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tattoos than skin, three spectacular mullets, a classic Jheri curl complete with “Thriller”-era pleather jacket, and one guy who called himself Metroman and described himself as a modern-day superhero. I got matched with a guy in medium-security prison, who swore that getting caught embezzling was the best thing for him, since he was able to kick his cocaine habit in prison. A guy who bred chinchillas in his basement. And one of my former professors from Northwestern, who had given me a C, made shitty comments on all my papers, and whose expression behind his bushy Claus-esque beard always looked as if he had recently smelled somethingunpleasant. Which he probably had, because I would not have been in the least surprised if that face fur contained morsels from a decade’s worth of school cafeteria meals.
    A good 80 percent of my matches lived anywhere from fifty to five hundred miles away. At least 50 percent of them were ten years older or younger than my requested limits. And 100 percent of them were not remotely dateable, at least not by me. I started actively booing at the TV anytime I saw the happy spokescouples on the EDestiny commercials.
    My three best friends from high school, Mina, Emily, and Lacey, had turned our monthly Girls’-Night-In date into Official EDestiny Night. They would come over for snacks and cocktails and we would go through my new profiles for the sheer hilarity of it. Emily is a ghostwriter for a
New York Times
bestselling chick lit author, and would take the opportunity to make up little impromptu stories about each guy and what our life together would be like. Some of which were so hilarious that you can now see them played out rather painfully by the likes of Katherine Heigl in the big-screen adaptations of the novels she writes. Somewhere in the middle of each get-together she sneaks away to call her husband, John, to tell him how much she loves him and how lucky she is to have him, since she is reminded of what else is out there.
    Lacey, the VP of marketing for a local chocolate manufacturer, and herself an experienced online-dater, would just hand over another peanut-butter-bacon bonbon and shake her head. Lacey is a serial monogamist, who dates an endless series of men in uniform—firemen, policemen, servicemen—each for about six to nine months before taking a few months off to be alone with her dog, Jaxie, and then start all over again. And Mina, head recruiter for a Chicago-based executive consulting firm, would try once again to convinceme to let her recruit a boyfriend for me. After all, the boyfriend she recruited for herself was pretty fantastic, why wouldn’t she have equal success on my behalf? But I had learned long ago that you actually probably don’t want to know what kind of guy your besties think you ought to be with. It always says as much about what they think of you as what they think of him, and I find a certain comfort in being ignorant of what my pals might envision for me.
    My favorite EDestiny offering was the guy we call “Tiny Furniture Man,” whose profile picture showed him oddly posed, leaning on a dresser from behind. At least, we assumed a dresser until Emily pointed out that since EDestiny loved to send me the little ones, it might in fact be a nightstand.
    “Look at me! I am this much taller than this piece of furniture!” Emily said, wiping tears from her bronzed cheeks. Emily is an unapologetic tanorexic with thick, wavy blond hair that is always perfectly coiffed.
    “I’m totally bigger than this nightstand,” Lacey piped up, folding her long legs underneath her, and tossing treats to Jaxie and Dumpling, who had collapsed in a pile of panting fur at her feet after an hour of playing.
    “The fact that I am leaning on it from behind to hide an enormous goiter should not deter you in the least,” Mina chimed in.
    No one at Whitney Young High School would have thought we’d end up friends. I matriculated as an unapologetic band geek, playing