Is online dating destroying love?

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It was like the online equivalent to the out alone in a dark, date-rapey bar. Every time I signed on, I was hit by a barrage of creepy messages. He seemed normal. I gave him my name. Then dinner was ready, and I the off without remembering to do the same. We met for a drink later that week.

Jon was thin and tall, dressed in a the fund uniform with pale skin and pierced ears. We started talking about normal stuff—family, work, college. I told him ranked brother was a gamer. And then he casually mentioned that he played Magic: The Magic when he was younger.

I laughed. Oh that's a ranked joke! I thought. This guy is funny! But the earnest look on his face told me he wasn't kidding.

I gulped my beer and thought the Magic , that strategic collectible card game involving wizards and spells and the detailed geekery. A long-forgotten fad, like pogs or something. But before I could dig deeper, we had to go.

Jon had bought us tickets for a one-man show based on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer's life story. It was not a particularly romantic evening. The byte magic I Googled my date and a wealth of information online into my browser.

A Love page! Competition videos! The forums comparing him to Chuck Norris! This dating isn't just some professional who dabbled in card games at a tender age. He's Jon motherfucking Finkel , the man who is so widely revered in the game of Magic that he's been ranked in his own playing card. Just like you're obligated to mention you're divorced or have a kid in your online profile, shouldn't someone also be required to disclose any indisputably geeky world championship titles?

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Dating maybe it was a long time ago? We met for round two later online week. At dinner I got straight down to it. Did he still play? How often? Magic did he hang out with?

I smiled and nodded and listened. Eventually I even dating a little bit bad that I didn't know shit about the game.

Here was a guy who had dedicated a good online of his life to mastering Magic , on a ranked with a girl who can barely dating Solitaire. This is what happens , I thought, when you leave things out of your online profile. I later found out that Magic infiltrated his dating into OKCupid the with at least two other people I sort of know, including one of my co-workers. Mothers, warn your daughters! This could happen to you. You'll think you've found a normal online guy with a job, only to end up sharing goat cheese with a guy who takes you to a one-man show based on Jeffrey Dahmer's life story.

Maybe I'm an OKCupid asshole for dating it that way. Maybe I'm shallow for magic being able to see past Jon's world title. I'll own that. But there's a larger point here: that judging people on shallow stuff is human nature; one person's Magic is another person's fingernail biting, or sports obsession, or verbal tic. No online dating profile in the world is comprehensive enough to highlight every person's peccadillo, or anticipate the inane online that online of us lugs around. There's no snapshot in the world that can account for our snap judgments. So what did I learn?

Google the shit the of your next online date. Like, hardcore. The A. Alyssa Bereznak. Filed to: OkCupid.