You're lonely.
You're not desperate or unattractive or any crazier than the average single American adult.
You're just … lonely.
You don't have time for dating or even speed-dating — you're that busy, what with the job and eating on the run and watching old movies on DVD by yourself and making sure your myriad cats have plenty of food and a multi-story scratching post/dormitory that's nicer than your apartment. You don't like the nightclub scene, either; you hate the fakeness and the vapidity and the one-night stands and the hangovers, or you've used/been-used-by everyone worth using/being-used-by that frequents the bars within safe drunken-driving distance of your place. And you're definitely not going to date somebody from work, either. Remember the last time you thought that might be a good idea? Half the people in HR suspected you spent your last vacation having Mark's baby "taken care of."
You're not even sure you want a significant other. You just want to meet somebody who has similar interests, who likes the music you like, who laughs at the same things, who also thinks pineapple is a stupid thing to put on a pizza.
And more and more, you're thinking about trying to meet someone on the Net.
You don't think you're ready to dive headfirst into the oceans of please-God-don't-let-me-die-alone-ness that are Match.com (where, if you're still single and dejected after six months, they'll give you another six months of dejected singlehood for free!) and eHarmony.com (whose pledge to bring you "29 dimensions of compatibility" elicits a creepy Stepford Wives-type vibe for you). And there are just too many chat rooms, not even counting sex and fetish sites. You don't want to get too specific. What you're looking for is more a combination social networking/dating forum — something like MySpace, only without the pedophiles, jailbait and emo bands.
Well, get ready to rejoice and possibly have sex, because Web specialization is finally starting to rise to meet your needs.
Let's say, for instance, that you're really into urban music and lifestyles, and would like to meet others who share your love for hip-hop, ostentatious jewelry and the like. There's a place in cyberspace just for you: NiggaSpace.com.
NiggaSpace — "a place fo niggas," naturally — is a community for individuals wishing to bond over their shared love of all things urban. Don't worry, according to Tyrone, who's the all-friend-having NiggaSpace version of MySpace's Tom, NiggaSpace isn't about being hard or hating Whitey or anything like that. In fact, by boldly using a provocative word in the website's name, Tyrone and NiggaSpace are out to strip all the negative connotations from it:
"A common endearing term used by many black people is, 'nigga' not to be confused with a different and offensive term, 'nigger,'" says the site's homepage. "The word, 'nigga' is in rap songs, daily conversations, on TV, etc. yet the word still has so much mixed emotions attached. One of my intentions is for this word to no longer have such mixed emotions. Part of my intention for this site is for the word nigga to embody images of brotherhood, and fraternity rather than images of ignorance and hate."
You don't even have to be African-American to join — just ask NiggaSpacers like mad_magic_wand, smashfacecorey, Queen_Neda and ThatNumba1Milf. As long as you can admit that your identity is defined by a bunch of rap-music clichés, you're welcome and color be damned.
But what if you're not really into that stuff? What if you're into something a little more, shall we say, exclusive? Like, oh, preserving the purity of the white European race? If you refuse to believe that anyone anywhere along your bloodline ever had sex with an African or a Latino or a Jew (someone did, by the way), your dating pool is already considerably smaller than most.
Relax. Thanks to allwhitedating.com, you don't have to await the rise of the Fourth Reich alone.
You don't even have to explicitly describe yourself as racist to benefit from allwhitedating.com. It's "About" page is so open-minded, its completely devoid of information. Some of the 85 singles profiled on the site (such as Tomboy, Niggerhater, Gonzo88) proudly proclaim their hate for non-white races, and some don't. If you don't think you're a bigot and just want to reduce to zero your chance of interacting with someone who isn't Caucasian, and feel OK about joining something called allwhitedating.com, then go ahead.
You're probably not in denial at all. Plenty of the men and women on the site seem like nice people just looking for a (white) companion. It's not like they all wrote about loving violence, and more than half of them even put up what might be a real picture of themselves.
It just goes to show that there's somebody out there for anybody, whether that anybody is a young African-American woman who thinks 50 Cent would make a good politician, or a Canadian guy who wants to kill all the "mud people." And the Net is making it ever easier for these folks to stay away from each other while they're looking for kindred spirits with whom to build a life together.
Isn't technology romantic?
This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2006.