How Twitter Makes Dating Difficult

 I’ve completely lost my point.

Let’s try again. A lot of people are meeting each other on Twitter nowadays. It’s a 280-character wanted ad. So you’re on Twitter and somebody catches your attention. Cool. You peep the avatar and you like what you see (thought be VERY aware that folks put pictures up that they like. Some people catch themselves at perfect angles.) and you @-reply them or DM if they’re following you.

Cool.

Say you two even manage to have some chemistry this way. It feels right and you decide to exchange numbers so that you can set up something a little more IRL. This is where things get hairy. And here’s how and why; I’ve created a list.

When do you call

If the person you are interested in via Twitter ALWAYS seems to be tweeting that means they ALWAYS seem to be busy. They’re doing this or that. Or in the midst of a convo or something. The advent of text-messaging has already made people self-conscious about calling and inconveniencing others, but now you have PROOF that they’re doing something. You might talk yourself RIGHT out of ever calling just because you see them pushing up their Tweet totals to 40,000.

What do you talk about

Loquacious motherlovers on Twitter (and bloggers in general) don’t like to be repetitive. There’s this inherent assumption that you were already reading whatever they tweeted or wrote about. There is nothing worse than a convo where somebody asks you “did you see my tweet about XYZ?” and you say no. The vim and vigor that they had on Twitter will be replaced by some half-arsed attempt to rehash a story that is now uninteresting two hours later. But this isn’t even a Twitter phenomenon. The beauty of Twitter is that when something excites you, at that moment you can tell random people and have a convo about it. Once that excitement is gone its hard to relive it. Point here is, if you are both talking about all the important stuff via Twitter what the hell do you talk about when you do actually ever talk?

Flirting

This is the one that hurts feelings. People are inherently jealous. As soon as you take it upon yourself to be vulnerable and indicate interest its like an internal volcano erupts. Which is great until you see the new object of your affection flirting with other people via Twitter. Or worse, what YOU interpret as flirting. I’ll bet that more than half of the people on Twitter have gotten into their feelings because of some conversation they’ve walked into between one person and another…merely because they’ve established a small connection outside of the Timeline.

The murder

I’ll ALSO bet that many many people have decided to STOP dealing with somebody because of what they’ve seen on Twitter. Let’s be real, Twitter is full of a bunch of megalomaniacal individuals. Completely self-absorbed people who believe that what they have to say needs to be heard. They ALSO like to tell all of their business because their business is that interesting. This is the downside of social networking, you find out people are crazy VERY early on. It’s a wonder that ANYBODY is dating nowadays.

The (Tweet) Meet-up

Well this goes back to the avi. Disappointment is a hard thing to escape facially. I remember a homegirl of mine going back and forth with this dude on Twitter that she’d developed a crush on. Full on flirting, etc. Well, we went to this Tweetup and she saw dude and immediately lost all interest. It’s not that he didn’t look like his avatar. It’s just that the reality of dude in person didn’t seem to match the fantasy. Happens all the time.

Anyway, these are the ways that I can think of in which Twitter is making dating difficult. It’s why I miss the good old days when men just clubbed their women and took them back the cave.

Can it be that it was all so simple then?