Mr. Right

My first date was a martini on a sunny Friday after work. From his personal ad, I knew that Guns & Ammo was one of his favorite magazines, that he loved stock-car racing, and that a snapshot of him in a club g'itmo t-shirt is posted on Rush Limbaugh's website. That morning, I rifled through my closet, unsure what to wear: Should I go Dr. Laura demure, with a church-social turtleneck and pearls? Or choose a plunging neckline and a tube skirt, in that Ann Coulter vixen style? Taking a wild guess, I selected a pinstripe suit, a pink shirt, and cowboy boots. I hadn't a clue--at least, not yet--as to what look would most appeal to an authentic conservative man.About a month ago, I signed up for ConservativeMatch, one of the biggest conservative dating services on the Web. In recent years, a whole cottage industry of politically and socially conservative dating sites has flourished: At CowboyCowgirl, you'll find a match who shares your "love for the country way of life." At SinglesWithScruples, you'll discover that special someone who doesn't sleep around. For the rank and file, there's ElephantDates, Conservadate, ConservativeMatchmaker, and even Hannidate, an online dating service promoted by talk-radio host Sean Hannity. Perhaps the proliferation of conservative dating sites merely reflects GQ's recent claim that conservatives are better in bed. But I couldn't help wondering if conservative bachelors and bachelorettes, trading on their own meat market, have distinctive dating rituals and ideals for a mate. In other words, how does Ms. Right go looking for Mr. Right? I put up a profile, trolled the listings, and went on three dates to investigate. `With a culture that is often hostile to conservative values and to the people who hold to them," ConservativeMatch's home page proclaims, "our goal is to provide an alternative resource." To wit, directing my browser there, I discovered personal ads; political articles; discussion forums (such as "Liberals Need Not Apply"); and a calendar of conservative events. But, as far as the ideological quality of the users within, ConservativeMatch guaranteed me only one thing: "Sweethearts not bleeding hearts." I needn't have worried. ConservativeMatch's signup process goes to lengths to ensure ideological authenticity. In its terms of use, I was forbidden to espouse the identity "gay." Developing my online profile, I was asked to agree, disagree, or declare uncertainty with a set of 14 statements testing my core "beliefs and values"--things like "Less government is generally better for society" and "Prayer should be permitted in public schools." This would be prominently displayed on my profile, providing a kind of quick, no-nonsense scorecard for my conservative purity. I filled it out in haste and tried to go on, but the page reloaded and scolded me: "Sex outside of marriage is immoral is a required field." Once I signed up, I began to browse the site, choosing to look for conservative singles by city. The long list--each city marked with a star--made up a boundless conservative constellation. There are conservatives looking for love from Topeka to Tacoma; there are even hundreds of conservatives in the Philippines and a couple dozen in Pakistan. Searching for my own city, I saw that the only D.C.-area option available was "Washington, VA." I began to realize that ConservativeMatch often resembles a parallel world, one that reflects what some idealistically minded conservatives might wish the real world could be: everyone's values, clearly delineated on a scorecard, hanging around their necks. Conservatism as a citizenship that surpasses national boundaries. And Washington safely where it should have been all along: in a red state. Though there are fewer of them, there are also liberal dating sites. Some of them operate to fight the impression that liberals don't adequately value marriage: During the 2004 presidential election season, one such site helped sponsor a contest to find a potential first lady for bachelor candidate Dennis Kucinich. Unfortunately, the winner turned out to have a boyfriend. But, while liberal dating sites tend to promote a sense of shared mission to save the world (DemocraticMatch offers a free membership to anyone who has recently donated to an environmental group), conservative sites market themselves as oases set in the middle of a libertine and inhospitable popular culture. "Ladies," Conservadate's homepage asks rhetorically, "Tired of meeting men who are just looking to `play the field'?" Some even encourage you to blame your past romantic flops on that old knee-jerk liberal prejudice. "Remember this?" the same site queries its male users. "You're dating, getting to know each other, and it seems like things are going well. Then she finds out you are a conservative and you get that look? You know, the look that says, `Oh and you seemed so nice.'" This sales strategy works because conservatives with a particularly embattled mentality are the sites' natural market. If you're a conservative living in Kansas, you don't need to meet your ideological bedfellows online-- you can find them in the grocery store. But if you're a conservative marooned in San Francisco, you really need a conservative dating site. This is why the top cities on ConservativeMatch aren't Dallas or Tulsa, but Los Angeles and New York. With its polls, events, and forums, ConservativeMatch provides such embattled conservatives the chance to get together and engage on the topic of their alienation. The most charming manifestation of this sentiment is a movement on the site to refer to Democrats as "Vichi-crats." In the ConservativeMatch imagination, conservatives--even if they control every branch of the government--will always represent the underground Gaullist resistance to the liberals' sellout Vichy. Imet my first date, the Guns & Ammo lover, at a downtown grill, the kind of mass-manufactured, mahogany-toned place that flogs dry-aged steaks, cigars, and 800 labels' worth of wine. Amid the high-gloss crowd, Shooter stood out like a bird who'd accidentally flown into the wrong habitat: I spotted him perched awkwardly on a stool, clad in an oversized white polo with his company's logo on the breast. As I approached, he saw my cowboy boots and proudly tugged up his pants cuffs to reveal big black stompers of his own. We matched! Our boots were just the beginning of a giddy game of conservative free association. Shooter said he liked William F. Buckley, and I revealed I'd met Buckley when he was a guest in one of my college seminars. "Really!" Shooter whistled. Shooter served Christopher Hitchens. I returned with William Kristol. It was like going out with a stranger and realizing that, by some great coincidence, he already knows some of your family: You feel relieved and excited; the conversation flows freely. Except, on this date, our mutual family was Buckley, Fred Barnes, and G. Gordon Liddy. As the conversation eddied onward and the drink kicked in, I began to feel pleasantly enveloped, as if in a cocoon of joint understanding. Shooter began to tell a story. When he moved to Washington from his native Tennessee, he went to a Kinko's and found the service there much ruder than in copy shops back home--a sure signal he'd entered liberal territory. At that moment, the story felt meaningful. I've always hated Kinko's, but I thought my hate was purely existential, like the feelings people have about the DMV. I had never before considered that my experience at Kinko's had a political implication. What kind of conservatives are in my dating pool on ConservativeMatch? As a little anthropological experiment, I took the first 40 profiles that came up when I browsed Washington, Virginia, and studied them. Some interesting trends emerged. The women on ConservativeMatch--at least the women of Washington, Virginia-- are both much rarer and more quintessentially "conservative" than the men are. Out of the 40 profiles I considered, only ten were women. Several of these described themselves as "simple," even "prudish" girls with "old-school" values, looking for a "manly" or "boy scout" sort of guy. ("He must not smoke, cuss, or spit.") All ten were seriously practicing Christians, and only one disagreed that sex outside of marriage is immoral. Favorite books included Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (or, as one put it, "anything from 18th century England"). The men are strikingly different. They are not, for the most part, serious values conservatives. Over half of the 30 men I initially viewed believe that sex before marriage is OK ("Heck," one wrote, "I think that some marriages are immoral"), and twelve--or 40 percent--believe abortion may not need to be illegal. Their conservatism manifests itself more in a libertarian sensibility, in diehard patriotism, in the desire for a strong defense, even in matters of taste, like an appreciation for country living. Widening my search, I found that the ConservativeMatch man reads National Review and that, on any given day, you might find him "in a scholarly discussion of Supreme Court decisions at the Cato Institute or ... tearing out walls in an old house." Inexplicably, he has a fascination with all things Italian. When asked what kind of woman they're looking for, the men judge the stereotype of the meek conservative woman with scorn. They tend to prefer an "intellectually aware" and "selfassured" woman--perhaps even a woman who "dresses ... provacatively [sic]": "[A] little bit of an uptown girl," one wrote, "with a downtown spirit." What does this divergence mean? It may reflect a national cultural demography: Women are more religious than men. They identify themselves as libertarian less frequently. And, historically, men have had the chance to partake more wholly of the American tradition of rugged individualism. The men on ConservativeMatch embrace a composite machismo of military culture, Western movies, the "don't-tread-on-me" spirit. The women simply don't want men to jump down their pants. No matter what the implications, the divide seems sad. Despite the site's goal, these men and these women do not go together. If Democrats feel down these days, they ought to take heart: It looks like they'll win the breeding game. I'd read that my second date was a writer and a lover of World War II military history, like myself. And yet, upon meeting him, I felt as disoriented as Twain's Yankee in King Arthur's court: I had left home for our date and suddenly found myself, as though coming to after a knockout blow, in an International House of Pancakes in Virginia. Fratty-looking guys overflowed the booths. There was a fellow across from me, fresh out of "The Office." "The `Buffy the Vampire Slayer' star was important during the Columbine shootings," Flapjacks was saying. "What? Sarah Michelle Gellar?" It turns out she likes guns, and Flapjacks works for the National Rifle Association, and he has opinions on that, as well as many other things, such as immigration, gay marriage, and Tom Clancy. "You know the one thing that really gets me?" he would say, and then he was off. Unlike the night before, I couldn't bring anything to this date; he needed a true believer. So we staggered on. After a time, we came to the sprawling menu, a landscape of pillowy waffles laid out against vast bacon skies, cliffs of jagged, glistening potatoes, and winding rivers of syrup. "Two eggs?" I proposed. "Country-fried steak, eggs with cheese, a stack of pancakes, and hot chocolate with whipped cream," he replied. And yet, toward the end of the date, Flapjacks made a surprising confession: Secretly, he hates Michelle Malkin. A subversive note or two of liberalism is a feature of many profiles on ConservativeMatch--and of everyone I went on dates with. Shooter told me he drives a hybrid car. One poster does yoga, explaining that it's "not as weird as I thought it would be," and another reads Outside magazine, even though "it's a liberal, hippy [sic] publication." The edge of guilty-pleasure liberalism in people's profiles creates an interesting tension on ConservativeMatch. The rest of the site emphasizes a tight community at odds with the world. This mindset promotes a sense of opposition to everything: Not only do liberals have the wrong ideas on taxes and abortion, but also on families, on vehicles, on entertainment. Such a culture constitutes a problem on a dating site, where the object is not to fit in, but to stand out. And, on this particular site, the way to stand out is through little betrayals of the conservative lifestyle: yoga, Outside. Some of these betrayals are not so benign. One man has published no less counterculture a book than The Pleasures of Woman, "a collection of poems, proverbs, stories and sensations about the supernatural dimensions of woman." Even among a group self-declaredly devoted to traditionalism and family values, a fascination with the other comes creeping in. I suppose it always does in love, no matter your ideology. For my last date, I planned to meet a young Southern lawyer--a man who claims his interests include dueling and buffalo meat--at a funky bourbon bar. We met on a hot Sunday evening and sat outside on a claustrophobic patio. All around us, skinny, bespectacled hipsters were draped idly over their chairs, like sloths in a zoo exhibit. As we chatted, Bourbon and I seemed to become aware that, unlike my other dates, each of us seemed a little too similar to the people at the next table for comfort. "How is it for you," he asked pointedly, "being a conservative in Washington?" "How come you don't have a Southern accent?" I retorted. Bourbon, it turned out, did not merely possess one anti-conservative trait. He listened to an avant-garde form of post-rock. He loved show tunes. And, in the middle of our bowl of curly fries, he revealed that he helped maintain a fan site devoted to Tai Shan, the baby panda at the National Zoo. We might as well have met through peta. It seemed as though ConservativeMatch had failed completely. But later, when I returned home, I looked up my date's website. It was a plea for Tai Shan not to be deported to Red China.