BLIND DATES
Romantic rendezvous at which you don't know anything about the person you're supposed to be courting.
? ? ?
Smoke and mirrors have long had a place in romance. For ages, we've made ourselves up and shaved ourselves down; we've surgically enhanced the things we can and covered up the things we can't. We've courted each other by the forgiving light of candles, and the nothings we whisper wouldn't be so sweet if not for Binaca.
Indeed, we've become experts in various scripts of untruths: Yes, it was good for me; Really, I've never felt this way before; No, you don't look fat.
The blind date was a proceeding that required much of this kind of playacting. On these assignations, neither party knew much about the other before meeting up at a bar or café, resulting in so many minutes of awkwardly scoping out other patrons and pretending to be nonchalant, but really searching for a glimmer of recognition. The rendezvous that followed was a sales fest, with each participant trying to present the best aspects of her or his product while downplaying the rest… kind of like a pharmaceutical commercial-one with children running in fields with puppies and kites, omitting the voiceover listing the medication's dysenteric side effects.
Today, however, relationships have a larger degree of transparency than ever, with technological advances allowing more potential for honesty than was an option in unions of yesteryear. Thanks to computers, we now need to contemplate entirely new ways that we want to be intimate with the people we love… or not. Are you comfortable giving your lover your password? Your PIN? Access to your computer at all? Rare is the suspicious spouse who hasn't tried to log in to his wife's e-mail account, or the girlfriend who doesn't surreptitiously check her honey's browser history.
Most notably, the opportunity for navigating deceptions and disclosures using the Web is completely changing the way potential lovers learn about one another before they meet face to face. The idea of a chance encounter or recognizing a date only by the carnation in his lapel have become… quaint. If a friend sets you up with someone and you don't automatically look for his image on Google, check his "relationship" status on Facebook, and make sure his name isn't listed on CheaterNews.com or TheDickList.com (the modern answers to stocks and pillories), one might question if you're fit to date at all. Instead of painting a picture of your ideal self, much of a first date is now spent trying to assess how much the person across the table actually knows about you. In the age of Internet dating, wannabe paramours who spend weeks weaving intricate false representations of themselves in their online dating profiles-using photos taken from juuust the right angle-can quickly be brought down by a site like TrueDater.com, where previously deceived online conquests report how Mr. Right on Match.com is, in the flesh, actually Mr. Fat, Married, and Republican.
Love may still be blind, but dating? Not so much.