Should I Confess My Internet Stalking to My Date?
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Q: Before a date, I like to do a little online research on the person. If I find interesting stuff, should I bring it up?
A: Sir John Hawkins was a British slave trader who voyaged through what is now Florida in 1565. The landscape Hawkins traversed was murky, disorienting, wild—a new world that no European could easily comprehend. Hawkins tried his best to make sense of what he saw. But in addition to being a morally despicable trafficker of humans, he was also, apparently, a moron. For example, when he saw animal horns being worn around native people’s necks, he decided they must be unicorn horns. From there, Hawkins employed his own special brand of extrapolative idiot-logic to deduce that there must be lions in Florida—because, as the historian Andrea Smalley writes, “the enmity between lions and unicorns was well known, and no beast could exist without its enemy.”
Hawkins was only one of many explorers groping boneheadedly through America and transmitting their awestruck, staggering wrongness back to the societies from which they came. (Another early traveler named Job Hortop—even the guy’s name sounds preposterous—reported catching a 23-foot-long, porcine-headed aquatic dragon by baiting a fish hook with a dog.) Still, if you were living in Europe and curious about the entirely new-to-you second half of the planet—which: of course you were—you had little choice but to wade through this kind of intelligence gathered by egregious, hooey-slinging buffoons.
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Have you ever been to Florida? I happen to love it. Sure, the state is still heavily mythologized, owing largely to the internet’s fascination with tawdry, meth-heavy #FloridaMan memes. But no one, whatever they think of Florida, still reflexively pictures a landscape of gamboling unicorns or hog-faced sea dragons. Nor, I’m guessing, did most early American settlers arrive there expecting to find such beasts. Instead, visitors have successively managed to recognize the many actual, sublime wonders of the place for themselves: My list includes a memory of plaintive oaks lining a country road in the Panhandle, the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disney World, Angela Bassett, citrus.
My point is not just that information gleaned from afar is often wrong. It’s that we can—if we want to—compartmentalize information of questionable credibility and stay open to learning the truth firsthand. We can resist marrying ourselves to prior knowledge, and instead let it pique our sense of adventure and discovery, our sense of romance.
I think most reasonable people understand this. So first off: Yes, I think it’s OK to bring up your exploratory Googling on a date. The truth is, we move through life preceded online by a disjointed, sometimes ungracefully translated travelogue of where we’ve already been. I’d argue that playing it cool, and pretending you hadn’t bothered to glance at any of this material before a date, is odd and maybe even a little insulting.
Of course, I assume you are decent and kind and know how to bring up your discoveries in good taste—treating what you’ve read delicately, using it to open a meaningful conversation and not just hammering your counterpart with their most mortifying social media deep-cuts. And I also assume you know that your Googling does not make you more of an authority on this person than the person themself. (Duh.)
Instead—and please, let me have this one little spasm of optimism and romance—you understand that every date is a voyage. When you come ashore at the noodle house or café or bar, you hope to finally glimpse the second, heretofore-missing hemisphere of your world. Naturally you’ll have read up a little first. Because you were excited. Because you couldn’t wait to discover it all for yourself.
This article appears in the November issue. Subscribe now.