I’m bad at flirting. Or maybe I’m good at it, I honestly don’t know. At best, my approach seems to be one in which I try to be funny for my own sake and if the other person likes what I said or wrote, cool. The funny section of my dating profile is the response to the stupid prompt “two truths and a lie” I rotate song lyrics into my answer. It’s my way of showing a little bit of who I am through music while being funny at the same time. The two lyrics that usually stay on the profile are “In the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey.” and “I don’t always say whoomp, but when I do…. there it is.” The third option varies. Sometimes it’s been “At first I was afraid… I was petrified.” At times it’s been “after midnight, we’re gonna let it all hang out.” At times it’s been “I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom.” You can always count on 80s and 90s rap lyrics to be kinda funny: “I gotta fight.. for my right.. To parrrrtaayyyy..” . Right now, it’s a lyric from Glass Animals, “Pineapples are in my head. Got nobody ’cause I’m brain dead.” They’re not all meant to be funny, but I figure if we can connect over a song or laugh about it, bonus.
I’ve been told, on occasion, that I possess wit and charm. I try to play the compliment off in an awe shucks sort of way or with some bashful self-effacing take down of myself. The truth is, I’ve spent too many years cracking myself up to think that I’m entirely devoid of wit and charm… false modesty is part of the charm 😉
A recent text conversation started with someone’s answer to a prompt on this same dating app. The prompt was “a random fact I love” and they wrote “Butterflies have a lifespan of 28 days. Dogs have 42 teeth.” I replied “That’s two facts… and now I want a breakdown of how those 28 days are spent. 52% fluttering, 27% drinking nectar from flowers, 8% having butterfly sex, 13% avoiding girls in pigtails with butterfly nets?” She replied with a series of cry-laugh emojis and something about me being hunky and witty, what are the odds? I said I couldn’t claim to be witty, it was just a mask for being semi-autobiographical – secretly lamenting that I’ve spent 13% of my life avoiding girls with butterfly nets and 8% dedicated to butterfly sex.
A different person on the same app said one of their unusual skills was making homemade pasta. I reached out and said I like to make bolognese. Maybe when we’re 80, those could be our pet names for each other. She could be rigatoni or cavatappi and I could be meat sauce…
I don’t know if these things are funny, but I’d laugh if someone said them to me. This is how little I care about online dating and flirting. Or maybe it’s how much I care. I make goofy comments to crack myself up and figure if the other person thinks they’re even remotely funny, we might get along. I can’t say that the approach is working, but I know it’s worked in the past. “Worked” being defined loosely as having led to a few dates that were fun and effortless.
The other day, out of the blue, I was thinking about one of the first women I dated after getting divorced. We went out for a few months. We broke up often and got back together often. It wasn’t the healthiest of relationships. We were both very new to dating. I wasn’t thinking about the healthiness or the breakups, but was instead remembering how much time we spent laughing. She was one of the funnier people I went out with and when we weren’t breaking up or crying about something, we were telling jokes and playing off of each other’s witty banter.
Elsewhere on my profile I write that I’m looking “to laugh forever with someone I take seriously.” I think that’s what I’m trying to attract or suss out: a sense of humor. In the “laughter is the best medicine” way of thinking, I believe a sense of humor suggests an ability to weather storms with a modicum of grace. When I think about the two or three relationships I’ve had over the last seven or eight years, that really stand out, that really felt like they could have gone the distance – they had humor as a fundamental part of our connection. Being together was fun. Which, when you think about it is so obvious it’s dumb. Of course it should be fun. Given the choice of fun or misery, most of us would choose fun. It seems so stupidly easy and yet we find so many ways to screw it up. Not surprisingly, when I think of those people and those relationships, some of the words that I associate with them are: light and warm and glowing. When I imagine those people’s faces, I see the sunlight somewhere in the picture. I see the sparkle in their eye, the adorable laugh lines, the light highlighting their hair.
In the spirit of being the person I want to find, I’m trying to re-discover my own sense of humor. I don’t think it went away or disappeared, I just haven’t been terribly practiced at it these past few years. I’m also trying to take myself less seriously (not that I’ve ever taken myself all that seriously). Most of the connections I’ve had or have made these past few years have taken a turn towards the depths of spirituality: being a good, kind, and compassionate human. Those qualities are important to me, and they’re the internal qualities I’ve been trying to cultivate. As such, it’s no surprise that what I’m putting out there (spirituality, depth, etc.) is what I’m getting back. And I’m trying to remind myself that if I also want light-hearted and funny, I need to be light-hearted and funny.
All of which reminds me of the poem, “Loving” by Jane Stembridge:
Loving
When we loved
we didn’t love right.
The mornings weren’t funny
and we lost too much sleep.
I wish we could do it all again,
with clown hats on.