InvestiDate Author Takes Dating to a Whole New Level of Paranoia
LatestAuthor Maria Coder has parlayed her experience as a crime reporter and a dater of shitty dudes into a new book called InvestiDate, which, if its clever title has proved too elusive for you, aims to help readers uncover the truth about their new squeezes. What, you ask with polite but no less urgent anticipation, are some of these secret tips for ferreting out the serial killer in your new SO? Use the internet, use the internet, and, um, probably call the registrar’s office of the college that this charming new romantic partner claims to have attended.
The New York Daily News writes that Coder, whose surname would be pretty cool if she were actually a movie crime reporter investigating a serial killer and not, rather, an investidator, was inspired to write InvestiDate in the wake of high-profile crimes like Natalee Holloway’s disappearance and the Laci Peterson murder. She says that she wrote her book in order “to help people avoid the cheaters, the liars and the really dangerous people who are out there.” Dangerous people like, say, a Tom Noonan lookalike whose unsuspecting new girlfriend can’t tell how completely creepy he is because she’s blind and thinks going to hug a sleepy tiger is the best date idea ever. Or something.
The Daily News‘ write-up, though, makes InvestiDate sound like a one-trick pony — Coder’s advice seems to wary daters is, first off, develop a healthy, real-world paranoia, and then use the internet to inform and nurture that paranoia. She directs readers to websites such as archives.gov, knowx.com, and criminalcheck.com if they want to vet a possible SO, and suggests that people verify their new partner’s story of triple degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton simultaneously by placing a few phone calls to the beleagured employees in a college registrar’s office.
Of course, there are plenty of innocuous reasons for daters to lie about themselves, including the fact that, for most people, their personal histories are quotidian narratives about how they drank too much when they were younger and watched all their dreams of tooling around the Sunset Strip in a Porsche dissipate one fine day when they found themselves working in, gasp, a cubicle. What’s a little fib about being second-string quarterback for the high school football team or steering the Model U.N. delegation to victory? Granted, anyone who piles on lie after lie is probably a bad bet for a long-term relationship, but what are the odds that any of us will end up like Cliff Stern’s sister from Crimes and Misdemeanors, i.e. handcuffed to a bed and pooped on, after a blind date?
Image via Arman Zhenikeyev/Shutterstock.