Adventures in (M)anthropology

Magnify

I couldn’t kiss him. No matter how terribly I wanted to—no matter how willingly I would have relinquished my Chardonnay for his touch—rules were rules. He was my fourth first date in as many days and I still had 26 men to go.

A year earlier, I was bent over my desk in a small lecture hall in southwest London, a pink highlighter in one hand and a black pen in the other. Before me sat an impressive-looking stack of papers: the Royal Anthropological Institute’s official Code of Ethics, courtesy of my fieldwork professor.

“Never sleep with an informant,” she warned us.

“Indeed,” the guest lecturer chimed in, “I married mine.”

We all laughed—graduate students will laugh at just about anything when they’re nervous about venturing “into the field” for the first time—but I never thought those words would come back to haunt me a year later as I sat face to face with a handsome Center City lawyer at a chic French bistro in downtown Philadelphia.

I couldn’t kiss him. A kiss was tantamount to the first step down a very slippery slope, and in stilettos, I wouldn’t step, nor would I slip: I would tumble, head first, and that would be the end of my latest ethnographic “experiment.”

I had just turned 25. Having recently returned to the U.S. to find that everyone was getting married, even my high school sweetheart, I panicked. I needed to get going so I signed up for a three-month subscription to Match.com.

I’d always considered cyber chemistry to be the realm of the socially awkward, but it made sense: I was single and had exactly two friends in the entire city of Philadelphia. I doubted that I’d find “the one” on the internet, but I figured online dating would be a good way to get reacquainted with the City of Brotherly Love—especially if I was rational about it.

As such, I wasn’t really dating, I told myself. I was simply doing fieldwork. My initial goal was to date 30 men in three months. Having spent the majority of my adult life in a series of long-distance, long-term relationships, I felt I needed to make up for lost time. Nonetheless, I knew navigating the murky waters of Match.com would be no easy feat. I needed help. I needed discipline. I needed rules.

With the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Code of Ethics at my side and a cursory knowledge of what worked and what didn’t work on Sex and the City, I devised the following to see me through my little research project: