Love is a Battlefield: Part Two

Love is a Battlefield: My War Story, One Cliché at a Time

Part Two: Going on the Offensive

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Continued from Part One: Retreat and Recovery

When the initial shock of sending my first email subsided, I took a deep breath and the following monologue played in my head.

“Okay Mike, you did it. Congratulations. You’re a single professional who just had trouble pushing a button.”

Chances are you have your own “First Email” story that played out in one way or another, depending on your personality type. Maybe you did it too quickly without thinking or maybe, like me, you debated internally to the point that you created your own Dante’s Inferno.

Insert cliché here: “He who hesitates is lost.”

My own struggle reminded me of the first time I ever asked a girl out. I was in fourth grade and wearing roller-skates while Bon Jovi’s “Living’ on a Prayer” echoed from the speakers at Skateville. I nervously circled the rink, trying to figure out how to approach the girl wearing the red skates and a Michael Jackson’s “Bad” t-shirt. It wasn’t until her skates were off and she was walking out the door that I worked up the courage to make my move. And by “make my move,” in fourth-grade terms, I mean saying “Hi.” When I got her phone number I remember thinking, “That wasn’t so bad, why didn’t I just do this earlier?”

20 years later, not much had changed in this scenario except the roller skates.

Now that I had some momentum, I started searching for new profiles. At first, I felt a little overwhelmed by all those possibilities. Who’s to say whether Woman 1 is better for me than Woman 2 through 50? In a normal search my criteria was limited to age, area, and whether or not her profile was photo-equipped, so I felt like I hit paydirt when I discovered Custom Search to “trim the fat.” I prefer a woman with curves, but too many results is a whole different story.

Insert cliché here: “It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.”

I played around with the parameters for awhile just to see how targeted my search could get. Sadly, there aren’t as many African American Buddhist Scorpios who speak Finnish as you might think. But I could get pretty darn specific and still get results.

Ultimately, I learned that I should only limit my options with true “deal-breakers,” the strong indicators that a relationship wouldn’t fly. Smokers, heavy drinkers and women who didn’t want children didn’t make the cut and were filtered out by my search parameters. Unfortunately, there was no option to strike cat owners from my list. Let me tell you, there is nothing less sexy on a first date than a man itching everywhere, wheezing, sneezing and wiping his eyes after two minutes in the same room as a feline. Yes, I am that man.

Now I started getting matches that didn’t require me to crosscheck each profile for my deal-breakers. I added profiles to my favorites list and figured out that sending flirts was a good way to show my interest. I tried out the keyword search option, typing in my interests like sushi and badminton (hey, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it). This showed me profiles of women who made some reference to either sushi or badminton in their personal essays. Very cool.

Before I knew it, the ball was rolling in a big way. I was in the middle of writing an email when it happened. A small box appeared on my screen: so and so “wants to chat with you.”

Insert cliché here: “The plot thickens…”

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