The New First Date

I wish my name were John Smith.

At least, that was the thought following a date with a woman who’d told me she had Googled me beforehand, probably discovering more about my personal life than I cared to know.

She then told me I had been MySpaced, Facebooked and probably checked out via various other social-networking devices. Maybe she even posted a missed connection on Craigslist about me that she forgot to mention? Was I the tall guy wearing skinny jeans and a plaid shirt on the subway? Who knows?

Initially taken aback by the situation, I decided on the walk home that night that it would be naïve to assume that with the rise of social networking, I was in some way immune to this background check of sorts when I provided her with my last name and phone number a week earlier.

What came as a surprise, though, was the brevity in which it all happened, and how even without social networking accounts of my own, websites full of other people’s personal information had found some way of affecting my dating life. I soon came to the conclusion that the days when people met through mutual friends or at a social event are now few and far between.

Charles Blow, an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, put it best last December when he wrote, “the paradigm has shifted” and that dating has become, well, dated. In a lot of ways, Blow might be right. The number of people who wait a given number of dates to “hook up” until they know whether they have a connection with a person appears to have reduced drastically, and if my experience in the New York City dating scene is any indication, the trend will continue.

What Blow neglected to discuss in his article, though, was that people are not only hooking up before they even acknowledge their compatibility with one another, but that they are also coupling this concept with wanting to know everything about their eventual one-night-stand or potential soulmate before they even have their first kiss, which is where social networking devices have successfully filled that need.

Essentially, we’ve cut out the second and third times to get to know a person after the initial first-date run-through where we get to decide if this person is worth our time, attention and ideally, love.

“It used to be that ‘you were trained your whole life to date,’” said Kathleen Bogle, a professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia who has studied relationships and hooking up among college students, in the Times piece. “Now we’ve lost that ability—the ability to just ask someone out and get to know them.”

In fairness, there could be numerous advantages to “pre-screening” your dates through the social network phenomena. The weeding out of potentially dangerous people, for instance, or realizing that all your interests placed appropriately in the Facebook “interests” box do not necessarily guarantee compatibility.

But there’s also the notion that you’re not getting the complete individual through social networking devices. Maybe you’re looking at a picture of John Smith 20 pounds ago or ones of Jane Jones having mixed drinks in exotic locations when her favorite pastime could be sitting on the couch and watching television. Social networking, no matter how intrusive and life encompassing its evolution has become, still cannot paint a complete picture of a person.

Take me, for example. Based solely on a simple Google search, the first things you’d know about me is that I’m currently a writer and that my little cousin, who shares my exact name (not atypical for Greeks), plays youth hockey. I’m fortunate that’s all that comes up, but it’s not my complete picture (or my younger cousin for that matter).

The more I try to understand evolving dating patterns, the more I realize that evolution is akin to any other technological advancement: from Atari to Nintendo, from no phone to iPhone and so on. It’s a matter of adapting to an ever-changing world, but I can’t help but feel like I’m having a Craigslist-type missed connection of my own when attempting to put the pieces together.