I have had little choice in my life but to have relationships. I guess that’s the way it is with most of us, at least those of us who don’t want to end up one day living with a bunch of cats, our corpse rotting until someone comes to check on a complaint by the neighbor that the house next door has a foul stench.
As we all know, I have definitely had my share of relationships. Most have been delightful, some extremely painful, others that should have gone somewhere didn’t while others that should have been dead ends on a first date turned in matrimony.
There are brief times in my life when I actually dated too. Or should I say, tried to date. Dating wasn’t really practiced in the high school I attended. If you asked someone out once, you were “going together.” As such, I never mastered the skills requited to date.
I remember in my early 20s and 30s when I tried to date casually. Being a pirate, it wasn’t hard to have a dozen phone numbers at any one time. Everyone seemed to want to go out with a pirate. Not me, per se, but a pirate.
The world was indeed my oyster, or so I thought. I would spend the first part of the week weighing my options for Friday and Saturday night. Then Friday and Saturday night would come and go and I was usually dateless. I either couldn’t make up my mind or work up my nerve to pick up the phone and ask someone out. Where was Facebook Chat when I needed it?
This last time around, when I was in between ex-wives and future wives, I took advantage of the electronic dating sites out on the Net, mostly plentyoffish.com and match.com.
I met some really wonderful women on these sites and clicked with a few of them. But I also met some real oddballs.
I guess I just attracted the oddballs, or perhaps there are more of them than I realized looking for a guy. I admit that I am not prime dating material. While I was born with a great sense of humor (which girls always say in a profile they absolutely love, but few are actually blessed with themselves) and pretty good looks, I have a relationship dossier that is, well, spotty at best. If it was written out as a resume, I would look like a job hopper, you know, someone who can’t hold a job for very long and flits from one to another.
Even though women in their profile say they want to leave past relationships behind on a date, they have a sneaky way of working them into a conversation. Inevitably, they would ask what brought me to Florida, and I would respond with my pat answer: “Love gone wrong.”
That would solicit a little nervous laughter. Then they would ask how long I had been here. I would reply honestly, “six years.”
Any children? “Yes two, one 10 and one 27 (at the time).”
Then you could see it in their eyes. They were doing the math and it wasn’t adding up. “So,” they would say, “Your ex isn’t the mother of your children. That would mean you were married before.”
“Yes,” I would say.
“For how long?”
At this point, I have no choice but to say, “Which time?” I could dodge the question entirely. But really, if I said 10 years and they did a little more arithmetic, it doesn’t add up how the 28 year old daughter comes into play. So why not get it out in the open, even though you made it clear none of this matters to you in your profile.
Why they wanted the truth from me on a first day when they weren’t exactly truthful in their bio is beyond me. I went on one date with Judy. In her photos, she was very adoable, and no, that’s not a typo. But when she showed up she looked nothing like her photo (which had been shot seven years ago), and she spent the entire lunch talking about how her life had crashed down all around her and that she was living in the spare room at her mother’s house after being booted out of her trailer park, and losing custody of her son as well as her job. Second date not likely here.
Rebecca was another one for the record books. She alone is the reason why I would prefer a bad relationship to dating ever again. We really hit it off in our emails to one another, so I finally asked her out. She is a teacher in the Brevard School District. I realized moments into dinner that we weren’t really connecting. The conversation was mostly one sided, and it was all me. I don’t know what I was thinking, but after dinner I asked her if she wanted to go to Lou’s Blues. She said sure.
We stayed there for a time, had a drink or two, then I walked her out to her car. Another bust of a date. It was then that she kissed me. Well, actually, she tried to engage in a little tonsil tickle and land grab. Then she wrapped her leg around mine. What is it with the leg wrapping thing? It happened on half the dates I went on.
I’m still not sure what’s up with that, especially after playing cold fish the entire night.
Thankfully, I have retired from the online dating circuit. The rules of engagement were just a little too odd for me. I felt as if I was back in Hazen High, trying to follow unspoken customs that are still totally foreign to me.
I guess I’m just not dating material. And that is a very good thing!
Out on the Treasure Coast, listening to Roy Orbison sing, “Only the Lonely,”
– Robb