Am I Ever Going To Be Good At This? Or: Why I'm Good At Social Networking And Not Dating.

Le Love
Dating is not like social networking. Trust me. I know this because I'm pretty good at social networking and not so much at dating.
In high school, dating is made easy by having all key players in the same building. If I had a burning question about how Chad The Football Player felt about me, I would simply wait until Chemistry and ask his friends. Who were also my friends. This is a lot like social networking. Example: I can ask a contact to introduce me to someone on LinkedIn. Then I can look at that person's profile for a lot of basic info (I believe the term is profile stalking and we all do it so stop judging) and pretty much know who I'm dealing with using all of the resources I can.
Using my social networking profiles, I can get through date 5. Dates 1 and 2 mostly cover what I'd put in my LinkedIn profile. Jobs, movies, books, who we might mutually know and things like that. Dates 2 and 3 cover more Facebook profile stuff, slightly more personal but still fairly edited. Dates 4 and 5 are where you start to fall off the profile map. You get into things that you would not put on any profile anywhere so this is where all of my hard earned skills in social networking do me absolutely no good. I agree that some people put too much of themselves on Facebook or their blog but it's still a pre-made and possibly edited version. There is no editing at a corner table in a nice restaurant while my date looks at me over a wine glass wondering why I'm not answering his question of "what kind of relationship I want".
I wonder if all of this profile building and self editing we can do in social networking is making us less quick on our feet when we're asked tough face to face questions. Or, if I just really suck at dating which is altogether possible.
I'm not sure I'm the only one either. Guys seem to love the whole "texting instead of calling" thing. I went out with one guy who basically never called me in the 2 months I knew him since he opted to communicate by text and Facebook alone. It was weird because I felt like he expected me to be a walking talking version of my Facebook profile. Oddly, he was not even close to a walking talking version of his...
Plus, with friendly features like "unfollow" "unfriend" and "block", you can quickly get rid of people like they were never even there. In real life, I run into people that I went out with a few times pretty much constantly. In my mind I'm thinking "unfollow, unfollow, unfollow". Still there.
Fortunately, I have been able to get past date 5. Granted, this person is patient with me while I take 4 days to answer simple questions and reference both movie and song lines instead of giving straight answers (Believe me, there IS a Breakfast Club line for everyone) but the murky non profile details are still trickling out. Anyway, profile buiding and social networking skills have been zero help in the dating process whatsoever, anyone else seeing this?