Recently, I began dating someone we’ll call Mr. Bateman. As in Patrick Bateman from Ellis’s American Psycho. Of course, as with any nickname given in retrospect, if I’d known that PB would remind me of PB minus the whole chainsaw and murdering bit, then I probably, most-likely wouldn’t have dated him. (Although, I do seem to enjoy making bad choices, so I’m not 100% certain).
How did I meet him? Well, I joined a dating site in April in order potentially to try and get over RHSG (Red Haired Sex God), this guy I’d dated on/off since January that I was super-infatuated with (more later). I’d never done online dating before. Maybe because of the stigma of online dating, but it’d been successful for my mother and a couple of my former English-majors-in-undergrad friends were on this site, so I figured why not try it? My roommate once described the small, college town in which we live as a fishbowl, which pretty much means that you encounter the same boring fish over and over again. And, lately, I’d been exhausting the options in my fishbowl and I was also pretty certain that I wouldn’t find another RHSG (or another SG in general red haired or no) in my vicinity.
I browsed the site a bit despondently after making my profile. I didn’t really see options I liked either on an attractiveness level or on a grammatical level. Why can’t people take the time to punctuate, capitalize, and avoid slang and text speak? It’s really a turnoff, people. Eventually, after receiving a bombardment of messages—all of which I’d tried to politely respond to because I didn’t think it was nice to reject people (again, my need to like and be liked by people)—I stumbled across a person of interest. The site blasts my inbox each week with a list of “potential matches” and you can go through them and “skip” the ones you don’t like whilst continually receiving a steady stream of new information and new photos as well as your percentage of compatibility based on answered questions. I saw a picture of a guy who very much appealed to me:
he was tall (I like dating men over 6’ tall. Check);
he was working on a second master’s degree (Educated. Check);
he liked to read (READING. Check. Check. Check. Check. Clearly, reading is a must and I don’t just mean magazines or “porn” articles. And I prefer people who read literature, which brings me to my next point…);
he majored in English and Philosophy in undergrad (Crazy bonus points. For the English major thing, especially since my school is so small that it renders the THREE males in our grad program un-dateable, even if they didn’t have other English major girlfriends. Check. Plus more checks.);
he worked in politics in the past (I don’t really care for politics, but this seemed impressive. Baby check. I care for impressive as in someone who doesn’t just aspire to work at Bob’s Diner their entire life);
he seemed as if he dressed well (I like a man in a suit. Big check.);
again, he was attractive (I’m a little shallow at times);
he could punctuate sentences correctly and used words over four letters long (maybe only an English major can appreciate this, but this is a MUST. Lots of checks);
back to the books thing, one of his favourite books was listed as Jane Eyre and I’d recently spent a week at the beach reading the first part of Jane Eyre with my roommate (okay, so I hadn’t actually finished it, but the fact that he read the Bronte’s was impressive and I did finish all of Agnes Grey. Yes, Agnes Grey is also known as the shortest Bronte novel ever, according to my roommate and probably according to page count too. But check, nonetheless).
Lurking amongst his other good qualities, there was one immediate no no: he claimed that he HATED traveling and I love, love traveling. But I thought it through; my roommate is all about pro-con lists and the pros clearly outweighed the cons. And, besides, I’d detective myself to the bottom of the mystery and ask WHY he hated traveling because, clearly, no one should hate traveling and there was obviously a reason. I decided to message him and I began by asking him why he disliked traveling and if he’d had a bad experience. And also what he did in film school/what types of films he made—whether he wanted to be a director or cinematographer or et cetera (because those were the only two things I knew had a name that you could go to film school for and et cetera seemed as if there’d be a continuation if I’d had time to type more). So there it began.
he was tall (I like dating men over 6’ tall. Check);
he was working on a second master’s degree (Educated. Check);
he liked to read (READING. Check. Check. Check. Check. Clearly, reading is a must and I don’t just mean magazines or “porn” articles. And I prefer people who read literature, which brings me to my next point…);
he majored in English and Philosophy in undergrad (Crazy bonus points. For the English major thing, especially since my school is so small that it renders the THREE males in our grad program un-dateable, even if they didn’t have other English major girlfriends. Check. Plus more checks.);
he worked in politics in the past (I don’t really care for politics, but this seemed impressive. Baby check. I care for impressive as in someone who doesn’t just aspire to work at Bob’s Diner their entire life);
he seemed as if he dressed well (I like a man in a suit. Big check.);
again, he was attractive (I’m a little shallow at times);
he could punctuate sentences correctly and used words over four letters long (maybe only an English major can appreciate this, but this is a MUST. Lots of checks);
back to the books thing, one of his favourite books was listed as Jane Eyre and I’d recently spent a week at the beach reading the first part of Jane Eyre with my roommate (okay, so I hadn’t actually finished it, but the fact that he read the Bronte’s was impressive and I did finish all of Agnes Grey. Yes, Agnes Grey is also known as the shortest Bronte novel ever, according to my roommate and probably according to page count too. But check, nonetheless).
Lurking amongst his other good qualities, there was one immediate no no: he claimed that he HATED traveling and I love, love traveling. But I thought it through; my roommate is all about pro-con lists and the pros clearly outweighed the cons. And, besides, I’d detective myself to the bottom of the mystery and ask WHY he hated traveling because, clearly, no one should hate traveling and there was obviously a reason. I decided to message him and I began by asking him why he disliked traveling and if he’d had a bad experience. And also what he did in film school/what types of films he made—whether he wanted to be a director or cinematographer or et cetera (because those were the only two things I knew had a name that you could go to film school for and et cetera seemed as if there’d be a continuation if I’d had time to type more). So there it began.
I should mention now that one of his favourite films listed on his profile was American Psycho, which was alright because he'd also listed one of Bret Easton Ellis’s novels, Glamorama, as a favourite book, but Ellis’s writing style exudes wit and awareness as he writes about shallow, superficial people in an ironic and tongue-in-cheek sort of way, mockingly exposing the dreadful underbelly of society gone awry. Basically, liking Ellis wasn’t a red-flag for the socially aware...or so I thought.
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