. I should subversively insist that boy-who-doesn't-want-to-da
te-me-but-for-some-reason-
doesn't-want-to-be-friends
-either-despite-claiming-t
o-really-like-me to be friends with me anyway (because, really, it makes no sense for us to behave as strangers), just in case he has a buddy who actually would want to date me. And, of course, I should introduce my girlfriends to guys whom I'm not interested in dating. Shit, I should introduce people to my ex-boyfriends. It's like in that Beatles' song: "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." If this kind of social generosity were the norm, I'd imagine there would be much fewer lonely people in this world. If one person can introduce you to, say, four people, and if those four people can each introduce you to another four people and so on, certainly someone among this tangled web could be your soulmate.
Yes, there's the potential for creating a lot of weirdness when worlds collide, but really, that already happens anyway. And I just found out that another one of my cousins broke the heart of a friend of a girl I work with. I could get weirded out when degrees of separation get smaller all of a sudden, but instead I'm just going to revel in it. I like when people get under my skin and into my system. I should insist that it happens more often. Yes, dating should absolutely be viral.
