On Sundays, my mother and I go visit my aunt Patricia and her family. They are: Patricia, Uncle Dave, and cousins Henry, Ava and Audrey. Henry is 15. Ava and Audrey are identical twins and they are twelve.
A few Sundays ago Ava and Audrey said this, "Asia, we need to get you an eHarmony account."
This was perplexing. No, I've never really been a dating wizard (is that a thing?), but I've been doing ok lately when it comes to men... right? I guess it depends on what standard is used to measure. By my standards, if someone under the age of 40 smiles at me and has at least 80% of their teeth, I'm doing pretty good. By Ava and Audrey's standards, I need a boyfriend. Bad.
At this point, Aunt Patricia chimed in with a, "They probably have dating sites just for Mormons, right?" Then it was Mom's turn to give her 2 cents, "Yes. It's called LDSsingles.com."
Within about one second, Ava and Audrey were over on the computer typing in the URL. They made me a username and password (I'm not even sure I know what the password is), then got to work building my online dating profile. It was all quite enterprising how fast they were able to do this.
In the process, they found a crazy long survey. It was 16 pages long and asked a lot of questions about my sense of humor, my cleanliness, and my feelings on sex. For each question, my cousins would shout out the query and either fill in whatever answer they felt was most fitting or they would probe me to answer it myself. When the questions about sex came up though, they would whisper the 'S' word quickly and try to move on from the question in a brisk, but professional manner.
They enjoyed answering the questions on my cleanliness, because they think it's wildly hilarious that my room is often in various stages of disarray. And they were very generous when it came to my sense of humor. According to LDSsingles.com, I'm the funniest person on the planet and I know it. Top marks on all questions about that. I'm also kind of outdoorsy and physically adept. The online dating profile version of me (as seen through 2 rather cheeky 12 year old girls) is pretty awesome.
One thing the girls could not fathom, however, was my willingness to date a divorcee. I've got to say, I hadn't ever really given it much thought until there were 30 questions about whether or not I'd be willing to date a single dad, be a stepmom or marry someone who had been married before. I told Ava and Audrey to put that I was open minded and willing to be exposed to these opportunities. They were aghast. "I would put no!" "You would date a divorced guy??" I shrugged. They simply couldn't believe it, but they put in my answers anyway.
Throughout the long process of answering these questions, my other cousin, Henry kept coming into the room and asking me if I wanted to play Super Smash Brothers Brawl with him on his Wii. The girls would send him away, telling him that we had work to do. After the 400th question about what I feel my best physical feature is, I decided that the girls could be trusted to finish the survey while I played Wii from a safe distance.
Henry and I went into the Civil War Room to set up the game. My uncle is HUGELY into the Civil War and thus has a room dedicated to it. It just also happens to be where Metaknight battles Link and Pikachu in 0 gravity.
Henry gave me a Wii controller and set up our two-player brawl. I picked a character that I thought looked cute and before I knew it, we were on a platform in space, trying to kill each other. I've never been very good at video games (except for the guitar on Rock Band) so naturally, I just pushed all of the buttons as fast as I could and watched to see what would happen. This is what I used to do when I would play Street Fighter with my brothers. It's an age-old technique. The theory is, pushing all the buttons gives me a higher probability of causing damage to Henry's character. Henry was playing as Jigglypuff, and I played as 2 alarmingly cute eskimos. Alarmingly cute and alarmingly terrible at Super Smash Brothers Brawl. At some point while playing, Henry asked, "You have no idea what you're doing, do you?" I pushed a bunch more buttons before responding. The eskimos did something cool with a lasso before walking off a cliff to their death. "Nope."
It was at this point that Ava came in, bearing brilliant news.
"Asia! We found you the perfect match! He lives in Daytona and he's 28. He's got two kids, but don't worry. It's not because he's divorced. His wife is dead."
She was so pleased that she had found me a non-divorced mate who lived within 100 miles, I had to indulge her by at least looking at his photo. He looked like a nice Floridian widower that probably had lots to offer whatever girl he was potentially going to connect with. The site gave us the option to message him or to "flirt". We were intrigued and confused by the idea of digitally flirting with him, so we clicked to see what would happen. Well, as it turns out, you have to pay $8.99 or something to flirt or message anyone on LDSsingles.com. Ava told me I should spring for the premium account for maximum exposure. But as I was unwilling to pay for the ability to flirt and she certainly wasn't springing the cash, we reached an impasse.
I saw them again last Sunday and they asked me if I had been online to review my matches. I told them that I hadn't, then distracted them by suggesting we play HORSE in the driveway. Henry beat everyone at that too. What a pain to be excellent at everything.
