‘Twas the night before Sunday, I was bored out of my mind

I decided to check an iPhone app for dating…dating online

I searched and I scavenged for the pretty and dear

Until one caught my eye and the plan became clear

Okay enough with this lame poem…. Let’s get to the story and you’ll eventually figure out why it is blog-worthy. Due to my temporary incapacitation (dislocated shoulder thanks to last Saturday’s snowboarding trip) I decided it would not be a wise idea to go out drinking this past Saturday so I hung out with my godson and my best friend until about 1:30 AM. After they left I planned to retire for the evening but those few sips of Starbucks iced coffee seemed to be working their magic and I couldn’t fall asleep .

Suddenly I found myself on a popular online dating app sifting through pictures of females, their profiles, and desperately wanting to correct some of their bad grammar. I’m not going to tell you everything that went on in my head but I will tell you that I eventually found a fairly intriguing profile.

Her picture popped up on the bottom banner of my homepage. “Hmm” I thought to myself; so I clicked it and made the commitment of checking out her profile. I immediately saw that she was 27 and knew right off the bat “This is never gonna happen” because I am only 23. I didn’t even plan on messaging her. I know the rules of engagement and dating a younger guy is just unheard of (99% of the time…there are obviously outliers in everything). So I did what any normal person would do and checked all of her pictures. She’s a total beauty…like the serious-girlfriend/wife-material type of beautiful. I then proceeded to scroll down only to find nothing but immaculate grammar and an actually engaging profile description. “Holy shit she has a brain!” I thought, but she was 27 and I wasn’t about to mess with the laws of the universe. After reading her profile though I couldn’t help but think….”I’m totally the guy she’s talking about!!” I believe (because I am too lazy to actually Google it) that the psychological term for this is called ‘confirmation bias’. She says a bunch of things she looks for in a guy, I obviously tie each of those traits to my own character….BAMMM confirmation bias. But screw psychology…I know what I know!

Normally, when I see a female is older than me, I would just forget about it and move on but a part of me felt the need to reach out to her and just tell her the truth. I really never even expected her to respond; all I wanted to say was “If only I was 3 years older I’d be your guy, without question. Oh well, I guess I need to wait three years now lol.” Low and behold, exactly ten minutes later she laughed at me, told me I needed 4 or more years, called me a baby, STUCK HER DAMN TONGUE OUT AT ME, and pointed out that I blatantly said “I don’t know what I want” on my profile. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out by the time you’re my age” she said.

Naturally, being my persistent self and never turning away from a challenge, I typed up my second sentence to her…

”Hmmmmm. I should change that shouldn’t I? I know what I want but I doubt I’m gonna find it on “here” lol. And if you insist on calling me a baby I’d like to think I’m a baby with a brain :)”

I was being honest…I don’t expect to meet the love of my life on a dating site and I know I’m young, but there’s a difference between being young and stupid and being young and me (just sayin…no offense to the young and stupid). I just figured I’d let her know that, but considering the rest of our conversation I think she realized that….kind of.

I decided to take the advice of this older and wiser woman and change my profile even though she said “I don’t think girls your age will care though honestly lol.” She seemed to admire my decision of following her advice because I was putting my “baby brain” to good use (she’s slowly realizing I’m no ordinary 23-year-old). Over the course of the next hour we talked about online dating in general, how you have to meet “the one” randomly (no good relationship story that ever started with “so we randomly bumped into each other on this dating site”), my secret goal of promoting my blog through my dating profile, how “kissing and telling” can be funny but mean, the importance of doing something different (for a living) from your significant other so you can learn new things, what we do for a living, how she always wanted to start a personal blog (which I obviously told her is a great idea), and how other people’s grammatical mistakes drive us both crazy. Pretty, smart, anddddd a good head on her shoulders?! I couldn’t believe it. She actually spaced paragraphs apart when she wrote stuff (in the world of online dating this is a mind-blowing phenomenon).

This quickly became the most engaging conversation I’d had in a while… She told me that she would “check out my blog for sure” which in my book means never…but in her book it meant she was already on it. Yes… she was reading my blog as she was messaging me and it made me feel totally naked and vulnerable (not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing). I’m not going to lie; while trapped in the fear of what she was going to think of me…..my butthole puckered a little. Now, knowing that she was reading my blog, I really had to jump in with some stats to guide her in the right direction so naturally I told her the below:

Number one by hits: “The Shooting Star”

Favorite by popular vote: “Catching the Sunset”

My favorite: “Man of Steel”

Here is her review in case you were wondering: “I just read Love Bandits and it was really awesome. It was not so short though lol but I kept reading and it had me smiling.”

Around 2:40 in the morning the conversation gracefully approached its end. She closed by saying that I shouldn’t even be on this site and I should just “be young” and that “meeting people in person is just way better.” I fully agreed with her but I told her that “I’m probably not deleting this account lol – Kills time on my bus ride back to Brooklyn”, I wished her a goodnight, and told her that this conversation was “rather enlightening.” She didn’t respond…I went to bed perplexed with the thoughts “If ONLY I was 4 years older…” and that was the end of that, until the next morning that is…

Apparently my brain had been doing some thinking while I was floating away in my dreams because I woke up with a revelation. It was a stretch and I literally laughed out loud at the thought…but it could work [you think you know where this is going…but you have no idea]. At noon she messaged me again. “Holy shit? Is this real?” I thought. “Did she just message me back?” She told me how tired she gets of stupid messages and all of the “spam” (which on dating sites is just a plethora of mentally incapacitated males who think a ‘Hi’ and an emoticon will somehow WOO a girl into sleeping with them). Can’t a girl just get five messages from legitimate prospects versus 300 stupid messages that just clutter up her inbox and she has to go through and delete anyway? I may not be a legitimate prospect because of my age (that was already clear to me before she made it very clear)…but she made up for it by saying “I actually am happy I msged you back bc you’re a cool guy. I’m okay with good convo on here too better than the usual… lol.”

Oddly this didn’t bother me because it didn’t go into this with unrealistic expectations and the pair of us actually had a great conversation (plus, she totally recognized my gangsta). I no longer looked at her as just another pretty female on a dating site but I felt connected to her…like she was the newfound mentor I never had (wing-women over wing-men any day). As a matter of fact this was my chance to tell her about my new revelation. In my sleep I had been brainstorming how I can age four years overnight and in the morning I realized something fascinating….I have a cousin who is four years older than me and he is a total wizard. “Holy fucking shit…I can hook her up with my cousin” I thought . I even gave her the pitch and the rebuttals in the same message…

Verbatim:

Good morning! Tell me about it! I’m all for good conversations. Seriously speaking I really enjoyed our chat last night. You’re really legit. I feel like we connected 🙂

This may sound strange but hear me out. So remember what I said about me being 3 years older??? I knew I had no shot from the get go buttttttt oddly I just remembered something today.

I have an older cousin (27) who’s single (lives in park slope), has an great job (mechanical engineering type stuff in NYC), good looking (we’re related haha), and his family lives in Staten Island. If I must, He’s pretty damn awesome with just the right dash of Brooklyn flavor.

Just letting you know. Technically speaking he’s older, you didn’t meet him on a dating site, he doesn’t do what you do, it’s most definitely random, and this would make for one epic story of how you two met. I just figured I’d share. I am actually laughing at myself that I even pitched this but whatever. Just trying to be a good Samaritan over here lolol.

I patiently waited to see how she would respond to this. “I’m so weird” I thought, “Who does this shit?” But to my surprise, not only did she find it hilarious…SHE WAS DOWN!! “Sweet mother of God is this real?!?!” I kept thinking. The next few threads in the conversation literally had to do with our execution of this scheme, how we would go about everything logistically, and how neither of us we’re good enough liars to effectively go through with this (honesty is the best policy mates). I even gave her my Facebook so she could add me. She most definitely made me well aware that I was special when she said “I never add people from here on FB but I feel like we’re becoming friends. It’s weird… haha.” I agreed and we continued our talks on Facebook. Now I know what you’re thinking. Friend-zones suck – agreed, but if I could potentially hook my cousin up with one blatantly awesome female and land a kick ass wing-woman in the process… you can friend-zone the shit out of me.

We still don’t know how were going to go about executing this match making plan but it was good enough until now to write down. Our best bet is probably just publishing this post and sending it to him…even if this just stops in its tracks here I think I’ll settle for the funny blog post.

[I settled for the funny blog post]