The View From My Knees

Original photo by Mechanic

The Month of Yes 2008 came and went and I never got around to telling you about my annual experiment in internet dating. I hope you can forgive the delay, babydolls; here is what you’ve been waiting for:

Long time readers of my blog, or those of you that have hungrily devoured the archives, are familiar with a little experiment I like to run each year called The Month of Yes. (Skip ahead if you know the background) It was inspired by a review I read of a book called The Year of Yes. In this book, a woman who had become frustrated with her dating life decided that, for an entire year, she would go out with everyone who asked her. Although I still haven’t gotten around to reading the book, the article inspired me to try a similar experiment. Unlike the author, though, I wasn’t looking for love, and I wasn’t dating a bunch of losers. On the contrary, I was (and still am) madly in love with my husband, and I’m having a great time dating friends of friends. What I saw in this experiment was the opportunity for variety. Going out with someone I normally wouldn’t consider “my type” would expose me to new people and, with any luck, a whole new set of new adventures.

Since I didn’t have the time to do this for an entire year – heck, I have a hard enough time fitting my current friends and lovers into my busy schedule – I decided to try it for one month. But I had to set up some rules. I’d start by placing an ad or posting a profile on a dating site. Then I’d reply to every single response that came in, regardless of how crass, illiterate, or just plain boring they were. I’d keep the conversations going as long as I had to for my new pen pals asked me on a date. Then, if nothing in our correspondence had set off my creep-o-meter, I’d say yes. I’d make sure to do all of the usual safety checks, like meeting in a public place and telling Lucky who I was meeting. And then I’d just see what happened.

So, now that you’ve had a little primer, are you ready to hear how this year’s Month Of Yes turned out?

The initial response to my ad was, to say the least, unimpressive. Out of the 50 or more emails I received within the first few hours of posting my ad, only two or three actually looked promising. The rest ranged from boring to impersonal to downright offensive. Several times, I had to grit my teeth and repeat my mantra (“It’s for the experiment, it’s for the experiment”) before I could bring myself to hit that reply button. But I did. I replied to each and every one until my inbox was so full I had to delete my ad just to keep my sanity. With only 30 days in a month, I had to be realistic that I wouldn’t have time to meet even half of the people that that had responded.

And so it began. I dutifully corresponded with all of my new potential suitors, trying my best to keep the communication going and waiting to be asked out on a date. Despite the vast number of people I was corresponding with and their obvious interest in getting to know me, the invitations were slow to come. By mid-month, I had reached as many as 20 emails with these people, and not one of them had suggested that we actually go out on a date. But eventually some of them got up their nerve, often with a little prodding by me, and we arranged to meet. So, how many dates did I actually make after wading through over 50 initial responses?

Four.
Yes, four.

In the next few days, I’ll tell you about each of my four dates, and what went wrong versus what went right. Stay tuned…