Love in the Rinse cycle

February, the month of love.
How magical, how seductive, how effen stupid.

Since I was 16 years old, there was always one question that would have crushed my chillie if I had one. ‘So do you have someone special?’ It didn’t take me long to realise that one, everyone wants to know about your love life and two, if you didn’t have one, there was something wrong with you. Even though you were muslim, and you were not suppose to have a boyfriend because it was haraam. People, even the older ones would want to know.

The world was divided into to groups. Those with ‘someone special’ and those without. As 2010 started, I felt daring, adventurous almost and decided that before someone asked me, if I had someone special, I would try and put my self ‘out there’, as I’ve been told a million times. FYI, between studies, sports and family obligations, I didn’t have time to go out and meet new people, because the free time I had I was catching up on things like sleep and movies.

So I started internet dating. For real this time. *grasp* yes internet dating. I did play around with the idea before. But I lost interest. Now I was serious.

Hey, don’t look at the screen like that, I was not desperate. I was curious. I decided to be as honest as possible. I was there to find a partner (male) to get married to and life my life with. I filled in every question muslima asked me and even put a real photo of myself. Your allowed to *grasp* now. And then I thought, what if someone I knew saw me? What are they going to think? That I’m so pathetic, that I cant meet anyone and now I’m desperate to get married? Then she told me, why do you care? If that’s what they think, then why are they on the site looking at you? I felt a little better, but then I thought, what if someone I don’t like sees me. So I decided to put a reason to my madness and decided that I would actually do a paper on Love.

And use my internet dating experiences to see if love can really be found in this medium. This is why I decided to tell as many people as I could that I was internet dating. That way if they saw me on some site, it would not be a surprise to them. Most people did exactly what I thought they would. They had shock, then pity, then a smile on their faces when I told them it was for research.

I will not lie, I had my own preconceived notion on what to expect. Freaks I knew I would get, but honestly I hoped that I would actually find my soul mate there. The good thing about it, is that everyone on muslima, knows why everyone is there. The goal is marriage. That is the standard, so if you are there for just a random fling, it’s strange. In the ‘real’ world, the norm is to look for a fling, to say your looking for a wife or husband is strange and most of the time actually scares the other person off.

So there I was, in full view of the internet world, I told both my parents and they could not have been happier. I was excited…and scared...what if I actually got what I was looking for?

To Be Continued…