Low Profile

A friend recently pointed out to me that my Match.com profile is weak. He didn't use that word, exactly, but that was what he meant. Which I appreciate. Now, I know what you are thinking: YOU joined match dot com? Holy crap. And yes, I had those very same thoughts myself. But my logic ran something like this. Here I am in North Carolina for two months, hanging out almost exclusively with my family. I enjoy meeting new people, I really enjoy going on dates, which I haven't been on for about 6 months now (I know). And it might be good "practice" writing up my profile and getting comfortable with this whole online thing in the event that I really want to do it for real. And that is the part that I should have been paying a little more attention to.

Now, in defense of my vague and noncommittal profile, I have to say that I found it rather difficult to compose and I couldn't quite put my finger on why until I was lying in the dark last night, contemplating everything and nothing. The way Match.com works is they pick out specific words you use to describe what you like and don't like and then run those against other people's profiles. When a certain number of words match up, you then have a percentage of how matchable you are with someone else. So the trick, and they openly encourage you to do this, is to be very very specific about exactly how you live your daily life and also how you want to live your life in the future. And what the person should look like that you wouldn't mind bumping into when you roll over in bed in the morning. In other words, you have to sell yourself. Which I'm not so good at. Or perhaps more accurately, don't really care to be good at.

In life, we are all aware that there is form and energy, right? There is an energetic component to everything, an inherent quality that defines something at its very essence, and then the form is the physical manifestation of that essence. Of the numerous "bodies" we possess, two of those are a physical body and an energetic body, and as we move deeper into our yoga practice, we start to access the energetic body more. We become highly attuned to the subtle ways we feel and how those feelings are expressed in our hips, our hamstrings, our hearts...anywhere, really. And as we begin moving away from the physical, the form, and into the subtle, the energetic, we start to experience life energetically. Meeting someone shifts from thinking, "She volunteers a lot" to feeling "She is generous." The energy is generosity, the form is volunteer work. Generosity can be expressed a thousand different ways. Where am I going with this, right?

Right. So what I found, as I tried to fill in that damn Match profile, is that I have been moving so far away from form, and so far into energy, that it felt very unnatural to define myself in that way. Constricting, actually. Noose-like. I honestly think I felt my chest tightening a little. The end result was a vague and somewhat despondent description of myself and how I live my life. So much for selling myself.

And it was during this Facebook chat that I clearly saw how lame my profile turned out to be. You all probably know that one of the qualities that I value in people most is honesty. Sure, I sometimes initially feel deeply wounded by someone's opinion and observations but almost immediately my appreciation for the truth eclipses that pain and actually serves to heal the wound. And there is such humongo growth in that! The truth here is that when I saw men who wanted to drive in from the next STATE to meet for a cup of coffee, I knew we were operating from vastly different game plans. My heart just isn't in it, not right now, and certainly not here in North Carolina. So I canceled my membership a few days ago. Big fucking whoop, as I like to say. At the very least I saved someone some gas money.