In my brief foray into online dating, I took the advice of a friend and veteran virtual dater, to initiate contact with candidates of my own choosing. It’s difficult to find things to write someone about just based on information in their profile. You find yourself scanning it for details you can expand on in a message. This particular site operates on a series of questions and quizzes and compares your results with other users. One person had taken the “Death Test,” which I had also taken. It’s a test, based on studies from Harvard that uses a series of specific questions to determine the precise age that you’ll die and what you will die from. I know it’s a morbid subject for a first exchange but considering we both took the test, apparently we were not bothered by it.

I noticed that this person’s death age was 81 and mine was 83 but because he was 2 years younger than me I realized that we were going to die at the exact same time. I wrote this to him and then concluded, “I hope it’s not a murder-suicide.”

I never heard back from him.