One of the main complaints I hear from women when it comes to internet dating is the common experience of never hearing from someone again after enjoying what they felt was a damned fine date, something I refer to as the - ‘MIA phenomenon’. This occurrence never fails to disturb and perplex the fairer sex. For weeks after an MIA, I’ve heard some of my female friends still anguish over the usual questions; ‘Why didn’t he call back???’ ‘What went wrong??’ ‘I DON’T GET IT!!’..

Personally, whenever an MIA ever happened to me I never really sweated it. 

I believe the average human runs pretty much down the middle as far as rejection is concerned. Sometimes you bite the bar, and sometimes the bar bites you. So you see, it really all evens out in the end. Still, this doesn’t answer the question ‘WHY!!!’. I think women need to know ‘WHY!!!’ more than men, that’s just my personal perception. One thing’s for certain, I’m not going to use that cutesy standby ‘He’s just not that into you’ as any kind of rationale. In the first place, due to the Sex and the City association, it’s automatically disqualified, and in the second place it’s way too glib and I’m just not a glib guy.

To start things off, let me relay a couple of MIAs I've personally experienced.

I met a gal for coffee at Le Pain Quotidien uptown in my neighborhood after having exchanged a few e-mails back and forth on Nerve.She seemed attractive and bore a slight resemblance to Chan Marshall in her photo -  which was a good thing. Of course, you can never really tell from a photo exactly what you’re gonna get. Anyway, she shows up and she’s very tall. I mean, I knew she was tall from her profile, but when presented with the reality in 3-d I was a bit taken aback. I think it was more the fact that she was big and tall that threw me. Not that she was fat, which she wasn’t at all, but she was just big. Hands, feet, mandible, ears.. I’m 6 foot myself, but on my skinny frame, I don’t take up a lot of space. She also had a severely short cropped haircut dyed bleach blonde, which gave her a slightly ‘Lerch’ like appearance.

Still aside from all that, she was alright. I wasn’t attracted per se, but I wasn’t running in the opposite direction. Anyway, we procured ourselves some beverage and got on with the business at hand. We wound up having a pretty good conversation which spanned a whole host of topics ranging from politics to art. She was a big fan of the movie Five Easy Pieces, which instantly endeared her to me. Over the course of the evening, she started to look less like Lerch, and more graceful, statuesque, Amazonian.. elegant! I guess these are just games your mind plays with itself. Either way, I was actually having a pretty good time and thought for sure a second date was imminent.

Long story short, we said our goodbyes and I never heard from her again. I had even sent her an e-mail a few days after the date just to say how nice it was meeting her, and maybe we could go see the Jasper Johns exhibit at the Met if she was up for it.

No response.

I didn’t really mind, I mean, like I said I wasn’t really attracted. I did find it ironic that a person I wasn’t attracted to wound up rejecting me. Still, there was a certain symmetry and justice to it all that I found colossal. She didn’t deem a response to my e-mail necessary, and I was ok with that. I may have felt a miniscule twinge of rejection, but I certainly didn’t deliberate over it.

Personally, I feel one of the unwritten rules to the online personals, is that you enter into it knowing full well that 95% of the time you will never see your date again. That’s just fact. Who really cares what the reason is? It just is.

Now on the other side of the pendulum, I distinctly remember this time right before I met my girlfriend that I went out with a very sweet girl, who was really quite attractive with long chestnut hair and a great smile that I never contacted again. Let me just state for the record that it wasn’t merely because ‘I wasn’t that into her’, it’s just that I didn't see any legitimate point for continuing our acquaintance any further. There just was no connection on my side whatsoever. She had attractive features, but none of them added up to trip the switch hormonal. Her personality was, well lacking.. at least in ways that I find intriguing. She tended to stay to middle of the road topics of conversation, and had an irritating laugh that sounded a bit like Tom Hulce in Amadeus. There was also something slightly off about her chin that I just couldn’t put my finger on.

I will say this though, aside from an innocuous e-mail from her about the Yankees, I never heard back from her either, and if she actually had written me to ask, ‘WHY!!’ I would have given her an answer…

I guess the main thrust of it all, is people shouldn’t really go into a date with too many expectations. Even if things APPEAR to be going smoothly, you really can never know what’s going on in the noggin of the person staring back at you over a delicious plate of fried calamari. My advice?

Just enjoy the fried calamari.