Cupid’s arrow hits an awkward bull’s-eye

How frequently do you prefer to be intimate with your partner? Dating website OkCupid asked me this and many more intrusive questions, including details of my most secret fantasies. In an effort to scientifically find someone whose tastes and habits perfectly match mine, I threw discretion out the window and answered.

After my girlfriend spent more on a box of chocolates for me than I did combined on drinks, dinner and a hotel on Valentine's Day, I found myself once again among the footloose and fancy-free.

I swore never to date Chinese women again, so I turned to an American dating website hoping to meet someone as well-traveled, quirky and unlikely to go home for Spring Festival as myself.

Some people might think online dating is for the "QQ generation," but we oldsters actually invented it. First, it was called "computer dating." It was aptly named because you and your high school classmates would hand surveys to the geeks in the computer room looking for a love match.

But in New York during Internet Bubble 1.0, digital dating took off. Everybody was doing it, and I mean doing it. The trick was to meet as many people as possible because online profiles and photos had no bearing on reality. Pretty profile pictures were posted by ugly girls. Plain girls online turned out to be quite cute. "Slim" meant average, "average" meant chubby, and I can't imagine what "chubby" meant. I went along and listed myself as "fit."

I went on 36 Internet dates over a few months, and worked it into a science. Both of us knew if there would be a spark within five minutes of getting together. Meeting for coffee after work was the way to go: fast, inexpensive, and easy to extend into dinner if both people were having fun.

Exactly one in six of the dates led to some sort of hook-up, and in one case - over champagne and shellfish at the Oyster Bar - a second date in Paris.

However, my delightful memories of Internet dating in New York turned into a Beijing nightmare when I realized that the information OkCupid solicited about my most intimate habits had been posted publicly.

I scrambled through the website looking for a way to change the privacy settings. Alas, I couldn't figure out how, but I did stumble upon a list of people who had already taken a look at my profile.

One of them was an acquaintance of mine, of whom we share many mutual friends. What was I thinking? In Beijing, there's practically only two degrees separating Westerners. Now, they all might know exactly how I rate myself between the sheets, and my preferred ratio of rough-to-sweet loving, as long as at least one of them is willing to expose that information about themselves on the website.

I asked my acquaintance what she had seen in my profile. The silence was deafening, but on further investigation I did find out whether she would be willing to squeal like a dolphin in the middle of the best liaison of her life if her lover asked her to. As weird as I fear some of my answers were, they matched 90 percent of the people I am most likely to bump into in Sanlitun.