I joined OKCupid because Naomi Skwarna told me, in all earnestness, that the survey was brilliant and really got to the heart of people. I stayed on OKCupid because it’s another thing to check when I’m procrastinating.
Here are my problems with OKCupid:
1) Enh.
2) Going on a “date” is a terrible way to get to know someone you haven’t already met.
3) A date with someone you haven’t already met is usually an enh way to spend an evening.
There are other problems too, not particular to OKCupid but indicative of why dating is such a dreadful thing to begin with. Meeting someone for the express purpose of fucking or falling in love—and when it comes to meeting people one-on-one from the internet, there has to be an express purpose because otherwise who has the time?—kind of defeats the purpose of meeting people to begin with, which is getting to know them and figuring out how you’d like to know them.
Toronto can feel like a small city, the way any city is if you live in it long enough. After a while you’ve either dated or written off everyone you’re liable to run into at the bars you frequent. Everyone here is really busy, and the culture is not particularly warm or playful, and picking up is insultingly expedient: pretty much anyone who hits on you has already hit on half the bar, and if you turn them down they’ll keep hitting on people until someone agrees to do it with them.
I don’t want to go on dates; I want to make new friends and have sex with some of them. But it’s hard to make new friends because everyone’s busy and standoffish, and I’m kind of a hippie-hater hybrid who complains about how boring and standoffish everyone is without doing anything about it because I don’t have the time and it’s corny.
My friends, corny is the way forward. Corniness and effort. So we’re doing the corniest thing possible and presenting an evening of live speed-dating in front of an audience, hosted by Naomi Skwarna, who is brilliant and really gets to the heart of people. The event is called NotOkCupid. And at the very least it won’t be boring.
