Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

30s to stare down a personal profile, and as far as punishments go, this was fairly benign. Once, my
type faced spinsterhood and destitution. Now I had to walk into the gallows of OK Cupid and drum
up a good attitude about emoticons.
Online dating was not a bad move for me. It allowed me to inch toward intimacy with built-in
distance. It granted me the clarity that “hanging out at the bar” often lacked. One of the great,
unheralded aspects of Internet dating was that the word “dating” was in the title, thus eliminating any
ambiguity. Were we dating? Was this a date? The answer was yes.
It also allowed me to say up front: I don’t drink. I’d worried so much about how to reveal this. I
didn’t want to watch some guy’s face fall when I ordered a Diet Coke and then endure the pecks of
his curiosity. So my “ABOUT ME” statement began “I used to drink, but I don’t anymore.” I’ve had
stronger openings, but this one was good for now.
I understood that not drinking—and not drinking to such an extent that it was the first detail I
shared about myself—would turn off certain guys. I saw them sniffing around my profile. Those
bearded eccentrics with their fluency in HBO shows and single-malt Scotch. How I missed those
beautiful, damaged men, but we kept our distance from each other. Occasionally I would email one of
them, and they never wrote back, and I got it. Back when I was drinking, I wouldn’t have responded
to me, either.
My first weeks on the site were choppy, but I soon became accustomed to the routine. The
endorphin blast of attraction. The coy banter that allowed you to tease out someone’s personality.
Flirting was like any exercise: It got easier the more you did it.
This wasn’t the first time I had tried online dating. About six months after I moved to New York, I
signed on to Match.com. I did it for Anna. She’d logged so much time listening to me complain about
my ex. “Just try it,” she said, which is a very hard argument to win.
I bought a bottle of sauvignon blanc that night and sipped my way onto a plateau of cleverness. I
didn’t want a profile that was drab and ordinary. I wanted a personal statement that grabbed every
guy by the collar and whispered each word into his mouth. I swear I was in love with myself by the
time I finished, a bottle having morphed into a six-pack of beer, and I posted the hottest picture of
myself I had: a close-up taken by a professional photographer in which I appeared 20 pounds lighter
than I was. I woke up the next day to a kitchen clogged with cigarette smoke, and the memory surfaced
in pieces: I think I joined a dating site last night.
I got several messages on the site that day, but two stood out. One was from a successful
businessman with silver hair. The other was from an indie-rock type who frequented a burger shop
less than two blocks from my front door. Those two men had nothing in common, but their notes had a
similar sincerity. They wanted to meet. This week. Tomorrow. Now.
I called my friend Aaron in a panic. “What do I do?”
He spoke slowly. “You write them back, and maybe you meet them.”
“But I can’t,” I said. Having portrayed myself as the overthinking hedonist’s Marilyn Monroe, I
could not bear to disappoint them. There was not a pair of Spanx in the world big enough to bridge
the distance between the woman on that site and the woman who stood in my kitchen, pacing in
jogging pants.
“If you’re worried about misrepresenting your weight, there’s an easy fix for that,” Aaron told me.
“Put up a full-body picture of the way you really look.”
“You’re right, you’re right. Of course you’re right.”