When I first got married at 22 years old, I never thought I’d be concerned with how to meet women.  Unfortunately, after 9 years, that path changed and I found myself being an over-cooked piece of day old new york strip trying to regain it’s flavor on the butcher’s prime cut shelf.  It’s been over 2 years now and I’m still learning the ethics of dating.  What’s appropriate on the first meeting?  Do women get offended now if I want to pay for dinner and hold the door open?  Am I supposed to talk less and just listen?  These are questions I never worried about 15 years ago when I first started dating as a newborn adult because they were ideas ingrained on my sleeve.

With all that time gone by, more than just my relationship status has changed.  Gone are the days when at a ripe old age of 5, you’re told who you were being traded to. “I’ll give you 3 oxen and an acre of tobacco for your daughter’s hand in marriage to my son”.  No longer do boys “court” girls that they met at the local town dance.  So where is everyone going?  How are people still getting married?  What’s the local hot spot?  It would seem there has to be one, but the truth is, virtualization has become more prevalent than I thought.

Where do you go when you forget how to spell ‘sphacelus’?  Who do you turn to when you have to calculate exactly many seconds remain from now until the time you leave for that dream vacation you have planned?  What helps you determine the best route from your crib to South County?  Say it with me…the Internet.

I’m not going to bore you with mundane explanations of online dating because if you’re single, you already know.  However, I do want to get to the core of a potentially burning thought on the minds of millions of single tweeters: is it ok to look for a date on Twitter?  I could probably stop writing right now but I suppose I should elaborate a little further.

My Twitter following has grown over the past 3 months, hugely due to the St. Louis market I’d say.  Another reason is most likely because I took the advice of a good friend who has become wildly popular on Twitter.  You might know him, @sockington.  With a over a half a million followers, this cat (yes, I said CAT) is one of the top 50 most popular tweeters of all.  He says to me, “Be consistent” and that was it.  Since then I’ve done just that.  Now because of my Twitter following increasing, I’ve made some very cool friends!  People that I would have never met in the “real” world.  Some of my most favorite tweeps are @mdhugo, @chinacat, @princessleah7x, @gatewaygroupie, @cosmosgirl, @spifbv and @tojosan.  I can honestly tell you that I knew none of these people prior to Twitter (however I knew OF @mdhugo but not personally).

I interact with these people on a daily basis.  We laugh about corny jokes, we cry for each other’s woes, and we relish in one another’s victories.  So where does the line get drawn?  Alot of Twitter veterans love the fact that they have a media outlet that hasn’t quite gone mainstream (although it’s teetering on the edge).  There’s a sense of “solitary” so to speak because within these virtual walls we have rules and guidelines by which we live.  We associate our lives with our followers because we do not fear the same judgment that is casts on someone who maybe has a bright neon pink mohawk and steps foot into church.  Our minds are purged everyday onto the binary fabric that interweaves our lives.

I’m really interested to know what fellow Tweeters think of this.  Is it appropriate to “hit” on someone within the confines of our sanctuary?  Would someone be chastized for asking a follower on a date?  Do we have an unwritten ethical law of “no dating those you work with”?  I don’t have the answers to these questions.  You may be thinking that I have a motive here.  I will admit there are a handful of women that I find attractive and whose tweets I enjoy reading because of it’s satirical value that it adds; but I’m not actively looking to get an answer to my questions JUST so that I can pursue one of these women.  My quest is merely to answer the unknown.