A couple years ago I came up with sort of a theory of dating. I guess it's a theory of dating, but it's really a theory of sociology that just happens to apply as a general rule for selecting people I might want to date.

It goes something like this:

Young adults (viz, 18 and up) age basically in spurts. Or bands. Or waves. Or something. Anyway, what that means is that at some ages the people either a year younger than you or a year older than you are really at about the same emotional and mental stage you are (what's important to you, how you address problems, how you think of your future, yadda yadda), but at other ages the next year either way is in a different age cohort altogether. So I came up with some rough groups:

18 to 21
21 to 24
25-2x
2x-3x
...

That's where I kinda ran out of ways to tell the difference. I'm pretty sure there's a definable difference between, say, 33 and 27, but those two are seemingly (from my not-at-all-representative sample) about as close or far apart as 24 and 27 are. So I guess I'm deciding at this point that maybe 27 is the cutoff, then it's 27 to 3x where 3x is not defined yet (too little sample data).

Anyway, those loosely match (as you may have noticed) with:

College
Post-College
Actual adult
Spouse, homeowner, etc.

Anyway, where the rules come into play is that I came to the conclusion it was okay to date somebody one age group away, but not two. I think the groups do get larger as we age (so, for instance, it could be 25-29 and 29-34, but I can't tell right now if 27 is the turning point, or 29, or something else entirely), but the rule still applies.

This comes into play now, of course, since I'm currently actually attempting to go on dates where before I just had a handy way to rule possible candidates out, although I wasn't really making any effort to find anybody to keep or rule out as the case may have been.

Anyway, I put up a personals ad on one of the web thingies and I specified that I was seeking someone between the ages of 25-33. And really what I meant was someone of an age greater than or equal to 25, up to and including 33. Older than that, I dunno (although I guess I'm open-minded enough to try). Younger than that, I'm pretty sure the answer is no.

So after some apparent technical difficulty (I have now confirmed with somebody I'm emailing with that the personals site manages to lose email messages it's supposed to be forwarding) I started getting some responses on my ad. From chyks who are 22 or 23.

Now. I've emailed back to a couple of them for at least one response, and they're seemingly nice girls and all, but they're just out of college and they have that just out of college thing going on. Like the one girl who doesn't capitalize anything in her email (so 1995), or the ones who still hang out with all their college buddies and get wasted just like they did in their apartment. In other words, they're too young. Or, in other other words, I'm too old for them.

They apparently don't seem to think so. They're wrong, but they don't. This raises a couple of questions in my mind:

• Why don't they think I'm too old, or they're too young, when I say in my ad that I'm looking for somebody no younger than 25? Can't they read?
• Are there other men out there my age who are happy to date these women? If so, are they emotionally still in college themselves?
• If that's the case, why do these women want to date them anyway? Are they looking for somebody who's "older" but who really isn't? Does this mean that the men in their age cohort are even less out of college (emotionally) than the women are?
• Finally, isn't there anybody actually in the age group I'm looking for who's also out there looking?

The answer to that last one is, finally, yes. I'm now a little disturbed that maybe I need to go back and re-respond (at the risk of being a dork twice, or a dork squared since dorkiness increases exponentially and not just geometrically) (QED) to the ads I initially responded to, citing technical difficulties ("and if you think I'm so lame I don't even warrant a response, please respond anyway so I can go back to assuming I'm a loser instead of holding out hope")? But I am emailing with somebody who holds promise for at least the reason that she liked my ad enough to respond to it twice (instead of assuming that a non-response expressed disinterest on my part, as I had done when I got nothing back from the women whose ads I responded to myself).

And she's 33, not 23. And she writes in complete sentences. And her life doesn't still revolve around her college experience. Yay. Now I wonder if there are others.

(2000-04-25)