Readjusting to single girl life, I have gone on more dates this year than in my entire life combined: lawyers, businessmen, scientists, engineers, trust fund kids, accountants, IT analysts, advertisers, salesmen. I have now officially dated EVERYONE in this city. A lot of those dates were trainwrecks from the start: dead conversations, uncomfortable advances, awkward comments. But occasionally you really click with someone new and sparks rain down. Great! This is so exciting! Now what?
You Google them. Obviously.
But let’s back up here. Say you don’t know their last name. That happens sometimes. So then you plug in their phone number to White Pages and, voila, there it is. All of their glorious information, meaning at least their last name and possibly their age. Then you pause, satisfied that you at least know that, and start considering other people you know who have similar last names.
“Huh. That’s a lot like my fourth grade teacher’s last name. She was pretty nice. Good family. She had that weird bad breath thing and really loved that turtle of hers, but that’s not so bad. He must be nice too.”
OR
“Wow, that sounds a lot like the _____ store!” In my most recent case, this was a grocery
store. And I LOVE going to the grocery store. “One of my favorite pastimes is shopping for food, so this seems promising.”
I am very logical.
After you spend 0.73 seconds considering just waiting to see what they’re like organically, you realize God made the Internet for a reason, and you are only insulting Him by not researching this boy on social media. You’d hate to be smited, especially right after meeting this great guy, so you go for it. You click through the limited privacy allowed Facebook profile pictures, refrain from looking at LinkedIn because, dang it, it’ll tell them if you looked, and you read any other little tidbits that Google decides to offer up. Usually it’s funny quotes from a college newspaper or random websites they’re linked to. Sometimes, though, if you’re really [un]lucky, articles pop up about their relatives. Their relatives who are actually international fugitives who are not allowed into the country anymore and may have a made-for-TV movie made about the crime they committed. But that’s only happened to me once.
You overly critique their texting styles.
I may be partial since I graduated with an English degree, but come on. Show me y-o-u care by fully spelling out your words. Calm it down with the text talk, lololol. And why so many exclamation points?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! I can’t handle this. *screaming face emoji siren emoji eggplant emoji* Give me a properly executed sentence, and I’ll give you my heart.
You start asking mutual friends about them.
Sometimes you’re lucky enough (thanks to Facebook-stalking) to realize that you’ve got a few friends in common. So hit up that old friend-of-a-classmate’s-ex’s-roommate and ask what they think about this guy.
“Hey! So I went out with _________ the other night. Remember him? I think he was at that
tacky sweater party we went to junior year. Yeah, that party. Exactly. So he was really nice, right?
Well, we went out recently and he bought me a drink and made me laugh. No, no he didn’t try anything, but he was probably just being a gentleman. What? No, he didn’t seem gay to me. Oh. Are you sure? But didn’t he date Emily for a while? Oh. OH. Oh. Well no, he didn’t say ‘date’, per se, but I mean…okay, maybe he is gay.”
You make an effort to run into them in public.
The best time for this to happen is when you’re looking great and you’re out at a bar with your girlfriends or, in my case, my very attractive gay male friend. A less great time for this to happen is when you’re as previously mentioned, but you’re at a gay bar with said friend. The worst time for this to happen is when you’re inside aforementioned gay bar and the drag queen emcee announces the strip contest that is about to begin, and you find yourself unknowingly watching the guy you’ve been seeing taking his clothes off for money.
And then you find out he’s a regular. And then one of the guys behind you nudges you after noticing you staring, mistaking your horror for intrigue, and tells you you should try and get a date with that. BUT YOU ALREADY HAVE. But it’s almost okay because at least he won. 
