Vampire Love: Love at First Click?

It was love at first click.

Well, maybe not “love”, but I did engage in a pleasant chat with a seemingly sane and attractive girl on gothscene last night.

Like all other means of communication, not many of the girls on gothscene have taken the initiative to establish first contact. I did have the 18 year old, depressed mass murderer reaching out to me, but that’s the only interest anyone has expressed since I became a member. I guess the whole “courting the undead” thing wouldn’t be as easy as I thought. I decided to turn from hunted to hunter.

I spent all of yesterday sifting through profiles and sending out messages to vampires, zombies, and even a few girls who looked alive. Similar to my photo debacle, I had a tough time wording my “ice breaker” messages. Introducing oneself to an undead member of the opposite sex via the internet is like fighting Goro for the first time in Mortal Combat; a mysterious, confusing, and deadly task. Here are some of my initial attempts at establishing communication:

Hey there!

Hey! I really like your profile!

What’s up?!

After sending out a few more of these generic greetings, I realized that I needed to spice things up a bit. Looking through each girl’s profile information, I personalized the messages to any relatively normal listed interests. For instance:

Hey there…what kind of art do you specialize in??

I see you like to travel. Ever been to Berlin? It’s my favorite city.

I love seeing movies too, what’s your favorite?

These messages still just felt ineffective. I pondered my strategy for a bit and reached a conclusion: this is gothscene, not match or eharmony. The serious and proper approach just wouldn’t work. I loosened up a bit:

Slayer!!!!Reign In Blood!!!!!!

Thats SICK that you dream about zombies. Are you ready for a zombie apocalypse one day?!?!?!?!? Resident Evil!!!

So you say you’re a vampire…do you actually drink blood or are you a vamp poser!?ZOMG!?!?!

After a few more messages along those lines I felt pretty content.

My first, and so far only response was from one of the site’s normal users; “normal” being defined as having a photo lacking fake blood, no indication of a delusional mental state in the self-description, and the ability to use simple grammatical techniques, i.e. capitalization and punctuation. She actually replied to one of my original, generic “Hey, what’s up?” messages. Go figure. I guess I falsely assumed that goths want to read correspondence written by Slimer, from Ghostbusters, wacked out on speed!!!ZOMG!!!

The responder replied back to my brief greeting with an equally short, neutral, and coherent one-liner; it was a humble victory, but a victory at that.

After reading her message, I noticed that she was online at the time – gothscene displays this status, allowing logged-in users to chat with one another. I figured “what the hell?” and requested an instant message conversation. She accepted and we began chatting.

The conversation was a bit awkward at first, but it eventually got rolling. We discussed how much we disliked our respective undergraduate colleges, as well as the areas we currently live. I mentioned that I might move out to San Francisco within the next year and she expressed her desire to move out West as well. Nice!

As the chat was coming to a close, she wrote “you seem really cool. we should hang out sometime”. I agreed, blushing behind my computer screen like Little Orphan Annie upon acceptance into Daddy Warbuck’s mansion. Could this be ‘the one’? Is it love at first click? Only time will tell.

Expect a special guest interview within the next few days. Check back for more!

oh yeah – www.scottbrundage.com