Voila! Here’s that piece I wrote for Elle Magazine on the new rules of dating in 2011 🙂 If you can’t read the fine print don’t strain your pretty little eyes, I’ve transcribed the text below.

Virtual Reality – The New Dating Game.

Do girls still wait for the phone to ring? Of course they do. But now with the added trauma of also obsessively checking email, signing in and out of Gchat (so that green-lit reminder will pop up on his screen), sending vague tweets about heartache into the Twitterverse and updating our Facebook status with something trite like, “Malini is NOT waiting for the phone to ring.”

The fact is, Drew Barrymore was bang on about the whole high-tech dating dilemma, “I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting.”

Since girls know that boys are intrinsically lazy their glimmer of hope when he doesn’t call (or text or bbm or Facebook) shines brightly in the belief that he must be doing something else, something terribly important (and kind.) I have no idea where we get this from; chances are the same place we get to believing “that if a guy acts like a total jerk that means he likes you.”

Now here’s the real trouble with technology; women have fantastic imaginations and a great ability to convince ourselves of just about anything. So that boy who didn’t call becomes another character in our ongoing animated fairytale, perhaps racing up our stairs at this very moment all set to profess his undying devotion. (Thanks Rihanna, I now not only have a deeply distorted sense of reality but also a soundtrack to go along with it because hell ya, I want him to make me feel like I’m the only girl in the world. Like I’m the only one that he’ll ever love, like I’m the only one who knows his heart.) *sigh*

So then what happens? We troll the Internet for evidence (hoping beyond hope to absolve him of whatever dating crime he has already committed) only to find his guilty footprints leading to some other desperately seeking Susan’s Facebook wall (yes, the one with the slutty pictures.) This is why I have taken the liberty of compiling a certain set of rules for virtual dating in 2011, let me know how it goes…

It is inevitable that you will take your initial attraction to a virtual space fairly quickly, but even if you add each other on Facebook, Gchat, LinkedIn, Twitter and FourSquare just promise me that you’ll keep a few of the following do’s & don’t in mind?

1.    If possible restrict your flirtation with him to one virtual platform, preferably a non-public one.

2.    Do not send him a Facebook “relationship” request until discussed in person or don’t be surprised if he never gets around to accepting it.

3.    Do not post flirty drunken pictures of you both to your Linked in Profile. He’ll be a lot less attractive when he gets fired trust me.

4.    If you see him sign into Gchat as “busy “ do not immediately ping him to say “what’s up?” What’s up is he’s busy and you’re annoying.

5.    I’m new to FourSquare but from my understanding it links you up with all your friends who are signed in nearby, don’t post shootout’s saying things like ‘I know you’re here, come find me now.” That’s got bunny boiler written all over it.

6.    Don’t add all his girlfriends on Facebook just so you can keep track of their “Friendship”.

7.    (And this is an easy one to overlook so careful!) Don’t give him a cutesy nickname in your phone that pops up along with his email ID to everyonone when you nonchalantly evite him (and all your common friends) to your birthday party.

Basically ladies its quite simple; with all this new technology popping up all over the place we have to reprogram ourselves to be less curious. Why hunt for clues that indicate we are pursuing an a*****e? It will become painfully evident on its own eventually anyway. Also chances are, when it comes to guys who tend to flee from needy chicks, all this virtual stalking will only help to speed up the process. So chill out, read a magazine, be that elusive mysterious creature he wanted to ask out in the first place. When he finds you a little less accessible he’ll be the one poking you on Facebook, guaranteed.

Malini Agarwal is a celebrity blogger known as MissMalini, Radio DJ and Columnist. She calls herself a “social media jedi” and can be found on Twitter @MissMalini and on Facebook at missmaliniblog.