My First (but By No Means Last) Experience with Online Dating - Part III

The story so far: I had just signed up at on online dating site, only to discover my prefrontal cortex, which is nominally in charge of my thinking, had turned the assignment over to another part of my anatomy.

"Boneriffic!" my dopamine-sensitive ventral tegmental area (VTA) was screaming. For the purposes of this essay, all you need to know about the VTA is that this is the part of my brain where my dick has a branch office. As you will recall, I had worked out a brilliant strategy of making an intelligent choice from a long list of very good looking active and intelligent women based on my "Simon Cowell eliminator" that had to do with the enigma of Einstein's iPod.

Trust me, it was a brilliant strategy.

Then I discovered that my prefrontal cortex is only capable of weighing and measuring, but not deciding. For that, it needs input from the emotional areas of the brain. Unfortunately, my amygdala - fear central - was in league with my hippocampus and other centers of ancient memory, cranking out malicious sound bites for the amusement of my inner mother.

"Loser!"

Suddenly, I was that short skinny nerdy high school kid with glasses at my first high school dance, on the gymnasium floor, Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet" crackling out of a crappy PA system, trying to summon the nerve to ask Marie Kapinsky to dance.

"Loser!" my prefrontal cortex concurred, with unassailable prosecutorial authority. The brief it had assembled was bullet-proof. The men these women date, the thinking part of my brain reminded me, own their own homes. They drive in cars with Bose Surround Sound.

But I don't want to die a virgin! was my best defense. Okay, that wasn't exactly accurate, but I was stalling for time. In desperation, I summoned "Tomatoe Girl," the woman with no obvious interests who couldn't spell tomato.

"Boneriffic!"

Instantly, the tenor of the conversation changed. My dick was now in charge, with my VTA calling the shots. My amygdala and its henchmen were nowhere to be found.

She doesn't know how to spell tomato, my prefrontal cortex reminded me.

And that's why she won't complain when I show up in a car that doesn't have a working radio, my same (and now dueling) prefrontal cortex shot back.

Weighing, measuring, weighing, measuring ...

Nothing good ever came from thinking with your dick, my dueling prefrontal cortex let me know.

True, my dueling prefrontal cortex acknowledged. Bad marriages, failed relationships. I needed to change my pattern. In some way I couldn't comprehend but knew was true, Tomatoe Girl was part of my old pattern. On the other hand:

Who is the woman I want to be snuggled up with on the sofa right now?

Shit-shit-shit! This was crazy. The tide had turned. My entire prefrontal cortex was now in thrall to my VTA. Already, it was cooking up images of the two of us - me and Tomatoe Girl - curled up in a comfortable corner of her motor home (the corner that didn't need to be jacked up), sipping Jack Daniels from the same bottle and viewing reruns of "Dancing with the Stars."

"The sheriff won't show up till tomorrow," she whispers in my ear. "In the meantime, we have tonight."

I have a very good friend and mother confessor in LA, who I reveal all my dark secrets to. "Sometimes I want to drive down to San Diego and wring your neck," she is wont to let me know.

But it was no use. I was already composing a message that entirely contradicted everything on my profile. Hopefully Tomatoe Girl will just ignore me, I rationalized as I clicked "send." But I also walked away from my computer knowing I had broken the deadlock, that I had overcome my fear and insecurities and had set the process in motion. Tomorrow was another day.

Something told me to check my computer one more time. A fresh email informed me a new message was waiting in my online dating site inbox. She was a classical musician who loved nature and entered triathlons for fun. Not only that, she read the same books I did and had solved the enigma of Einstein's iPod.

"Holy shit!" I could only think. Could this be the one? 

To be continued ...

Previous installments
Part I
Part II

My First (but By No Means Last) Experience with Online Dating - Part II

The story so far: I had just signed up for an online dating site, but was having trouble making up my mind. We pick up on the action ...

By now, I was scrutinizing the photos with the intensity of a CIA analyst, desperately searching for visual clues, trying to give my brain something to work with. We are told that looks matter far more to men than to women. My answer to this is if I looked like George Clooney I wouldn't have to spend so much time thinking about what to put in my profile. Yes, looks do matter to men, but not in the way women think they matter.

A few years ago, I entertained (but not very seriously) the idea of starting up a new magazine, "Boneriffic." If we're going to have fake superficial standards for female beauty, I figured, then it made no sense that those who are incapable of getting it up for women should be the deciders. What dickless wonder, for instance, came up with the brilliant idea that vulnerable teen-age girls are supposed to mature into womanhood  with high-strung cadavers as their role models?   

It's not about physical dimensions or specs, and men know this. Women are their own harshest critics. Women: If you don't believe me, just listen to your own conversations. Trust me, if men said the same things about women that women say about women, there would be no new generation left on earth to even discuss the topic of sexual attraction.

You see a fellow member of your gender - a potential competitor in life's ultimate prize - and you say something like her eyes are too close together. We see the same human being, the manifestation of all things possible, and say it's a good day to be a bicycle seat.

It all comes down to the simple fact that men are wired to get boners, and for once Darwin and the Bible are in precise accord. So, back to my magazine, "Boneriffic." Real men, real boners. I would publish photos sent in by truck drivers of their sexy wives and girlfriends. Not only that, I would recruit these same truck drivers as designers for a whole new Boneriffic fashion line. Think Victoria's Secret meets LL Bean.

So, anyway, here I was, just signed up on my online dating site, my carefully plotted out strategy laid waste by the unexpected operational limitations of my prefrontal cortex. It could think, but it couldn't decide, not without some input from the part of the brain where emotions reside. Enter the midbrain's dopamine-sensitive ventral tegmental area (VTA). Rats whose VTAs get stimulated with an electrical current get erections and start mounting the nearest available female.

This is the part of the brain (the right VTA) that also lights up with humans in love, anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers University reported in a lecture at the 2004 American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting. (Simultaneously, the fear-mongering amygdala goes silent.) Romantic love, she went onto say, is a "drive" rather than an emotion, a "need" that compels one to seek a specific mate. Technically, testosterone/estrogen-driven lust (the craving for sexual gratification) is separate, as is oxytocin/vasopressin-influenced attachment (the sense of calm one feels with a long-term partner), but the three are also connected.

"Don’t copulate with people you don’t want to fall in love with," Dr Fisher cautioned, "because indeed you may do just that."

All kinds of emotions are in play, but they exist in relationship to the various drives, depending on how the eternal lust-love-attachment tango is playing out. The prefrontal cortex is also participating - assembling data, putting information into patterns, making strategies - but one gets the impression as a very junior partner. Case in point:

My brain was gridlocked. On paper, there was little to distinguish Prospective Soulmate #1 from Prospective Soulmate #2 from Prospective Soulmate #36. Which one? The mountain-biking attorney who loves to cook or the nature mystic small business owner who spends her time off raising autism awareness? Maybe it was the one who actually subscribed to - not just purchased as plane reading - "The New Yorker." But which one was she? The scuba diving emergency room nurse or the equestrian special education teacher?

I needed visual cues. The eyes have it - something that looked straight into my soul and locked in. A zillion and one things you can't explain, that would translate into a feeling or intuition, that would provide the prefrontal cortex with food for thought, that would help me make up my mind. I'd been at this since early afternoon and it was now approaching one in the morning. I'd set myself the modest goal of initiating contact with at least one prospect before going to bed and time was running out.

"Tomatoe Girl!" something in my head cried out. The one with no obvious interests who couldn't spell tomato. My prefrontal cortex had eliminated her in the opening minutes of the first round, but something in my midbrain was demanding a rehearing. Obediently, I dialed up Tomatoe Girl's profile and checked out her photos, and instantly felt a stirring below the equator. Oh shit, I could only think.

"Boneriffic!" my VTA was screaming. My poor prefrontal cortex didn't stand a chance.

To be continued ...  

My First (but By No Means Last) Experience with Online Dating

When my brain isn’t working, it’s a good thing I have a dick to think with. Case in point, some time ago I decided to give internet dating a go. I signed up on a site, then spent the next several hours agonizing over what kind of public face I wanted to display. For instance, would I come across as a snob if I said I read The New Yorker, and if I did let this particular cat out of the bag would I need to disclose that I wasn’t actually a subscriber but only bought it as a plane read?

And what if my soulmate-in-waiting pressed me on this? Then I would have to reveal that I’d only flown once this year, which meant my Scientific American reading was way down, as well.

Online dating is definitely a game of chess, calculating at least four moves ahead, using the best information available to anticipate a future that you have deluded yourself into thinking you can control. The part of the brain responsible is the prefrontal cortex, the seat of reason that separates us from those who believe that Fox News is true and other lower life forms.

But there are limits in our capacity to think things though, which I discovered once I started checking out the available women on this particular dating site. Just about all of them were very attractive. They looked after themselves, kept themselves fit, and did interesting things. Clearly, these women had no room in their lives for losers. What they wanted to hear from me was something along the lines of my love of the smell of the freshly oiled teak of my sun deck as I sat overlooking my private ocean while I broke down my last triathlon on the prototype iDrool that my good buddy Steve Jobs asked me to try out as a personal favor to him.

Fortunately, this culled most of the herd for me, but there were still way too many candidates to choose from. On one hand, I needed to come across as desirable as possible to the whole rest of the pack. On the other, I needed the equivalent of a prick like Simon Cowell to give me four finalists. My profile (which I have fictionalized here) was finally starting to take shape. First, the black box warning:

I'm self-employed, which means my boss is a cheap bastard and my employee a lazy no-good shit.

Then the catnip:

Silence is golden, so is great conversation. Sharing both with the right individual is priceless.

Then my set-up:

I'd love to prepare one of my gourmet pizzas for you ...

And finally my Simon Cowell eliminator:

... while we sip wine and listen to Einstein's iPod.

Perfect, I decided. More people on this planet have "Antarctica" listed as their place of birth than would be able to get what I was driving at by Einstein's iPod. Even I didn't know what the fuck I meant by Einstein's iPod.

It didn't matter. All I had to do was read through the profiles of some likely candidates, contact one or two at a time over the next several weeks, indicate my interest in them, and invite them to check out my profile. The first one who didn't impale herself on my Simon Cowell eliminator, assuming she was interested in me, would be my next coffee date. Let the games begin.

I went to the profiles only to discover my prefrontal cortex refused to cooperate. Shopping for women online is not the same as shopping for kitchen appliances online, or rather, yes it is. I may tell myself that I want a pasta maker that simply works on the same principle as an old-fashioned wringer washing machine, but ultimately I am going to choose the model that fires up my ventral tegmental area (VTA), the dopamine-sensitive region in the midbrain that mediates pleasure and reward.

While the thinking parts of my brain are weighing up customer reviews and performance specs and price points, my VTA is getting a hard-on over the shiniest looking appliance on the page. Through a complex series of brain signaling, the VTA shuts down the amygdala, associated with fear (which the thinking parts of the brain really need to be paying attention to) and starts negotiating with the prefrontal cortex.

Never mind price and practicality, says the VTA in effect. Get the bright shiny one. In a straightforward negotiation, the prefrontal cortex simply abdicates its authority to the VTA. (Yes, get the bright shiny one.) In a more complicated transaction, the prefrontal cortex spins somersaults rationalizing the choice already made by the VTA. (Yes, the bright shiny one is far better value for my money, even though it costs twice as much as the others. Not only that, it's far more efficient, notwithstanding the fact that three reviewers have noted they had trouble anchoring the object to the counter.)

Hopefully, when you unpack your shiny new pasta maker, the handle doesn't fall off. It probably doesn't matter, anyway. You'll use the thing just once, then exile it to the same dark corner of your lower pantry as your way cool retro bread machine.

So my best-laid plans for choosing a woman online were doomed from the start. This is why men get boners. Women, too, in a manner of speaking. The prefrontal cortex is simply incapable of making up its mind. Which woman? The tree surgeon who has just finished reading Joseph Campbell or the martial arts black belt who teaches drama at a community college? Or the woman with no obvious interests who enjoys her "tomatoe" plant?

As I said, good thing I have a dick to think with.