Sharing my heart on okcupid.com

I recently took the somewhat scary foray back into the world of the online personal, hoping it goes better than last time. One of the steps on okcupid is to write a journal entry to I suppose, expose your fuzzy underbelly a little bit more than just your stats and rote fill in the blank blurbs. So, this was written at midnight-ish after a slightly trying day...

So you say I'll be up to 80% completed once I finish my journal entry, okcupid.com; but what exactly does that mean?

Am I 20% closer to finding a partner?

20% nearer compatibility that will whether tough economic times, Skype, easy access to porn, a society that sees everything as disposable and as a trial run, including marriage?

I know this sound cynical, but I don't want that to be the 100% goal I'm striving for.

I've learned a lot about attraction, relationships and the sad end of them through a lot of trial and error. Some standards that have a good beat and you can dance to them are: Just be yourself, men love women with self confidence, cut your losses, time heals all wounds, there are plenty of fish in the sea.

What if you want to fight against some (not all) of these relationship cliches? While schools of fish find comfort and safety swimming together, I've always been a kind of against the stream kind of person. Sometimes I know that makes me look like the one fish going the wrong direction, but sometimes it just means I find better feeding grounds by myself.

In this day and age, just being yourself doesn't seem to be enough, for men or for women. Women are being told "(you can) have it all!" You need to go to school, get the best grades, be perfectly fit, be the bitch that gets the corner office, corral yourself the ideal mate, have 2.5 kids, and if you didn't choose the right: career, mate, time to get your tubes tied, don't worry 50's the new 30! Try again and again until you get it right, til death do you part. Or you get a bitchin' new lawyer.

But what if that mold just seems too restrictive and like it was made for someone else? What if you never decide what you want to be when you grow up, does that make you less worthy of love and figuring out how to have 2 and a fraction of a baby?

And sure, time heals all wounds, but sometimes the scars remain. From my parents divorce 28 years ago to my brother's current one, you can see the wounds and scars all over our families. For something to be disposed of, means it is thrown away and discarded, and no one wants to be littered or strewn. Of course, I don't support staying together for the kids, staying in abusive relationships, or if you are just genuinely unhappy, but sometimes I think a person needs to take a step back and say, "is this temporary? Can this be fixed? How much work am I willing to put into making this a success?" Seeing how hard people strive to keep their jobs, cars and houses, you'd hope they'd try to scrimp and save to bulwark their love against the lean times as well.

As for so many fish in the sea, well it's true, we have limitless options, but to find that incredible blend of attraction, reaction, blending and boundary making that makes up a good relationship, I can't help but find the odds a little more daunting. Like throwing a blue fish in with a whole bunch of slightly lighter blue fish, and telling it to find the one other fish that matches it's exact color.

And I know how attraction works, we are constantly surveying, analyzing, surveying and analyzing. I know there's a kind of national standard of beauty that I don't fit in, but I don't rail at the universe for it. Not every man finds comfort in stick thin women, just as not every woman is swept off her feet by muscle bound men. And we as people make very quick, snap judgments... in a place like this, even faster. Make sure you post the flattering pictures that make you look thinner, taller, younger, more attractive so you might catch someone's attention for longer than 2.5 seconds.

I have the confidence and faith in myself that only comes from being alive for 30 years, and seeing the things I've seen, doing the things I've done, and really taking in the lessons I've been offered. And while this time hasn't brought me my ideal career, body, mate, child to adult ratio, it has brought me a lot closer to a self actualization that makes me feel like I built up a lot of muscles swimming against the stream, rather than just letting it sweep me away.