Modern Love Revenge: My Date With the Online Stalker

For most of us, sitting down with our Sunday New York Times is a relaxing experience. But for subjects of the "Modern Love" column, it can suddenly turn into a choke-on-my-scone nightmare. For those unlucky few, Double X launched Modern Love Revenge [2], a series of responses written by the subjects of Modern Love columns. Got a lead? E-mail us [3].

Early last fall, while I was in Chicago at my sister's wedding, I stepped out of the reception to listen to a voicemail from a former housemate. He said something about an ex-girlfriend and the New York Times, and D.C. night life, but he was over-excited so I couldn't make out the rest. The next day, as my wife and I headed to O'Hare for the trip back to our home in D.C, e-mails started trickling in from other friends. Apparently, a former romantic interest had written a story about me in the "Modern Love" column in the Times [4].

As I paged through my mental little black book, dusty and unopened over the past four years, I realized there were a disproportionate number of English majors who were potential culprits. English majors can write, exaggerate, and embellish, and I'm sure that I, like anyone, provided dates with plenty of material. It was conceivable that, while trying to impress some date, I'd made some embarrassing boast.

When we arrived at our apartment and I logged onto the computer, I tried to play it cool. Instead of looking up the column, I visited my favorite running website, letsrun.com [5], run by the same former housemate who had given me the initial warning about the article. Not very helpful. "Scott Anderson in Modern Love Section of the New York Times" was emblazoned across the home page. My name hadn't been mentioned in the story, but as it turns out, I'm the only Chicago-native in the D.C. area who has run a sub-four minute mile. Throw in a bunch of other descriptors in the article (my penchant for karaoke, my "tall and lanky" frame, the Chicago MBA, and the Ivy League undergrad degree), and my identity was obvious to anyone who knew me.

I clicked on the hyperlink, and before even reading the title, my eyes went to the byline: "Joanna." I was foggy on the details, but I remembered that she'd worked for some health-related non-profit, that she was attractive, and that she'd come across as intellectual in a literary way. When I met her at a karaoke bar in Adams Morgan, she had asked my buddy Greer and me whether we were there "ironically." The first few lines of the piece made it seem like she was the one who should be embarrassed. "I met a man the old-fashioned way: tipsily, in a bar," it began. "Then I ruined my chances with him the new-fashioned way. I Googled him." For my wife's sake, I particularly appreciated how she noted the G-rated nature of our parting at the end of our date: "an awkward car-hug."

I remembered enough to know that there were a few minor details that were off in the story. To begin with, Axl Rose is not in my karaoke wheelhouse. At the time of our date, I was in a "Living on a Prayer" phase, under the influence of my business school housemate Jake, from New Jersey. (The struggles of Johnny the dock worker really resonated with future finance geeks like us.) I have since progressed to "Forever and Ever" by Randy Travis, perhaps more appropriate for a Mid-western boy still trying to scrape up some rural cred with his southern wife. Joanna also claims that I had offered to help her research spas and good places to get a facial. I certainly do not remember that. More importantly, though, I do not want my wife to get any ideas about any dormant enthusiasm for that kind of research. Finally, it made me cringe to read that I might have volunteered my undergrad GPA on a date. Yikes.

Now, to the larger Modern Love point. The whole story involves Joanna fretting about having Googled me, worrying that she would inadvertently reveal some information that she that she had learned from the Google search, and me figuring out that she had Googled me and thinking she was some kind of stalker. Then she fretted about how all the fretting made the date incredibly awkward. And then, out of nervousness, she spilled her wine. Phew. I honestly don't remember any of the alleged awkwardness, let alone the spilling of the wine. If she'd come clean about the retrieval of my background info via Google, who knows? Maybe I would have been impressed with her research skills—it's not like my name is that unique, after all.

Take the first example she mentions of potential Google-induced awkwardness: Apparently, when we first met she had once taunted that she could "smoke" me on a run. In her Google search she found out I was a competitive runner, so she wanted to take back her boast, but in some way that wouldn't reveal what she'd found out about me by sleuthing. So she went through some major contortions to get out of her promise to smoke me. But why did she think I cared about the taunt in the first place? As someone on a message board thread about the story wrote, "it's called flirting." Her challenge was more interesting than the typical responses to my running, which are either to bore me with details of a recent marathon, or talk about how you couldn't make it around the block.

Joanna remembers me telling her: "You know, I'm actually going to be out of town for the next month of weekends." That line actually sounds familiar (and, in my defense, it was true: I was travelling a fair bit). But her article seems to connect our failed "relationship" with that first date marred by Google guilt. I can see her point that the Google search may have hindered our spontaneity, but she's making a narrative leap. We were simply at different stages of life. She had just graduated from college and I was out of grad-school, and it seemed too big a gap. So Google or no Google, we wouldn't have worked.

Still, the larger lesson I take from Joanna's essay is how thoroughly you can psyche yourself out of a goal before you've even begun. At my first conference track meet in college, the break-through race in my running career, I was an unknown but confident freshman. I purposely kept myself in the dark about my competitors. When a Navy guy broke from the pack with a few laps to go, I chased him. I finished in second place by a wide margin. But in the process, I beat a few All Americans. If I'd Googled my competition first, I probably would have lost my stride.

If you, or anyone you know, has been written about by an ex-lover or ex-husband or girlfriend of an ex-husband in a Modern Love column, Double X wants to hear from you. Please e-mail us [3] with your leads, rants, and long-stored-and-never-sent vicious e-mails. Do it. Revenge is at hand.