Polishing the Dating Resume

Mick drives. Terry and I continue drinking.

First things first: Terry looks at my profile information. I have a tendency to be wordy. She raises her eyebrows and says she loves that I am smart but having a great vocabulary is only really an asset when you are in conversation. An overly chatty response to a simple question might just look like "blah blah blah blah blah, yakkety yakkety yakkety" to a divorcee who sat at the dinner table each night for 20 years with Chatty Kathy, Patron Saint of the Endless Run On Sentence.

I allow her to edit.

When it comes to activities I am woefully lame. I don't ski. I don't golf. I don't run. I don't play tennis.

Where are the check boxes for frisbee golf? The walking? Dusting and vacuuming?

Terry is not hung up on accuracy. She checks "hiking." Her logic is that my walking is a lot like hiking. But walking sounds like I am an old lady in cross trainers. And possibly diapers. Hiking sounds outdoorsy and sexy. And not prissy. Tennis is prissy.

I want to make sure I don't come across as a tight assed priss. No trophy wife here. And no detail oriented homemaker either. Don't expect Carol Brady or Sue Ellen Shepard Ewing.

Terry gets it. Gets me. Vows to remove all evidence of priss from the profile.

Let's start with the Must Haves. She removes some benign and uninteresting entry I've made and puts in "A good IPA." Perfect. A girl who knows her beer. And has ideas about it. Distinctly unprissy.

Terry and I disagree about some of my pictures. My profile picture for instance. She thinks I look too polished. It is a great picture but doesn't necessarily suggest that I am easy-going. My hair and makeup are flawless. I may look a little high strung. I should look a little messier. Like I walked out the door a few hours ago and so what if the wind tossed my hair around while I tooled around town singing with the car windows rolled all the way down?

She askes Mick for his opinion. He likes the picture but sees Terry's point.

Good answer, Mick. Safe. No one is going to pick up an ashtray and whack you across the face with it for that.

She scraps and re-checks different boxes in response to the "how my friends would describe me" section. I am quite literally afraid to look at them.

We get to the part about what "chemistry" means to me. There is no free-form answer. It is multiple choice. I have checked that I should feel chemistry in the first date or two.

Terry nearly falls off the barstool and into the creek behind the bar.

"What???"

"What, what?" I answer, completely baffled.

"You are a recruiter, for God sake! You decide whether you like someone in under 30 minutes! Why waste another weekend night on a dud you don't feel drawn to?"

She's right. I have gone on second dates that have materialized into relationships, but probably not good ones. Scott and I weren't even sure about each other on the phone... but once I saw him, wham! That was chemistry...at least for two years. But it had happened like lightning.

And that's just it. Chemistry feels like lightning. Or should. An instant spark. A spark you can not take your eyes off of.

That's what I had with Craig. And no online dating service will ever let you feel that.

So maybe Charlotte is right after all. This will lead to nothing.

But Terry has created a masterpiece profile for me. Let me see where it takes me. Even if it leads nowhere near anything that resembles chemistry, it would have to be a better place than alone.