I underestimated how complicated a person could be. (S)

It started with poetry, and ended with a phone call. In my longest blog post ever, I will share with you all a synthesis of one of my best and worst experiences in online dating. Before I start, I want to remind everyone of a few things. First, be careful. Second, after much thought, if you meet in person, meet in public and tell your friends if you will be gone, and how long. Third, and the main lesson I got from this experience: you don’t know someone until you get to know them in person.





New England is beautiful. (S) I started talking to him January of 2010. He was a cute Chinese guy, and I saw that he liked poetry and was attending a liberal arts college in New England. He appealed to me as hip and artsy. I sent him a message online, and he responded. He told me he thought I was cute. He shared a poem with me about running away from home one night, climbing up a tree and looking at the moon. I loved it. I thought: “What a beautiful and romantic person he must be—to be able to write something like this!” I shared some writing with him, and he was impressed. We were rolling. We went back and forth for a few days. I would check my account when I woke in the morning, and periodically throughout the day and all night as I slogged through homework. I was in him-land and present space, both at the same time.





One night, he shared his number with me. I called him with little hesitation. Waiting on the other end was an attractive, smart, artistic guy I was very interested in. He picked up, and for the first time in my life, I heard his beautiful voice. We talked for at least an hour. I was infatuated with him. I loved hearing how he enunciated words and could pontificate on social issues and poetry. When his voice came through my phone, I wasn’t alone. I think that was part of his magic.





I just re-read the poem,

and it's still beautiful. (S)

I was alone at that point in my life. I had friends and a loving family, but I spent so much time on school and trying to find a boyfriend, that I didn’t spend as much time with them as I really should have. Sadly, I didn’t fully appreciate them. I have gotten much better, but I think this is something that I still deal with to this day: the loneliness. I share this vulnerability with everyone here not for pity or attention, but just to let people know that loneliness happens, and to not feel further isolated by it. My simple advice is to love your friends and family. I know it’s cliché, but I believe it. However, at the time, having been in the closet so long, I was emotionally withdrawn, and I simply didn’t open myself up to connect with people. I hoped I could solve my loneliness by finding a boyfriend, but that didn’t really work in the long run. Anyways, back to the story. I was looking for love, and I was feeling it with him.





Over the end of senior year, I continued to talk with him. He was on my mind, and he was a far off dream. When I found out where I would be attending school, he became a dream with the possibility of realization. I wrote a poem about him at one point. It was about how I should spend some time cleaning up my room and folding my clothes, rather than thinking about him all the damn time. I absolutely knew that I was disconnected from reality, my mind living in this far-off future with him, but I just went with it. I was betting all my decisions during this time on the assumption that when I met up with him in New England, we would be a couple, a beautiful pairing of two perfectly compatible people. We had skyped, and he was a real person, very animated and charming. We send emails back and forth. These emails took hours to compose, and they were full of declarations, questions and reassurances. He even wrote one beautiful poem about waking up with me by his side, and washing my face with a warm washcloth. It was a beautiful poem, and I felt so absolutely loved. One time, I called him, and when he didn’t pick up, I left a reading of a poem on his voicemail. He loved that. Now, a distinction I didn’t think about was the difference between loving the actions of people, loving what people are able to produce, and loving the person.





We rode different trains. (S)

When we met up in person, I started to see that something wasn’t quite right. I had difficulty catching trains, so he had to spend four extra dollars catching trains back and forth to find me. My first look at him was greeted with a look of contempt and frustration. I was hurt, and I told myself it was my own damn fault the date started off poorly. But it picked back up. We had a good dinner, and that was enjoyable. Then we went to his place. We played Bananagrams and listened to Ana Tijoux. He was so hip, playing music I had never heard of. Then we moved too fast. We were not ready for the insecurity and fear that would follow in the coming days. I would call him, wanting to talk to him about where we stood, asking him to get tested, him freaking out, and me not doing enough to help him calm down. We all took too much too personally. It was both of us, operating in our own worlds of assumptions and fears, and that made all of our conversations messy. We both ended up hurting each other. The relationship ended with me saying: “I never want to talk to you again.”

“Fine.” And then nothing.





About a month ago, we spoke again. After apologies online, we agreed to meet in person. We met in a coffee shop near a city park. I think things are okay now. He is achieving what he wants in life, and I am happy for him. We have not met since, and we have not become good friends, but that doesn’t need to happen for this story to end well. I just need to learn from this. I feel awfully stupid when I share this story with people, but I imagine there may be other people out there who could gain something from my story. One does not need to meet a sex offender online to have a bad experience. One simply needs to rush things and not recognize that the people we meet online aren’t accurate representations of people in real life.





The smell of October in New England still chills me. (S)

I had heard this before, but I didn’t believe it. I really thought that I knew him. I thought I was in love with him. However, the unfortunate truth was this: the him that I knew wasn’t really him. It was just his voice, his image on skype, and the words he wrote to me. He wasn’t a liar, and I wasn’t a liar either. We just didn’t see all of each other through the limited interaction we had online. And rather than a story of college romance in New England, I have the memory of silently walking back to the train station with him. Street lights illuminated splotches of leaves and pavement, and the cold October air pulled heat from my body, leaves crackling beneath my feet.