Personal Hell, Part 1

If a young person feels alienated, oppressed by social and political constraints, and has nothing inside except desperation, what option does that leave them? Our leaders may condemn personal ads, but everyone knows they're the inevitable choice of the downtrodden.

This loser entered the personals world upon realizing that my paltry 100-person high school would never yield the dream date I should've already obtained had I belonged to a normal demographic. It's unbelievable at first that such an artificial medium exists. If anything, I began to revere the Internet's assembly powers, its capacity through numbers to magnify opportunities and overwhelm with delectable romantic information. The personals amateur predictably pounces on the first mediocre ad he finds, convinced with sparkling faith of the possibility for true love. At this stage, it makes perfect sense to consider a cookie-cutter future with someone 4,000 miles away.

When the exchanges start, so too does the primordial flirting game. The bashful awkwardness on both sides exhilarates and endears; hesitation, polite resistance and the unwillingness to dispense private details quickly become sexier than any curve or muscle. The heart races just waiting to know what the other's favorite hobby is. Such pleasant interactions, however, only last as long as one's naivete. Awareness of the redundancies in personality leads to special anger at the pitfalls of cloning. This awareness becomes perilous for the "idiosyncratic" person when their own vocabulary, style and appearance unwittingly start to follow trendy paths. All the sweet nothings exchanged lose their tender sting and become part of the blasé repertoire now usable on someone more gullible than you.

I refused to tolerate such generic defeat and decided instead (against all logic) to be excessively and universally accepting: "I'm open to speaking with everyone, requirements are stupid, our minds can always meet if our bodies refuse to ... real beauty is in the flaws." Like the troubled youth/film-maker from American Beauty, I wanted to go beyond my unibrow and realize blind love. Filling out the various "about you" forms, I sought to portray myself as an invincibly enthusiastic puppy, immune to pessimism and compromise, stubborn in that "kinda cool" way. If I invest enough creativity, thought I, the singular hermits will recognize a companion and come out of hiding. This approach does attract very unique types, although they're usually over 45, have strange skin and want to take you on a "vacation" around the world.

If represented on a graph, a person's level of interest after establishing contact peaks during the first few exchanges and wanes once a routine generates. The splendor of anonymity makes the other person seem hazily attractive, in the same way that a silent date appears to possess admirable wisdom (but in actuality has nothing going through his mind). Once you can predict these patterns, only the preliminary stages of contact seem worth reliving, and you discard your companion once their form takes shape: the catch-22 of pursuing a silhouette.

Many factors can result in breaking off communication, but especially abbreviation-mania. Besides being unpoetic, acronyms for important words like "relationship" or "affection" serve only to trip up the writer's rhetorical momentum, and further make it seem like they use those words with whorish regularity. The panting fetishists are easy to spot and easier to drop, what with their lists of ransom-note demands. What, you ask, is the necessity of having bulbous ankles for a successful relationship?

XY.com, the Fisher-Price "my first personals" for gays and lesbians, presents an interesting case study. On this site, you will find such raw enthusiasm, such smiling ignorance, such antiseptic fantasies, that you will want to take each one of these twinks and drag them through the gutters of a red-light district. In their Lisa Frank hyperactivity, they dish out "lol's" and "24/7's" like a sexually inverted Babysitter's Club, all this while taking the eye-soring pains to make every other letter capitalized because it's "trippy": "LuV KuDdLes :))), vnlla ice crm, str8 acting Abercrombie boyz, JuStIn!!!OMG !!" A demographic study would reveal a preponderance of rubyfruit nipples, memorized Britney dance routines, and face misting (a la Enrique Iglesias). Little do these children know that musky grandfathers are watching, chanting "my precious," tears streaming down past a crooked smile ...

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