The other night over cocktails a friend of mine told me about this guy she had seen at a party just a few days ago. She spoke with that very specific mix of enthusiasm and uneasiness that most of us have when talking about someone we think we might like, yet know absolutely nothing about. That is, until we start looking for information. In less than ten minutes she sent over all the links I needed in order to have a clear image about the guy's career, experience, projects and agenda. And his girlfriend. My friend's enthusiasm was suddenly silenced.
Then I remembered a few months ago I had gone through a similar episode on a rather dull Monday evening. I was on my way to the grocery store when I spotted the new dance and ballet school just a few hundred meters from my apartment and decided to take a detour and see what it was all about. Had this been a movie, I would have probably gotten the idea post-shopping and would have taken a short and intense trip in the world of ballet carrying a watermelon (if this doesn't ring a bell, it's probably been quite a while since you watched
this). But I gave in to my curiosity. In less than five minutes, I had managed to spark with a person who was pretty close to what I had been looking for but hadn't realised it: ballet dancer, world traveler, probably at least bilingual and, as it turned out later, lead dancer for the Polish National Opera and most likely married, but I only found that out after calling Ana and blabbering about men in tights. It didn't take Google too long to kill the butterflies in my stomach and my enthusiasm over the new dance teacher in the neighbourhood - because this time it was not just about dancing, it was also about liking someone I would have probably discovered at a later point was out of reach, but that later point would have happened a lot later if not for my conditional reflex and for the easiness to find out absolutely everything there is to be found out.
Back in highschool I could spend weeks without even knowing the name of my newest crush and then get all girly and blushy and quakey when we finally spoke, there were countless questions filling my head and I'd get an adrenaline rush every time I found out something so unimportant as where he usually goes for beer, how he likes his coffee, the name of his dog, the bus he takes every morning or the books he borrowed from the library the week before.
Back then it was a lot easier to daydream about men because fiction was the only filler for the gaps that appeared in our brains every time we had a new guy in sight, until we actually got the data that gave us a complete picture. Now it's pretty sure we're able to find out more than we actually need about most guys we meet, be it the bartender from the pub around the corner, the Starbucks guy who makes the best vanilla latte in Warsaw, a new dance partner or just someone randomly met on a Saturday night. Some might say this spares us a lot of trouble, but I'm really not sure I want to be spared the trouble of daydreaming and putting a bit more effort into finding out things that I'm practically offered prepacked with just a few clicks. And trying to control the impulse of searching all this information is more difficult than it appears, cutting Google out of my life is much riskier than letting him cut out some potential new prospects.
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