Recently single myself, I was back on OkCupid, not just for me, but in solidarity with my mom. If the Britts were unfairly alone in love, then it made sense to try and pool our resources, compare notes and figure out what we were doing wrong.

While Brooklyn and East Village singles grab a whiskey at 11 p.m., the older crowd in the Chandler, Ariz., suburbs where my mom lives, tends to meet when the sun is out. My mom had a Starbucks date in which her guy talked only about his ex-wife. I had a stroll through the Guggenheim with a girl who claimed to “hate the sun.” My mom saw a big summer blockbuster with a guy who hogged the popcorn and snorted. I saw “Francis Ha” with a girl who talked during the scene where Greta Gerwig runs and dances in the streets.

But one day, Mom had some news for me. “There’s a new man in my life,” she said, “I think he might be the one.” This dream dude sounded like an altruistic James Bond supervillain: he worked overseas as a contractor on oil rigs, and as such was in and out of Arizona a lot. He had a deep, gravelly voice, which he said was the result of years and years of having to yell above the din of the machinery, which (I guessed) is just how it went on oil rigs.

“Well, do you like the way he looks, Mom?”

“I like the way his pictures look,” she said.

“What? You haven’t met him?”

“No, but we’ve talked a lot,” she said. “I told you, he’s out of town a lot on oil rigs.”

“Oh, Mom,” I said. And then, in the same way I was instructed to avoid “stranger danger,” I told her not to take anything too seriously until she had met him. I reminded her that there were plenty of schemes out there on the Internet, and she shouldn’t let herself become so involved that she would tell a bunch of stuff about herself to a person who might be a lot of different people.