The Internet Dating Service
(A short story by Walker Elliott Rowe III)

Arthur Ravenel is 40 years old and almost divorced. Being cast aside by a wife he never loved and enjoying his new found freedom he spends every waking moment looking for love. He had grown weary of trying to pick up girls on the street or in bars. He had tired of dating young girls and thought he should focus on older ones. He had been rebuffed just one time too many by young beauties so he thought we would try to find love on-line. He posted ads at kiss.com, match.com, and personals.yahoo.com and started writing love notes to complete strangers.

Arthur had three months to go before his divorce was final so he was bursting with desire for female companionship and female sex. It wasn’t revenge he sought against his ex-wife. In fact he envied her situation because she was completely asexual he thought. He, on the otherhand, was bursting with eros—literally crawling out of his skin to get laid. He hadn’t felt this way since high school and blamed it on the testosterone with which all men are burdened.

Everywhere that Arthur went he was tormented by female flesh. Those ample bosoms, those wide hips, that soft hair—all this drove him to detraction and drink. Young girls were all over the street where he worked in Boston, Paris, and New York. Tall ones, thin ones, plump ones and skinny--their bouncing breasts, the curve of their neck, their hair dyed red.

Adding to his longing Arthur had recently adopted the practice of reading love poetry. He read Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” twice and tried to commit Sonnet #18 to memory. He devoured “A MidSummer’s Night Dreams”. Shakespeare’s lines were so erotic, so lustful, so magical that he reasoned he could woo females by reciting that most titillating fare.

Arthur lived in the mountains near Atlanta, Georgia but he traveled most weeks with his job and stayed out-of-town Monday to Friday on most weeks. When he was working in New York City he found that he did quite well finding dates. He focused on twenty-something-year-old girls and women in their early thirties. Each day it seemed he met someone on the street, at the party of a friend, or at work who he could date. The problem was these girls never became girl friends. More often than not they wouldn’t go on a second date. The problem was Arthur had forgotten how to date and no longer knew the rules of how one sex manipulates the other. When he appeared too eager for a second date the girls were spooked like doe deer. Anyway, this is what his friends told him.

Arthur found the girls in New York easy prey. They were everywhere. New York was the capital of bacchanalia populated with eager young females each harboring dreams of becoming a fashion designer, playright, or simply marrying a rich investment banker. Arthur in particular found the Path train between Manhattan and New Jersey a great place to pick them up. They pour onto the train by the hundreds at 3 and 4 in the morning heading home from drinking at Bleecker street or dancing at Eugene’s, Spa, or The China Club. Occasionally someone threw up with too much drink but the ones who could still sit up seemed quite willing to chat. Arthur was a gregarious person but not particularly attractive to women. He could strike up a conversation with anyone but only occasionally would he find a girl who would agree to a date. Yes his confidence soared each time one said “yes”. He was practicing what Henry Kissinger called “the shotgun approach” to the situation—Kissinger, a well-know ladies man, was of course in this case talking about diplomacy: in other words throw enough pellets and a few will make their mark. His friends accused him of “playing the numbers”. Arthur did not care: this tactic appeared to be somewhat successful.

But then Arthur headed off to Boston for an extended consulting engagement. When he first got there he hit the bars with abandon, flirting with the Spanish girls in the shops and practicing their language “hola señorita bonita”, made eye contact with all the cute little honeys pouring out of Kenmore subway stop headed to Boston University. Ogled the working girls headed across Boston Commons to jobs in the tall office buildings in that part of the city.

But Arthur found the girls in Boston much harder to approach than those in New York. Some were quite rude and hostile. Since Rudolph Guilianni became mayor-- and now since the onset of World War IV: spiritual leader of New York--the city had become safe and full of friendly people. But in Boston and environs—where Cambridge proudly wore the monicker “People’s republic [sic]”--he found panhandler’s on the street and wondered why men in the bars didn’t solicit the women as freely as they did in Soho or Hoboken.

Arthur tried to chat up some girls in the Middle East bar in Cambridge. They were two Arab beauties. Mistaking them for Indians Arthur thought he would talk about henna. They were smiling and friendly but then one of them said “do I know you”? Arthur thought “Well of course you don’t bitch I’m just hitting on you trying to score like all the other horny devils out here.” Good grief.

Arthur tried to strike up a conversation with a group of college aged girls who were playing with a camera and sitting at the table next to him and his friends. He was devastated when one of the young girls called him “sir”.

Women were cruel and narcissistic Arthur thought and in his misery he risked drifting into misogyny. Aren’t they a mystery wrapped inside an enigma tucked in a riddle of whatever it was that Churchill said about the Soviets? Women were walking contradictions. He wondered why they read Cosmopolitan with all it’s talk of sex, yet they were so difficult to seduce. He wondered why women were so unapproachable yet spent all the waking day applying rouge and shopping for clothes to lure men. Cruel, indifferent, he hated them yet at the same time he was inexplicably drawn to him. It is true that relations with women are bitter sweet.

Arthur spent much time in the airport on his way to and from work. There he saw that pretty girls kept men at bay with that ubiquitous cell phones that they kept plastered to their ear. He did manage to meet Jill and talked with her on the plane. She was older than the rest and pretty so he thought she might agree to a date. He asked for and got her phone number but, horrors, it turned out to be fake. Fake phone number! This happened to him twice in two weeks. First there was Meghan that 21 year old Irish girl in the Boston restaurant and now Jill. Why didn’t they just not give out their number rather than use this malicious trick. Arthur asked his friends how to counter this tactic. They said when a girl gives you her number call it right there in front of her and if she is lying then she’ll be caught in a lie and embarrassed. Perhaps if enough men did this then the whole female sex will be defeated by this tactical move in the greater strategic battle.

For dating advice Arthur turned to his friend and mentor Kevin, the greatest pick up artist on the planet. Kevin and Arthur hung out at the bars in Buckhead in Atlanta and invariably Kevin left each with a pocket full of phone numbers and more often than not a kiss on the cheek. “What’s your secret?” Arthur wondered. Kevin had been a salesman for year so knew how to read people well, attack their weaknesses, fan there ego, cajole them, et cetera. Arthur on the other hand was a techie would could coax a computer to miracles but was not too good with sales. Kebin said, “Women have a giant hole in them that is their loneliness. I look for a way to exploit that. Say something to them that makes them feel flattered, appreciated, and special. It works every time.” Kevin is right but it helps to have his good looks. Kevin also told Arthur that women could sense that he was desperate for love so counseled him to wait until his divorce was complete. Wait? Wait for what—6 more months of divorce misery? He thought that having a girlfriend would mitigate his misery.

But the women could not know how tough his divorce had been. Arthur married a Latin woman. When you do that you marry not one women but you inherit her whole family. Arthur’s wife was Catholic and Arthur was agnostic. He, trying to use religion to his advantage, told his wife that the Bible said when a woman marries she is to leave her family, join her husband, and form another. But his Latin wife did not see it that way. So when he started to divorce the wife he found her whole family allied in warfare toward him. He tried to be the nice guy in the divorce with generous child support payments and flexibility with the visitation schedule. But this did him no good. Arthur’s wife Pilar locked Arthur out of the house one day. So Arthur broke a glass, climbed in the house, and called the glass company. The next day the sheriff came and threw Arthur out of the house with 15 minutes notice. He had not been back to his house nor even talked with his wife in the 10 months since that happened. He managed to get his children but only after lots of expensive negotiations with various attorneys. He was ordered into a child abuse investigation and threatened that the only visitation he might have with his kids was supervised visitation because his wife has taken his anxiety disorder and claimed that made him a dangerous psychotic. In short Arthur’s emotions had been upended by this protracted divorce battle, it tore at his heart, upset his mother, and pushed his own children into sessions with a psychiatrist. Yet through it all Arthur was relived to be free of that unhappy marriage and was enjoying his bachelorhood even if he had not yet found a full-time girlfriend.

So, for the reasons give above, this is why Arthur decided to venture on-line to look for love. He opened accounts at match.com, kiss.com, and personals.yahoo.com. He didn’t open all these accounts at once. Rather as his fortunes rose and fell at one web site he hopped onto another. But Arthur soon learned that pursuing women in cyberspace offered the same disadvantage as the grounded approach—namely, the pretty girls got lots of offers. He thought that this pick-and-choose approach to love would put him on a more equal footing with females. But only one female wrote to him. Rather Arthur learned that just like the time-honored approach women on-line expected to be wooed. So Arthur surfed the net and began to write love notes.

He wrote to women each day, picking through a list of them as if he was buying a toaster from the Sears catalog. Practically all the women he wrote to never wrote him back mainly because he only picked the pretty young girls, the ones that were inundated with e-mail from would-be suitors. He tried to woo them with lines of poetry from Millay, Auden, and Shakespeare. He figured all the writers said “your’re pretty” so he tried lines like “do you blush often” or “write me back and I’ll pen you a reply certain to make you blush”.

He read one women’s headline: “Looking for the man of my dreams”. Surely this is a dimwitted dullard, he thought. On the sidewalk he tended to go for the pretty girls. Even here he zoomed in on those with the pretty photographs. But on-line Arthur expected his girls to be literate and learned. Surely this woman who could write no more than a cliché was not worth his effort. On to the next one.

“Oriental Delight”. There’s something wrong with this woman. She’s had her ad posted for three months without changing a word.

“Summer is waning, looking for love for the fall”. Since it’s the dead of winter this woman has obviously had no success in the months between. Arthur didn’t want what no one else didn’t want.

“Looking for Orpheus”. Obviously this is an intelligent woman, his intellectual peer. But he can’t tell from her photo whether she is hideous or a sublime beauty. Also does she know that Orpheus gave up women?

Watch out! Here is a 21 year old advertising herself as “hottie”. Either this is a porno sight fronting as a sole female—a violation of the internet dating service rules--or a naïve young girl who is fanning her ego with the mountain of email she is certain to receive from horny young men and dirty old ones. Arthur would classify myself as falling in the latter category.

Arthur’s own ad reads:

Genteel country aristocrat looking for urbane intellectual female. Yes it’s true I live in the mountains of Georgia but I know Paris, Boston, London, and New York because my work takes me there each week. I can order the best Pinot Noir in the French language and grow the biggest tomatoes you have ever seen. Come crawl into the bed of my cozy mountain cabin and I’ll read to you from Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

When forty winters shell besiege thy brow,

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,

Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now,

Will be a tottered weed of small worth held…

*************************************************
written by Walker Elliott Rowe III
************************************************

Send this short story to a friend

Previous Article                 List of Articles                   Next Article