Guest post from Mary Carter

I sat in the café section of ABC Furniture on Fifth Avenue and 19th Street in Manhattan, sipping on a glass of champagne, awaiting my blind date. Internet dating in New York City. Tired of all the dates on match.com, exchanging emails but never even getting to the “meeting” stage, I’d gone on craigslist. This was before the craigslist killer by the way, and I always met my dates in a public place. Normally, I only use craigslist for futons and apartments, but here I was, single again, back in the Big Apple. Some things are easier to take a bite out of than others in this city, and when it comes to dating, there is no apple, unless it’s the poisonous one from Snow White, it just plain bites.

Why would that be? Isn’t New York crawling with men? Probably. It’s also crawling with models, and actresses, and au pairs. And if they aren’t your competition, than pure ambition is. Men (and women) here, are following their dreams. Attached to their cell phones, spending sixty plus hours a week at work, the gym, their iPhone, their iPad, their Kindle. Competition has gone wireless.

That’s why a lot of people in New York meet at bars. Pick up any self-help book on dating and the first thing they will tell you is: DON’T MEET MEN AT BARS. So after awhile, craiglist looks like a viable option. After all, I don’t meet men where I work. And it doesn’t matter how long I linger by the frozen food section in the grocery store, all I’ve ever gotten from that is frostbite. I’m in bookstores constantly. Men don’t hit you up there either. Forget the subway. All you get is a little ass grab. (Don’t worry, I only do it if they’re really cute).

So that leaves cyber dating………

I hate internet dating. They never look like their picture. Or they think you don’t look like your picture. Within seconds you both realize neither of you finds the other one remotely attractive. Expectations have already been built. You’ve created a fantasy date in your mind that the other can’t possibly live up to. You should probably picture them as hideous as you can, that way you’ll be presently surprised if they show up with say—all their teeth. Attraction is still the bottom line. Starting some kind of dialogue with a person you’ve never met, dare say, email flirtation, is a big mistake. Because it will all come crumbling down if you meet them and the chemistry not only fizzles, it slides down the table and crawls away on its belly, leaving you sitting there to take the shrapnel. Now you have to stay through dinner because you already know all about them and their dog, and their cousin Jeremy who’s having knee surgery next week. Don’t do it. Meet as fast as you can, meet in public, and meet for a brief drink or coffee.

Seconds before my craigslist date walked in, my brain registered something I had totally skimmed over, paraded it in front of me, and gnawed on me. At first glance at his ad, I thought he said he was 40. I was in my mid-thirties. I was thinking of a dating age range between thirty and forty. Forty-one up to a sexy forty-five might slide if I was really crazy about someone. But what if he was—

Here he comes—walking toward me. He’s tall. And he’s—

Definitely forty-nine and a half. Or fifty-something.

We sit down to dinner. Conversation is okay, but I’m already bummed because I’m not attracted to him at all. And then he hits me with his—

“You’re so attractive. Why didn’t you send me a picture of your whole body? Because you just sent me a picture of your face, I assumed you had an ass like a barn door. But you don’t.”

Uh— Don’t let the barn door hit you on your way out, buddy.

My other two craigslist dates were hideous too. A Republican who didn’t drink. I’m a liberal democrat who does. That ended after about twenty minutes with a handshake and him just muttering one word: “Interesting”. As a writer, I could have colored it up a bit for him, but I didn’t bother. After all he trudged all the way out to Queens just to have a coke. (I would have met him somewhere else if I knew he didn’t drink. He’s the one who suggested a bar)….. A guy who didn’t read the newspaper because he “Didn’t care what was going on in the world” but didn’t understand why I didn’t want to go out with him again, because he loved a woman with “big hips”.

I have been dating the same man now for a year and a half. We met at a bar. It’s nice to take a break from the “dating scene” in the big city. It’s a lot like Sex in the City without the shoes, money, high-profiled careers, dinner reservations, or girlfriends to cry on.

MARY CARTER is a freelance writer and novelist. My Sister’s Voice is her fourth novel with Kensington. Her other works include: She’ll Take It, Accidentally Engaged (Little Black Dress), Sunnyside Blues, and The Honeymoon House in the best selling anthology Almost Home.

She is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which is part of the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has just completed A Very Maui Christmas, a new novella for Kensington that will be included in Holiday Magic, a Christmas of 2010 anthology. She is currently working on a new novel, The Pub Across the Pond, about an American woman who swears off all Irish men only to learn she’s won a pub in Ireland. Readers are welcome to visit her at www.marycarterbooks.com.