And all those things I didn't say, wrecking balls inside my brain

This is what I should have said, when he started yelling at me ten minutes into our first date, when I had the audacity to (respectfully) express a different psychological or temperamental approach to dating than the one he had expressed.

I don't think I'm interested in talking to you anymore. I'd say, 'have a nice life,' but the odds of that are pretty much non-existent, so I'll just say 'good-bye.'

I was accused of trying to "mother" him, of telling him how to live his life, of lecturing him that his statistical approach to love - of believing that he'd have to go out on 30 dates before he would find anyone worthwhile, and that having only gone on 5 this year, he was doomed - was wrong.* He became louder and more irate as he talked, jabbing his finger at me and punctuating his diatribe with, "why are you doing that, counselor?" 

His voice was filled with contempt and he called me "counselor" as if it were an epithet.

I'm actually proud of being a lawyer, so it seemed like a misplaced insult to me. But unlike when I'm arguing in court and I can be prepared and dispassionate, my ability to come up with quick, logical, cutting zingers escaped me.

Instead, I was stunned and I gaped at him in disbelief. I have never in my life been spoken to that way by a date, and my eyes started to tear. I blinked them away before he could see them.

Rather than gathering my coat and my purse and telling him to go fuck himself as I scooted out of the booth, I asked, "why are you yelling at me? I didn't say any of those things."

Part of my reaction was because our exchanges before meeting had been lovely and encouraging. We texted, we talked on the phone, we even FaceTimed, and he could not have been sweeter. He's good looking and ridiculously smart and was interesting to talk to. It seemed so promising.

So to be attacked and berated right out of the gate was shocking. Surreal. Incomprehensible. I didn't know how to process it. I hadn't walked into the restaurant armed for battle, so I was exposed and vulnerable.

"I was just trying to talk to you. I don't know anything about you, so I'm trying to get to know you."

He threw his head around as if my efforts to make normal first-date conversation were too outrageous to be borne. His agitation was palpable.

"Jesus, I don't want to do this! I just want to talk and have fun! I don't want to feel like I'm being interviewed!"

"What are you talking about? I was talking about the sports teams we liked. And instead of comparing stories about who we liked growing up, you launched into a statistical analysis and talked about demographics and economic trends. You never even answered my question!"

"It was a malthusian analysis!"

I didn't know how to respond to that.

He continued, "I don't want to sit and do all the talking. You talk!"

Rather than gathering my coat and my purse and telling him to go fuck himself as I scooted out of the booth, I tried to talk. I don't even remember what I was talking about. I just remember him being fidgety and looking around like he'd rather be anywhere else.

I stopped talking and sighed and shook my head.

The waitress was walking by. He stopped her and said, "check, please."

We had been there for 15 minutes. We hadn't even ordered anything to eat.

Rather than gathering my coat and my purse and telling him to go fuck himself as I scooted out of the booth, I sat there throughout the process of waiting for the check and then waiting while she ran his credit card and brought the slip back.

While we waited, he started talking about politics. He is vehemently anti-Trump, anti-establishment, anti-anything run by old white men, and without any prompting from me - by this point, I was scared to say much of anything - he started this unbelievable rant in which his voice got louder and louder and he was irate and every other word was "fuck." Finally the hostess came over to the table and asked him to tone it down because there were children at the next table.

It was mortifying.

The check came back. He signed it.

I gathered my coat and my purse and scooted out of the booth. I did not tell him to go fuck himself. I said, "I'm going."

He stood up and his demeanor became almost sheepish.

"Can I give you a hug goodbye?"

Are you kidding me? I though to myself.

My nerve didn't fail me this time.

"No."

I didn't fall apart until I got home. I pulled into my driveway, still shell-shocked. And then I burst into tears. I cried as I walked into the house. I cried as I realized I needed to put the garbage and recycling bins in the alley. I cried in the alley as a guy passed me, walking his dogs.

I pulled out my phone and texted a guy I know, a guy who is always sweet to me. Our schedules never match up so we barely ever see each other, but we manage to hang out together once a month or so.

He was sympathetic and kind and supportive and outraged on my behalf. He talked me off the ledge. It was what I needed to hear.

But I slept horribly that night. I woke up feeling psychologically bruised. I still do, a little bit. I am generally one to say, "next!" in the face of a bad date, but I've never had a date like that. I think I'm done for a while.

All because I couldn't say from the beginning, go fuck yourself, dude.


_________________________
*For the record, I did none of these things. I simply stated that I had different thoughts about it.

Me and my head high, and my tears dry, get on without my guy

"Maybe you don't really want to be with someone."

I was talking to a friend of mine about my recent dating foibles, and this was her observation.

I was both surprised and not at all surprised.

The past couple of months have felt jarring and left me with a sense of disjointedness.  I had a birthday I wasn't thrilled about (although I'm as healthy as I've ever been and, as ever, it's better than the alternative), and then a week later Lori died, and then construction started on the kitchen, and now the kids have been gone for a week on spring break.

I feel emotionally pushed and pulled.  The past six years (and particularly the last two) have involved so much trauma, death, and heartache - it's hard to deal with it all while at the same time being a present and productive mother, daughter, sister, friend, and functioning member of society.  I keep thinking I'm old and washed up and nearing the end of my shelf life.  I don't know what I want.

She was so sweet and bubbly.  And I miss those South Park pajama bottoms.

I keep thinking about Emma and bursting into tears.  When I was in New Hampshire for Lori's funeral, someone gave me a picture of two-year-old Emma sitting on my lap on the porch of our beach house at the Outer Banks.  We are deep in conversation and she is telling me something interesting and I'm gazing at her like I can't stand how gorgeous or cute she is.  I love this picture, but it fills me with sadness.

And my physical surroundings do nothing to provide a sense of calm or stability.  The downstairs of my house is virtually uninhabitable.  The kitchen is almost done, but it'll be another four days or so before I can start putting things in cupboards and drawers, and before I can actually use it.  So everything is dusty and there are still boxes and appliances and plastic sheeting everywhere.  I have no idea where anything is.  The only place I can really hang out is in my room, which after a while gets depressing.

So I have almost compulsively kept myself busy and out of the house.

It's been relatively easy to keep my dance card full.  I thought, given that most of my relationships have made me miserable, why not just date for the sake of dating?  Keep it casual.  Be noncommittal. Have fun. And outside of one dinner with a guy who I found repulsive on every level, it hasn't been unpleasant.  They're all very nice and enthusiastic.  We have dinner and drinks and tell our stories.

But every time, I feel them start to get too interested and attached and anxious, and I reflexively pull away. This one has mannerisms that annoy me.  That one isn't dynamic enough.  The other isn't smart enough, though smart enough for what, I don't know.  It's my own intellectual snobbery at play.

At first it was fun to be so busy all the time.  But now I'm bored and I just want them to leave me alone.

I fucking hate that I do this.  Even just reading over what I've just written, it sounds obnoxious and awful.  My friend remarked that I should give one of them a chance.  But I don't want to.  When it comes to men, it turns out that casual and noncommittal is not in my DNA. As much as I crave both the emotional and physical connections, as much as I so enjoy the experience of hanging out with someone I respect and am attracted to, I can't fake it or force it when it's not there.  I wish I could just love the one I'm with.

But the truth is, I'd rather be alone.  I'd rather read and listen to Amy Winehouse's Back to Black album.  I'd rather get caught up on movies I've been meaning to see.  It feels less lonely than being out with someone I don't really want to be with.

This is a strange discovery to make at this point in my life.  But there you have it.

Adventures in Online Dating: the student becomes the teacher edition

I think my daughter is better at this shit than I am.

The other night I was in the bathroom with her while she took a shower.  She and I were talking as I handed her shampoo and conditioner, and she was talking about Adam, the kid in her class with whom she has an off and on relationship.  Apparently, after Nick was her boyfriend for a little while, Adam became her boyfriend again.

"Well, he was my boyfriend, but then he broke up with me."

"He broke up with you?  What do you mean?"

"I mean he's not my boyfriend anymore," she huffed, exasperated that I wasn't keeping up.

"Why did he break up with you?  How do 6-year-olds break up?"

"He broke up with me because he said I was disgusting," she explained.

Girl, wut??

"What are you talking about?  Why would he say something like that??" I demanded.

"He said I was disgusting because I suck on my fingers," she responded.  "But I can't help it! I suck on my fingers because I need to chew on something.  I need a chew toy.  Will you get me a chew toy?  Something I can wear around my neck or something?"

"Sure, I'll get you one of those rubber stretchy coils that you can wear as a bracelet or something. And you're not disgusting. I can't believe he would say that to you."

She shrugged, unbothered by it.

I clearly need to learn how to adopt this kind of DGAF attitude.  If someone I liked told me they thought I was disgusting, I would be devastated.  Fortunately, the men I go out with are far more tactful than your average 6-year-old, so it's unlikely to happen to me, but still.  I wish I were that cool.

And she is learning to juggle better than I do.

In addition to handling the scheduling issues that come with trying to date a few different people while also having 50% custody of the kids, I've never been one to date a bunch of guys at a time.  It's nice to have full dance card, but my nature is to fall for and want to be with one at a time.  I'm not going to have the red hots for more than one person at a time.  At heart, I'm a romantic and I believe in being a one-man-woman.

But Josie is unburdened by such concerns.

Turns out, she and Adam are back together.  He told her that he likes her again.  During center time when they're working on iPads, they draw love hearts for each other.

"Yeah, Mama, so Adam is my boyfriend, and Trina is Mark's boyfriend. And Trina kind of likes Adam, but I told her she can't be his girlfriend because I am.  But Carl wants me to be his girlfriend too."

"But you're not his girlfriend because you're Adam's girlfriend, right?" I need to keep it all straight.

"Weelllll, I kind of like both of them.  I kind of want to have both of them as my boyfriend."

This girl is my role model in so many ways.

Adventures in Online Dating: Good artists copy, great artists steal?

After a short period of wallowing, I have jumped back into the world of online dating.  I have a number of single friends who do it but hate it, but I actually kind of love it.  It's certainly flattering.  I get a lot of messages - most women on those sites do, way more than men generally get.  And while the majority of them are from men I'm not going to go out with, a decent number are from guys who have some potential.  So I've decided that my approach will be to play the numbers game - if a guy asks me to meet him for a drink and he seems smart, funny, nice, attractive enough and age appropriate, I'll say yes.

And really, why not?  My attitude is, most of them will only be first dates, but maybe a few will lead to second dates, and who knows?  I keep my expectations low.  At worst, I'll spend an hour having a drink and chatting with a nice enough guy who I never have to see again, and at best, I'll meet someone really cool.  There's really no downside.

The result is that my dance card is filling up to the point that I'm having to schedule dates two and three weeks out.  It's fun.

And I won't lie - my ego enjoys the feeling of being complimented and pursued.

Plus, even the ones I don't go out with provide some entertainment.  There are messages from those I call the Young Guns - guys who are a solid 15 years (or more) younger than my target market, but whose brashness and enthusiasm I find sort of charming.  Who knew that 25 year old guys would be interested in a 45-year-old divorced mother of two?  I even got a message from a guy who is 19.  If I had been remotely interested in going out with him, we couldn't have gone to a bar.

Then there's the international crew.  I have been written to by men from Israel, Canada, England, Ireland, France, and a couple of other places.  And that's not counting the ones scattered around the United States, even though I have no interest in dating someone outside of Denver (even the suburbs would feel like a long-distance relationship to me).

Another category I haven't come up with a name for, but it's characterized by guys whose profile pictures include them shirtless, or a bathroom mirror selfie, or posing in front of their car or motorcycle (or even a picture of just the car).  Dude, I don't need to see your nipples before I meet you.  And I'm not impressed that you drive a Beamer.  Move along.

But tonight I hit upon something that really blew me away.

One of the things about how my brain works is that I have crazy recall for certain things that I read and hear - conversations, dialogue, movie quotes, text message exchanges, that sort of thing.  My brother Sam has similar abilities - he and I can hear something that reminds us of a line, and one of us will say it, and the other one will immediately get it while everyone else is wondering what the hell we're blathering on about.  What sometimes triggers it for me is distinctive or unique uses of language - a way of expressing something that strikes me as interesting, a particularly descriptive or powerful statement, a statement that seems incongruous or inconsistent with what I know about the speaker.

Anyway.  Tonight I was dicking around on my computer while the kids were playing, and I got an email that someone was interested, so I went online and checked his profile out.  And when I read it, I  immediately had a sense of deja vu - there were two sentences in there that I knew I had seen before.  So I looked back at another guy's profile that I had read about a week and a half ago, and he had used the exact same sentences.  Verbatim.  Word for word.  (And it's a distinctive couple of sentences - absolutely no way was it just a coincidence.)

That made me curious.  So I took the sentences and googled them.  My head exploded when the search resulted in at least 40 hits, all linking to dating profiles on a number of different sites, all by men using the exact same language.

I dug a little more, and that led me to an article advising men on how to write a compelling online dating profile.  The article included a number of sample profiles and talked about what was good or bad about them and what kind of message and attitude they conveyed.  And one of the sample profiles, which was at least 4 paragraphs long, was one that I had read in the last day or so - the guy had literally cut-and-pasted the entire thing into his profile, without changing a word.  There were other samples in the article that I hadn't seen duplicated in their entirety in any one guy's profile, but which had certain elements or phrases that I recognized from different profiles I had read.  I checked back at the profile of a guy I had actually gone out with once, and it was an amalgamation of different sentences and paragraphs taken from the different samples in the article.  There was not a single thing in his profile that was original.

I find the whole thing fascinating, almost like a peek into the male psyche.  I get that many people are not natural writers, and that it's hard to write about yourself.  I get doing some research on some of the dos and don'ts.  But that level of rank plagiarism seems crazy to me, if for no other reason than it's so easily exposed.

In any event, I'm not sure what to do with this discovery, but it's very amusing nonetheless.

Adventures in Online Dating: "Yikes" Edition; or, From the "How Not To Proceed" file

I've been writing quite a bit about this stuff, but it's on my mind, because suddenly I'm communicating with a bunch of guys and going out on a number of dates.

Setting aside the "isn't this a gas" aspect of having crazy or funny stories to tell, the communications I get increasingly remind me that for some people, online dating creates a scenario in which reading someone's dating profile leads to wish fulfillment fantasies that usually (if not always) bear no relationship to reality.  It can be a dangerous game - you interact with someone online and build them up in your mind before you've met them, filling in the gaps in what you know about them with what you want those gaps to be, and then you've become infatuated with a unicorn.  A phantom.  A reverie.  And it never ends well.

This is why I approach it extremely cautiously, assuming nothing, expecting the worst.  When I go on a first date, I'm hopeful, but I expect nothing.  That way I can be pleasantly surprised if he isn't a total troll.

It's also why, if I'm making the first move and reaching out to a guy after reading his profile, I am the embodiment of chill.  An initial message will never be any more provocative than, "Hey SoAndSo, you have an great profile. I dig your picture on the summit of Longs Peak. And I'm also a huge Michael Chabon fan - what's your favorite book of his?  Cheers, W."

Friendly, indicative that I've paid attention and actually read his profile, but casual and breezy enough that I don't come off like a crazy-ass stalker type.

Which is why it's a little bit alarming - and a lot sad - when I receive this message from a 61-year-old guy (well outside my stated age range).  I've excerpted portions of it, but beyond that, I've left the language and punctuation intact:

our words are defination of what is inside us , from your words i have a positive feelings about you, you will bring out the best in me, i see us together for ever , i dont speak when i am not sure, we have a lot of people who's words cant holds waters but for me my words are my bounds, we have to commit to each other and give in everything that we make us strike a spark and live happily.  ... I know what my heart tells me and I am not in a rush, i saw a lot of other people here but my instincts tells me you are a great, good hearted and the best woman any man can have as a mate. We're all human and not perfect but you appear to be different from the heart. Since i've spent the night dreaming about you, i want to spend the day cuddling up with you. 

A)  What. The. Fuck.

B)  Oh, honey.  No.  Just no.

Why I'm glad I didn't get sick in Elizabeth Bennet's time, plus where to find guys hunting for cougars

It started around the middle of the afternoon on Friday: sore throat, swollen and tender lymph nodes in my neck, fever-chill.  I figured it was tonsillitis.

With the exception of getting up on Saturday to go to Josie's soccer game and birthday party (a mistake, though it would have been awful to miss it), and then going to the doctor on Sunday, I was in bed from Friday afternoon through Monday morning.  The fever seemed to peak at night - I was so overheated Friday and Saturday nights that I took to sprinkling water on my sheets and lying with freezer bags full of ice on my neck and head, and even then, I couldn't cool off.

At the doctor's office, they gave me a throat culture and the test for strep, which came back positive in seven minutes.  The doctor prescribed oral antibiotics, but was alarmed by the size (huge) and condition (covered with white abscess-looking spots) of my tonsils, so she also gave me a shot (in the ass) of a powerful medication generally used to fight bacterial infections, including life-threatening diseases like meningitis. Doc wasn't fucking around.

I appreciated her aggressiveness from the get-go, but particularly when, within about 7 or 8 hours, I was feeling so much better that I could hardly believe it.  Huzzah for western medicine, y'all.

Naturally, all of this got me to thinking about Jane Austen.

One of the things I always notice about Jane Austen novels - other than how fantastic they are - is how the characters are always inquiring into the health of other characters.

"And how is your family?  Are they in good health?  Are they well?"

Illness was greatly feared in those times, and rightly so.  Medicine was primitive, and illnesses that would temporarily knock you or me on our asses, to lie in bed drinking chicken soup and binge-watching Orange is the New Black on Netflix while waiting for the antibiotics to kick in, were often life-threatening.  Like Jane in Pride and Prejudice, when she gets caught in the rain going to Netherfield and ends up horribly sick in bed for days.  Or Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, who almost dies near the end because she gets really sick after neglecting her health upon hearing about Willoughby's marriage.  It was some serious shit.

Meanwhile, 200+ years later, I felt awful for a few days, but the fact that I would get medicine and recover quickly was never in dispute.  I didn't spend my time in bed worrying.  I spent my time in bed watching everything in my DVR and a jillion other movies, and trolling online dating sites.

Speaking of, it continues to be a fascinating process.  I've had a couple of pleasant dates with guys who were interesting and smart, but with whom there was no chemistry.  I've had a couple of dates that were utter fucking disasters - the best I can say is that they make for a good story when I'm out with my girlfriends.

I've learned that if you're a woman in your 40s and need a confidence boost, get your ass onto OKCupid, pronto.  Within 6 hours of putting up a profile, I had been propositioned by at least 15 men in their 20s and 30s (including one guy whose screen name was, no lie, "Hunting_Cougars69") telling me how gorgeous and sexy I am and begging me to overlook the age difference and would I consider something on a purely physical level pretty pretty please? Please?  I swear I never do anything like this and I'm nervous about even contacting you but you're so preeeettttyyyyyy...

Um, no.  But thank you for your kind words.

I also got a message from some poor schlub in Kansas who all but proposed marriage, a dude in England who insisted we could make it work because he's moving back to the States, a military guy who just moved to Colorado and asked if I would be his "first friend," and about 50 that were some form of "hey your (sic) hot."  I guess I should be thankful that no one sent me a picture of his dick.

But it is a numbers game.  For every 25 or 30 "ur sexy" messages, there's one from someone who is cute and smart and interesting and age-appropriate, and who knows how to write.  And sometimes there's a connection, and sometimes there isn't, but it keeps the hope alive.

It's a wild time to be 45 and dating again, that's for sure.

Adventures in Online Dating: Getting back on the horse edition

First of all, with respect to the title of this post, I'm not talking about *that* horse.  I'm talking about the online dating horse altogether.

Because with everything that's been going on in my life, I climbed off it for a while.

I had a couple of dates that didn't pan out, and it was frustrating, plus every time I set up a date, I had anxiety attacks.  Which kind of told me that I wasn't ready.  My emotional state was so fraught because of other stuff that it was bleeding into every area of my psyche, and it made it impossible to just relax and have fun.

I've spent a lot of time over the past two months talking myself off of various ledges.

So I took my profile down.

In the meantime, I went to my India reunion and had a number of conversations with friends who had divorced and were now happily dating people they met online.  And I know so many people who are happily married to people they met online.  They all gave me pep talks, and told me to just have fun, assume that I would go out on many, many bad dates with the occasional good one thrown in, and that I should just be patient and give it time.

As you all know, relaxation and living with uncertainty are not my strong suits.  But one of the things about constantly talking yourself off the ledge is that you tend to get better at it with time.

So I'm getting better at it.

I made my profile public again.  I'm communicating with a couple of guys, and setting up a date here and there.  I'm trying to be relaxed.

Baby steps.

Adventures in Online Dating: The Geezer Edition

I have dipped my toe into the online dating waters.  I started on a couple of different sites, but that was annoying and I found myself irritated by the prospect of trying to connect with someone, so I ditched the specialty sites (Eharmony (SOOO annoying) and JDate (not enough Jews in Denver, or at least none that I wanted to meet - pickins were slim)) and went to Old Reliable, a/k/a Match.com.

I've been on two dates so far, both Jewish, ironically.  The first guy was pleasant enough and we had a nice time at dinner, but there was no spark.  He was a bit persnickety and lacked a sense of adventure.  The second was a complete fucking tool - admitted that he had no interests, didn't really care about having friends, hated everything to do with the outdoors (when I talked about going hiking, he said, "so what does hiking entail, exactly?"), and admitted that he only cared about making money.

In the meantime, I would scroll through profiles and get "winks" and "faves" and receive messages from different guys.  Including an alarming number of men in their 60s.

My profile settings indicate that I'm interested in guys aged 40 through 55, but honestly, 55 would be a stretch.  He would have to be a George Clooney-esque 55 year old.  I'm really more interested in someone my own age, or within 3 or 4 years either way.  Bottom line, I want to be physically attracted to a guy, and most men in their late 50s or 60s aren't going to cut it.

Remember that episode of Sex and the City when Samantha was dating that really rich old guy, and was able to keep it together until one night after she was in bed with him, he got up to go to the bathroom or something and she got a full look at his flat, flabby, wrinkly old-man ass?  That's the stuff of nightmares for me.

The first older guy I heard from was 61.  He acknowledged that he was 6 years outside of my age range, but insisted that he was spry and athletic and that he could "run circles around" me.  I highly doubt it, but in any event based on his picture, I just didn't find him attractive at all.  There are older men who have that cool, distinguished-gentleman-but-still-sexy energy, and this guy was not one of those.  Sorry, dude.

This is from one of my favorite Louis CK bits about how
there really isn't someone for everyone.
https://youtu.be/aUgQPzq6ifc

So I responded and thanked him for his interest and his kind words, but that I felt that a 16 year age difference was more than I would be comfortable with.

He wrote me back with a lecture about how you never know if you like someone until you meet them, chastised me that he just wanted to meet for a drink, not marry me, and that his last girlfriend was younger than me and he ran circles around her (he does a lot of running in circles around people, apparently), so age shouldn't be an issue.

I wanted to respond by explaining that now I didn't want to meet him not because he was too old, but because he was an asshole, and that maybe the reason I didn't want to date a man 16 years older is because he'd have a tendency to treat me like a child who didn't know her own mind, as he had just done to me.  Or alternatively, I wanted to respond by telling him he could go piss up a rope.

But I said nothing and moved on.

The next day, I got a message from a 62 year old.  Again I told him he was too old for me, again he lectured me about being closed-minded.

*sigh*

Then I got a message from a guy who is 67.  Sixty-fucking-seven.  Twenty-two years older than me, and three years younger than my mother.  His kids are probably my age.

My mother suggested that I ask him if he has a son who is cute and single.  Heh.

At least he was polite when I told him I wasn't interested.

But there is hope!  I've been in communication with a couple of guys my age, and I've got a date. We're going sailing, which will be such a fun, lovely respite from the shit-show that my life has been for the past week and a half.  Maybe we'll click, maybe we won't, but it won't suck to drink wine on a boat with a smart, funny guy.