Dates have come and gone bye-bye.
Let me see. One friend didn’t appreciate my letting him pay for our first several dates, whereas I thought I was allowing him to exercise his male prerogative; then there was the guy who phoned to give me his ground rules regarding what I had to do if we had sex, really harmless, he needed me to sleep over so he wouldn’t feel abandoned; or the fellow who spent the majority of his time kayaking, or the man who lived in East Oakland and was in between jobs as a contractor in the biotech industry, both of which evaporated into the online world without my really knowing where they’d gone and why. Or worse, the man who’d read my entire blog with exclamations about my writing, called me on the phone from Europe (!!), and then faded away into his Silicon Valley motherboard.
But what did any of my dates really owe me except an email, and how is that any different from regular old dating, where following a night out on the town, the phone remains a silent collaborator?
Then there was the man entering a second career counseling at-risk teenagers and who had relocated from the mid-west to be with his dying mother and sister (both scoring high in my pantheon of prospective lovers), and who’d even cooked dinner for me with his grandmother’s recipe for tomato sauce, and who showed me around his house with explanations of family pictures affixed to a bulletin board, a man who joined me for walks and decided that I was not able to communicate according to his particular standards, and began to do the most horrible of horribles – calling me choice names that I won’t repeat here but only to say they included, “overwrought, scary, and idiotic,” which brought me full-circle to a marriage that overflowed with such barbs, so much so that I retreated into the walls of my condo, and vowed “never again,” at least not if I could help it.
So where does that leave me? The other day I was sitting in my stylist’s chair waiting for my hair to set, and overheard a conversation amongst several women about their online experiences.
“You mean it was okay with you that he was bi-polar, had wrecked his car, and was living with his mother, but it was only that he was $27,000 dollars in debt that made you to step away from the relationship?”
“Mmmm…yes. I mean, but he was very cute.”
Send me your online dating stories!
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