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Can You Google Your Way to Love?
Google can tell us a lot; but not everything about dates & potential mates.
by Marnie Hanel
The Internet is the new town hall, so it’s perfectly rational to scan the crowd from a hidden corner … or so I told myself, when I pre-screened a blind date. There wasn’t much wrong with him, he just seemed like a bit of a meathead, and not really my type. Which is exactly what I told my matchmaking girlfriend after I emailed the guy to cancel the date. She was surprised. Usually, I’m an optimistic dater who sees potential, even when I should see disaster.
And that’s when I realized I’d crossed the line between exceptional time management and closed-mindedness, letting petty details get in the way of possibilities. After all the time and energy I’d given Google, what had it given me? Hours of angst over the truly awful middle school poem I never should have submitted to an online literary magazine. Awkward dates spent “discovering” facts in the evening that I’d already learned at my desk that afternoon. A pit in my stomach when an ex-boyfriend I hadn’t spoken to for years admitted to reading all my articles online. (Even this one? Stop it. Really.) If romance was dead, I had let Google kill it.
Perhaps, I reasoned, my friend Matt Ray was onto something. He’s the only person I know who never googles in the name of love—all the more fascinating because, as a network architect and security expert in Seattle, he googles hackers for a living. “The dating process moves fast enough already,” he says. “Emails, instant messages, and cell-phone calls truncate what used to be a longer process. By the time I started dating my last girlfriend we had exchanged 15 emails, and who knows how many lines of IM. Come the second or third date, we had covered at least 50 percent of the significant gettingto-know-you data. And knowing everything up front takes away the allure of start-up dates.” He had a point.
So, when I received a flirtatious email from a friend of a friend, I thought twice before calling up my favorite search engine. Maybe it was time to live and let live. Let fate takes its course. Stop allowing a technology that gets hit on a trillion times a day determine who gets to hit on me. Sadly, this line of thinking lasted about 15 minutes. (See chocolate cake rationale.) I typed his name.
As it turns out, the guy was extraordinarily good on screen: exceptional job, history of charitable giving, obviously athletic, good-looking. (Yes, I image search. But I draw the line at Google Earth. When you know what his apartment building looks like, you have to cop to stalking.) So, I took a chance and responded with a flirty email, which led to more, flirtier emails and, eventually, brunch. In person, he was just as intelligent, kind-hearted, athletic, and handsome as my research indicated. He was funny, personable, interesting, and … gay.
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1 Anne Frank’s “One Who Got Away” // Feb 28, 2008 at 1:54 pm
[…] that’s an amazing find 48 years later, what’s maybe even more amazing now, when you can Google-stalk just about anybody, is how rare it is to have “one who got […]
2 Anonymous // Apr 15, 2007 at 2:17 am
I don’t think that google is the be all end all. There is no way of knowing if the person who comes up in your searches is really the person you are looking for. I googled my name one time for fun and it came up with a film actress. I have never acted on film in my life. I tried looking up my dance teacher once and only found people with the same name as her except on the dance studio website–despite the fact that she has been in movies with famous actors.
3 Donna // Mar 21, 2007 at 5:45 pm
A few years ago, while watching the news, I heard an unusual but familiar name, going back about 30 years in history. The name was that of my brother’s ex-girlfriend when they were in college. Why was she being mentioned in the news? Because she and her current boyfriend had been indicted & convicted of luring and kidnapping a young teenage girl on the Internet, and holding her as a sex slave for several weeks in their basement. And to think that this age 40+ woman had been a sweet teenager who used to share our bedroom when she stayed over on weekends. Scary…..
4 Lisa // Jan 31, 2007 at 12:42 am
I would never have considered googling anyone. I didn’t google my husband, but in my defense I have known him since we were kids. It is just not somethign that would have ever crossed my mind. Though now that I think about it…its not a bad idea.
5 Connie // Dec 2, 2006 at 10:00 am
First, anyone who doesn’t try to find out as much as possible about a stranger they’re considering to date is a fool.
Second, and much bigger, is our contractor. During the time he was working on our house he was jailed in May, ‘06. I googled him, repeatedly, and nothing came up until July, ‘06 when I heard he was jailed again. I started googling again and finally found the article, only written in July, that both arrests involved him holding his wife and her child at knife point and a SWAT team that had to close off blocks around his house. These were not his first domestic violence issues. I had been home alone with him as were my children. Bottom line - definitely google strangers (or even not strangers) you’re considering getting involved in but don’t take it as the “be all end all.”
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