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As a "recovering" middle school teacher with a unique outlook on life, I stopped active teaching in 2010 and moved into another career path... writing! Here goes! In addition, I am a travel buff, forever baseball addict, movie fan, music fan, foodie extraordinaire, NCIS devotee, gardener, and more.

Just love writing for kids, travel writing and basic journalism. Pretty unusual, since I taught Home Economics! But there's a story here too - a non-fiction one or more...


Sunday, March 8, 2015

A Match-less experience - the set-up


     It’s time… to rethink a few things. It’s time to report on successes and failures. It’s time to come to terms with that age-old nightmare of running down the middle of the street buck naked… like Will Ferrell did in “Old School”.
     Last summer, I cleaned out all of Hub’s clothes. Most of them were donated to charity and a lot was able to be consigned to the resale shop at the hospital where he received his treatments. I looked at the process this way – I had to clear out the old to make way for the new. It’s a good strategy for mental health, for sure. But it was necessary if I was going to possibly find someone to share my life – what might be left of it.
     One major problem is that I haven’t dated since the 1960’s. Now, that was a decade of Peace and Love, and many of us of a certain age remember grasping at the freedoms we thought we had at the time. Now in 2014, I want to start dating again? Am I crazy? What has changed? How do I get back into the dating pool? I sucked at dating in the 1960’s so what makes me think I’ll be any more successful at it now?
     Armed with these questions - and a nagging vision of Hub, the security nut, in my head saying “Hmmmm…”- I signed up on Match.com to try my luck in the new world of online dating. I’m well aware of the Internet’s history of screwed up anonymity and predatory personalities. There are people with no life who just love to become others in an online dating community. (I think many live in “gated communities” and not the upscale kind)
     Now, to be fair and honest, I do know several couples who are together because of Match.com. They seem very happy and content in their relationships. And I am very happy for them.
     Guess my problem is that I miss that couplehood. But before I go swan diving into this pool, I need to know just what I want – and what would be considered “settling for”. At this point in my life, I refuse to just settle for anyone. As a teen, I would go out with someone so I didn’t have to stay home on Friday or Saturday evening. Now, no! I’ll stay home before I go out with just anyone.
     Match has a profile set up that allows you to put in as much or as little information as you want. Of course, they say the more information the better. You are also to put recent pictures up. You are also to write a description of your likes and dislikes in a date. You are supposed to sell yourself as if the date was a job interview. I never looked at dating as an interview process before, but, looking back, yes, I was searching for someone special with whom I could share my life. But now it seems like I’m asking for romance by microchip.
     Not totally sure what to expect from this process, I spoke to some of my friends who used this particular site. Women can be brutally honest when discussing their dating experiences. To sum up, my women friends said they had a range of nice guys looking for a sugar momma to keep them well into their old age to total creeps looking for a quick roll in the hay. They found the men who were legends in their own minds. For some reason, the consensus was that men using the site were not interested in a real woman with real ambitions and abilities. They agreed that the men they met thought the women were desperate and would do anything to get a man.My friends suggested that I be ready to just get a few free dinners out of the experience and be happy with that.
     Once your profile goes “live” you get shopped around – like a piece of meat. The site delivers to your inbox a selection of potential matches based on some algorithm that predicts relationship happiness and longevity. I guess this is no different from the teen dances, where the girls are on the floor and the guys hug the walls, until a slow dance comes along, with groping possibilities.But now I'm working with a few pictures (maybe), and a few words and a whole lot of guessing.

And you wonder why I think dating sucks?

To be continued....

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