All-knowing Internet kills mystery date

“I’m going on a date tonight,” my intern friend – let’s call her Jan – said to me one weekday morning.

My cliche response followed: “Oh really? Who is he? Is he cute? How’d you meet him?”

Yes, he – let’s call him Bob – was cute, hot actually, but Jan only knew his name, school and job. He had asked her out shortly after meeting her through a younger sibling.

His basic stats weren’t enough for Jan, so to Google and Facebook we went.

Fifteen minutes later, we had sucked the mystery from a first date that hadn’t even happened yet.

It was then I realized, with all the benefits of the Information Age, we have lost sight of how much dating has changed. Gone are the days of spending an evening with a near stranger, or going on a completely blind date. Now any questions we have can be cleared up by our pal, the Internet.

Jan and I started by googling the name of Bob’s school, which neither of us had heard of but we found it in seconds. We then started looking for clues about the types of studentsw that enroll there. We skimmed admission requirements, looked at photo galleries and even found a sports team Bob played for.

We commented on our findings as we clicked and scrolled, creating a mental profile of a guy Jan barely knew. After our search, we knew where Bob was from, which high school he attended and even how much he weighed. Jan already had negative judgments toward him. Why did he go to such a small school? Did he only get in for sports? Was he smart, too?

I felt a bit embarrassed by our background check. We kept saying to each other, “Oh, we should stop.” “Yeah, we are stalking.” But then with more research came more questions and it was too easy to find the answers.

I tried to justify my behavior. With more than 250 million active users on Facebook and countless computers with Google as the main search engine, it was a safe bet we weren’t the only ones looking up info that morning.

If it’s online, I also thought, why should I feel guilty about reading it? No one is held against his or her will to sign up for Facebook. By creating a profile, the user is agreeing to publish personal information for “friends” to see.

But through all the excuses I created, I came to my own conclusion: Even if information is accessible, that doesn’t mean it should be accessed. In Jan’s case, each exciting first date jitter diminished with every new tidbit of info we discovered.

Jan and Bob didn’t work out. Nothing catastrophic, the chemistry just wasn’t there. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if she had saved all her questions for that initial conversation and looked at her date with an open mind.

Would it have worked out? Maybe you can’t find everything on Google.