Years ago, long before this pandemic was the thing that changed everything, I had a friendly debate with an acquaintance about what qualified as a date.
She claimed a date wasn’t a date unless you kissed. Anything else was just a meet up.
I insisted that a date was a date if romantic potential was being explored. This especially applied to people who had connected through a dating site (or app as those are more common now), because that potential brought them together.
Even if nothing intimate or sexual happened, and the date ended up being a friend, the first meetup or two were dates. Platonic dates, but still dates.
Since she and I had met through OkCupid, she raised a brow.
“So you’re saying you and I had a couple of dates?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“I’m so hawt!!”
Whatever. That’s not the point of the story.
At the time, I was surprised by her perspective, but I also suspected her theory that it wasn’t a date unless something sexual happened was probably more common than mine.
Once upon a time, OkCupid was known to be very sex-positive, as well as LGBTQ and kink and poly friendly. OkCupid used to have a lot of direct and indirect multiple-choice questions to size up values and attitudes around sexuality in all of these areas.
One of the many ways Match.com ruined OkCupid when they bought it out was that all those questions disappeared.
That is a shameful loss. So much valuable information was to be found in the answers to those questions. And those perspectives mattered a lot.
Most people who have dated online are familiar with the OkCupid algorithm questionnaire.
But for those who come across this blog who got married/partnered out of high school or college or before age 30 at least 15 years ago - and who stayed together, and thus never had to dive into the wonderful world of online dating and algorithms, here’s a quick tutorial.
If you perused the profile of somebody who looked good to you, you couldn’t see their answers unless you answered the same questions.
You could rate the importance of their answers by: 1) checking the answers that were acceptable to you; 2) rank if the answers mattered a little, somewhat, or a lot; 3) if you checked all the answers, it’s considered irrelevant because you don’t care.
Dealbreaker answers were highlighted in red. So if your answer was red, that’s their dealbreaker. If their answer was red, then it’s your dealbreaker.
This little algorithm was pretty rich when it came to the sex questions.
One of the simplest and most straightforward of these was:
If you started dating somebody you liked a lot, how long would it be before you had sex?
The choices were a) 1-2 dates, b) 3-5 dates, and c) 6 or more dates.
The most popular answer was 3-5 dates, but plenty of women answered 1-2 dates, and that was rarely marked with scarlet. Of course, the answer most often highlighted in red was 6 or more dates.
Guess which answer mine was? The least popular of the three.
Can’t bring the U-Haul on the 2nd date if you don’t fuck on the 1st.
That cliché about lesbian dating is kind of exaggerated and kind of true. Attraction, sex, love, and lesbian bed death before the breakup - this sequence of events often happens at a lightning pace.
Thus, it was clear that the consensus on queer dating was more in alignment with my acquaintance’s perspective than mine.
I was always floored by the 3-5 dates before sex as the median average.
I get it if people met through shared interests, mutual friends, work, or crossing paths in those random ways of similar rituals and life habits because the mating dance has already begun. Even sex within 1-2 dates seems all right, especially if the getting-to-know-this-person-I’m-crushing-on phase lasted a while.
But if the theoretical lovers met through a dating site? And the first time they laid eyes on each other was on that first date (or “meetup” if they didn’t kiss, according to that acquaintance)?
I guess I’m kind of a prude, or what is now known as a demisexual - which is far more flattering. That leaves so little time to know if I really like a person.
I know within seconds if there’s a spark and I find somebody attractive. But sparks can and often do fizzle fast. Real attraction with the delicious sexual tension that often leads to the best kind of climax – that develops over time.
I thought 6 or more dates was reasonable and not even that much of a challenge. Chances were excellent that sex would happen by the end of the first month. I mean, if we liked each other, we’d probably get together at least once or twice a week.
Yet that was the answer most often highlighted in red on OkCupid. This was before Tinder exploded and became the new normal for sex and dating.
What a minute…what dating? Tinder was all about the hook up.
You didn’t even have to pick somebody up or get picked up at the bar, where the mating dance of drunkenness led to the respite of getting laid.
