100 words or less

Tonight, at approximately 7.12pm, I registered with a dating website. Go me. It might not sound that hard but it is an extremely important step which I have successfully completed. I feel good about this. Then around 7.23 and 7.37pm I registered with two more.  If I’m going to convince 20 people to go on a date with me over the next year then I’m going to need to keep my options as wide open as possible.

It’s a strange concept creating an online dating profile. It starts off easy enough, just answering a few simple questions about yourself. But then you get to the final question and you’re left staring at a large blank box, wondering how the hell you’re supposed to describe yourself in 100 words or less that will make random strangers decide they want to eat food with you and talk about Harry Potter.

At first, I went for the practical approach. I have a 97% positive rating as a seller on ebay, I can certainly sell my own dateability. I can make this happen!

26 year old Lesbian Virgo. Made in Glasgow. 55% water, 41% bones, skin, blood and stuff, 4% sheer determination. Good condition – slight scarring on left upper arm from riding a horse into a tree at age 12 but hardly noticeable. Height: 5’3”. Weight: Unknown – hasn’t been near a set of scales since 1999. Hair: hard to say – appears to have created an entirely new shade of hair colour through repeated home dyeing using low quality haircare product lines.

My next thought was to go with what I love: the theatre. I love reading programme bios. I make a point of selecting out my favourite cast member from who has the funniest bio and focussing on them for the entire show. I know how these things go.

Luna is delighted to be making her online dating debut here on match.com. Previous dating credits include: that girl from that club in Sydney, she think her name might have been Alice; Gemma the straight girl with the boyfriend she didn’t tell Luna about; the exchange student from Mexico who spoke a delightfully broken English; a drunken mistake or two with her friend Lisa, which they’ve agreed never to speak of again.

A Haiku, perhaps?

A girl called Luna
Frolicks in the summer rain
Cake, eats it and smiles

Maybe I should just be honest?

Hi, I’m Luna. I like Kung Po Chicken, musicals, books that are set somewhere I’ve never been, cold beer on a hot summers day, good spellers, girls, travelling, sleeping, laughing until it’s hard to breathe and the internet. I don’t like fish, pretending, people who try to get on the bus before I’ve had a chance to get out, creatures that have more than four legs, cooking, high heels and getting hit in the face. If any of this makes sense to you, let’s date.

Or cut right to the chase?

Hi. I’m Luna. I’m nice. Um, please date me?

I didn’t use any of these in the end. It took ideas from them all but went with something that hopefully made me sound like a normal human. As is quite obvious, I tend to ramble. I don’t think it’s my most attractive quality so I tried to keep it pretty short. Succinct and mysterious. Enough information that might convince someone they would like to meet me, but not so much that they realise I’m slightly strange. I hope it will work. I think it might.

Is Earthlings taken?

It took me a while to come up with the name. Best Friend Nora and I brainstormed for about two hours trying to come up with a snappy title, which we failed at entirely, but did end up with a few options. Best Friend Nora tried really hard to get me to call it The LUNAcy of Online Dating but I am 100% against puns that use my name. I heard enough of those when I was a kid, growing up on the mean streets of Glasgow (just kidding I grew up in the suburbs, the streets were not mean at all. They were mostly kind and very well lit). Other ideas we came up with included:

• The Misadventures of Online Lesbian Dating (but then we realised that would be MOLD for short, and that does not sound sexy at all. I am not going to call it that)
• Luna McKavanagh and the Online Dating Experience (like Harry Potter! If Harry were female, gay, single and looking to meet some ladies)
• Dating Online: A Gay Escapade (neither of us liked this one, I don’t even know where it came from. It’s a ridiculous name. We kept trying to blame each other for coming up with it.)
• Desperately Seeking Luna (I liked this one for a good hour until I realised it didn’t make any sense. I’m fairly sure no one is looking for me. That’s the problem. And desperation is never going to be a good thing in this situation. I really don’t know why I liked it in the first place).
• L for Luna. (Best Friend Nora: L, like as in the L Word. Don't all lesbians love the L Word? People might read it if the think it's related.)

So anyway, I eventually decided on The Misadventures of Luna McKavanagh. Because that’s really all it is. Me talking about stuff that’s happens in my life. Anything else seemed presumptuous. I hate it when people try to speak for me. Nothing irritates me more than someone starts a sentence with ‘As a woman / lesbian / brunette / Christian / person who doesn’t like mushrooms, I feel...’ Unless you have taken a poll and found that an overwhelming majority agree with you, you can’t be spokesperson whole subset people. You have feelings. That’s ok. You don’t need to justify them by claiming to represent everyone else. Just feel your feelings. They’re perfectly valid on their own.

I’m not trying to represent the any faction of the world’s population right now. I’m not trying to tell “our stories”. Chaiken can keep that one. I don’t understand the ‘our’ being referred to here. These stories had almost nothing to do with me. Except for the pretty ladies. That part was relevant to my interests.

I’m not really sure what it is I’m trying to do anything right now. I’m just typing and hoping words will be formed. If I’m telling anyone’s story it’s only my own and it doesn’t matter if anyone is listening or not. I’m just going to have some fun telling it.