If you're the sort of person who reads Jane Austen, you probably know that it's tradition for pretty much every girl who reads Pride & Prejudice to overidentify with Elizabeth Bennet. She's clever and fun and not the prettiest girl in town but sort of the center of the universe in her own right. Everyone loves Lizzie.

I? Am no Lizzie Bennet. I am clever and fun, and I certainly act as if I'm the center of the universe. But in relationships. I'm actually Fitzwilliam Darcy, who acts all aloof and disapproving until he reveals himself as a total dork, stumbles all over himself, then confesses his love in the form of a list of Lizzie's (entirely valid) bad qualities. That is a fine literary example of being Apriled in extreme... and if you translated me-speak into Regency English, it would look a bit like this:

The inferiority of your family and that of their connections have made me fully aware of the many obstacles involved in this attachment. I know that loving you goes against reason, and that my family will be horrified by the connection, but I cannot help myself.

Did you know it was possible to be dumped after a single date?

Yes. I think you heard me right. Dumped after a first date. The first of my dates to go quite well shifted direction after the fact, thanks to stuff that isn't mine to tell. I think, in a way, I even got a "Dear John" [Or Jane? Are there "Dear Jane" letters? I assume so.] letter out of it. My first ever.

It sure took me by surprise.

A spectacular surprise.

Wow. I was hurt and angry - cause hi, that's the usual reaction, I think - for about 5 minutes. Maybe 10. Ow. It was hilarious for another 20. Then I sat down to write a response, and what came out was... Understanding. And affection. And a profound sense of wonder at possibilities and the connections that form between people. It's like my best self sat up and wrote for me.

That? Is exactly what this project is for. It's about fear, and as it turns out, it's about love. Just not one and only one kind.

This may sound silly in the morning. It will still be true.

For some reason, I started counting my dates backwards, as the number of dates remaining rather than labeling each person with a number. It's weird, and I like it.

( But you want to hear about the dates. I know. )

I thought I'd be able to ask a lot more people a lot faster, but going out with people takes more emotional energy than I remembered. I need breaks! But it's time to start another round of asking.

I haven't said much about the results of my asking-50-people-out thing in a bit, have I?

So. I've been writing a little. Here's some of it.
( Where it came from. )

( I made up my own rules. )

Next post I'll tell you more about the first handful of people I asked.

Regarding my previous posts - I'm now at 45 to go. One rejection, two yesses, and two yet to respond make that three yesses, all seriously awesome people, and one yet to respond.

It's. Well, it turns out to be fun, this bizarre little project. Just the asking! We're not even to the spending time with awesome people part yet!

I've made a commitment to attempt to ask 50 people out on first dates. It's part of learning to have fun with the whole dating idea. Anyone tried speed dating locally? Is it worth the expense for the experience?

When I get an idea in my head, I have to go research it. This explains why, when my mother asked me if I'd tried dating on the internet (I hadn't), I immediately went and checked out several different dating sites.

Want to know what I learned?

They suck.

The mainstream sites like those Match.com & eHarmony places actually won't let you use the word 'fat'. I'm not kidding. It's a forbidden word. Because $DEITY knows no one would ever want to claim to be fat! Let alone *eek!* want to meet any of those horrible fat people (except to make fun of them, of course - and we must protect the fatties!)! Egads!

Yeah. So, my first act of internet dating was to sign up for both sites (they have a free version) in order to send them each strongly worded comments about how ridiculously stupid banning the word 'fat' is. Particularly when you're totally cool with words like 'overweight' and 'big & beautiful': can you say disgusting hypocrites, kids? Yeah, you can be 'big & beautiful', but for $DEITY's sake, don't talk about your fatness! Euphemize it! Hide it! Diet it away!

The other way in which dating sites appear to suck is that many of them assume you have one gender preference in your seeking: you are either a man or a woman, and you are looking for one, not both or either. I realize that there are certain programmatic limitations in the common dating engines, but couldn't everyone just add a 'gender is a continuum' or 'either' option to their stupid databases?

Yeah, maybe not the folks who bring you those over-the-top Middle America "look, I found my husband on the internets & I'm completely normal, I swear" teevee ads... but it wouldn't be that hard for the peeps on the more liberal/young/cool sites (I'm thinking that OKCupid place that everyone gets the tests from, or the Nerve/Salon/Bust personals) to take gender out of the equation, or at least make it a more complex variable.

Hmmph.

On the other hand, they've given me opportunities to proselytise: a random guy sent me an email wherein he called me "girl", and I sent back something like "dude, you're cute, but I'm a grrrl not a girl - or did you miss the Big Hairy Feminist subtext in my hastily written profile?" - so it wasn't a total waste of time.