A few weeks ago, I sat down with the hosts of TLC’s new late-night talker All About Sex to chat about the show and what the ladies — actresses Margaret Cho (who recently made a splash at the Golden Globes) and Marissa Jaret Winokur, sex therapist Dr. Tiffanie Davis Henry and Chelsea Lately’s Heather McDonald — might be learning from each other.
Soon enough, the discussion turned to online dating and how women of our certain age feel about the ever-evolving age of digital matchmaking.
“I love hearing my niece’s stories about Tinder and all this other kind of stuff that I can’t even comprehend,” said McDonald, who has been married to her veterinarian husband Peter for a decade. “I actually met my husband on a real blind date. I did not have a picture of him before — and now that doesn’t exist!”
When I said that that troubled me, given my single friends’ preoccupation with their dates’ online profiles more so than the people themselves, McDonald agreed.
“If I’m going to set you up, you can find everything about him in a second and you know their FICO score and you’re like, oh, maybe I won’t go out with him. And that’s kind of a shame,” she said. “You could go back on their Facebook pages to, like, four years ago and they’re looking kinda ugly or doing something dorky and you’re like [scrunches up her face] ‘Mmmm.’ It’s unfortunate. I’d love to force people to try to do more like a true blind date. … to meet someone and let the evening go and see if you’re attracted to them and not have to decide that second because you’ve read everything they’ve ever done online.”
“I have a friend who met a guy on one of those things,” Winokur chimed in, “and by the time she texted me to say ‘Should I go out with him?’ we had found him on YouTube playing bad piano music and we’re like ‘Oh he’s a dog! What a loser!‘”
The expert on the panel agreed that online sleuthing is best used in moderation.
“When you start doing that, you don’t trust the person to start with and that’s a horrible way to start a relationship,” said Dr. Davis Henry, an Atlanta-based relationship expert and entrepreneur who has appeared on The View, Today, Dr. Oz and more. “It’s not a good way to get to know each other. All you have to do is figure out if they’re a criminal or check their credit. But at the same time, there are a lot of weird people out there. So I think there is a fine line, and we’re going to help people navigate that — how do you do this safely and also have fun and not be so pretentious and not x somebody out because maybe they took a wrong turn at one point in their lives. Because a lot of people have.
“And I think we sometimes forget that they can look us up online as well,” she mused, “There’s some !@#$ out there on all of us!”
“There’s pictures of me in a poet’s shirt,” Cho sighed. “I’m not gonna lie.”
New episodes of All About Sex premiere Saturday nights at 11pm ET/PT on TLC.
