VILLAGE VOICE — Apr 15 — Since moving to New York from England, I have ascertained that not everyone shags on the first date. In God’s Blessed Land, "dating" has been established for the express pursuit of filtering for one’s life partner before tumbling haphazardly into bed with them. I am more used to the English way of doing things. Get blind drunk, snog, repeat the next week, repeat the next week, bang! relationship. By the time alcohol has dissolved that messy barrier between social convention and drunken desire, the English couple has progressed past the need to ever "know" each other, apart from in the carnal sense. Having sailed through the last few years shagging married men—unknowingly, for the most part—I don’t think I’d know what to do if I ever got past the "hanging out" stage. The New York answer is probably to take all the money I would have spent on happy-hour margaritas and invest it in an excellent therapist. A friend of mine, Amy, who has been online dating for a year or so, regaled me with horrors of how 99% of participants regularly "fake" their photos. "You have to be careful when meeting them. Don’t take any risks." The challenge in successful online dating, then, is managing to avoid a potential psychopath. I would rather go out, buy two bottles of wine, and glug my way into inebriation. It works in England.
Mark Brooks: Those barbarian Brits!