IN WHICH I DATE MANY PEOPLE or ENTR’ ACTE

Now that it was actually necessary for me to write a profile, I wanted to write one that was interesting, alluring, showed how involved I was in countless different and exciting activities and of course one that would show all my sterling character traits. 

There are so many.

This profile had to captivate, it had to exude charm and be glamorous as well as showing me to be very down to earth.  It had to show that I was as good in jeans as I was in a cocktail dress (this is said ALL THE TIME), and it had to show that I was mysterious, appealing as well as a good sport ready to pitch a tent in the middle of the wilderness – in other words, a fair impossibility.

The photos were there for that, I hear you cry, but, no, I want to convey more than just outer… the outer had made me too impetuous, and frankly, had me act completely out of character.  I explain it away as a result of too many chick flicks and too many cheerleading friends who were saying go for it. Sorry, that sounds like I’m not taking responsibility for my behavior, but I totally am.

We won’t dwell.

I took my time, tried to use my wit, the questions on the profile were as good as these things can be.  (I’m still of the opinion that no one really reads the profiles, they look at the photographs, full stop.)  The questions weren’t really intrusive since nothing today is intrusive.  In a society where people are ready to admit on television that they molested their pet monkeys, certainly no one would balk at questions like “what’s the most private thing you’ll admit”,  “name six things you can’t live without” or “what do you think about all the time”. 

Honestly, I mostly wonder if time travel is possible, but I also wonder if that is something one should admit in a dating profile.  Nevertheless, I wrote on fearlessly, used quotes from many movies, chick flicks once again, and decided very definitely to be proactive. Luckily, in none of the profiles I read was there a mention of a pet monkey, so I was safe.

However, prepare yourselves for a confession.

I decided to maximize my computer and got on a pay site.  Yes, I know what I said about paying for non-follow-through as opposed to not paying for it, but, I got caught in the silly idea if they were paying they might be more serious and possibly even consistent.   I quickly learned the ugly truth which was there is very little difference in the level of commitment.  

I had a luncheon date with a guy who was going to drive out from Ventura, his choice.  I waited, waited, waited, called, waited, and he didn’t show, and never explained.  Somehow this was all hard to take personally, and you’ll be glad to know I didn’t.  I went back to the site and blocked him.  However, it was all beyond perplexing.  Behavior like this makes the secrets of the universe seem elementary.

My next encounter was a very sweet young guy in his 30’s who told me that his fiancée, who had been killed in a car crash, was older than I.  You can’t make this stuff up folks. Anyhow we had a nice cup of coffee together while he told me he was still living with his parents and was about to go on disability. Uh – no.

I would have opted out of Match after a month had not my fellow bloggers (and you will hear from them at some point, they are busy having lives) not urged me to stay on the site on which they were currently residing.

Well, back to business.  I began my search, slightly younger as I’ve said but put the range through to my age just to be fair.  I looked through profiles, and honestly, how many bare-chested men and mug shots can anyone look through? I have learned that men don’t seem to worry as much about flattering photographs as women.  If they are vain, they show their toned chests without shirts (this may be a California thing, but I’ve seen enough of it to think it might be a trend).  Otherwise, they are frowning at the camera, hair often uncombed, doing some undefined activity – not the pleasurable shopping experience many of you may think. 

We won’t discuss spell-check.

As well, have to tell you there are spammers on Match who call themselves something different put up the same pictures, or picture of male models and say the exact same things about themselves in several profiles.  Why they want to do this is anyone’s guess. Their estimation of the average intelligence on this site was a little discouraging. 

I, myself, got contacted by the same guy with two different names, who wanted my email address right away so he could write to me privately. The excuse is that they are soon going off the site (in other words, they were using a FREEBIE!). I’m ashamed to say that I fell for this exactly twice. 

One guy said he was in Afghanistan and was a Lt. Colonel.  Initially, with the photos he sent, it sounded fairly legit and he was halfway attractive, so I thought I’d do my bit for God and Country and correspond with him.  However, his letters got lamer and lamer, as though English wasn’t his first language.  He told me that his child (he was supposedly divorced) was with his lawyer in England.  Why?  Who the hell knows? Eventually he became very angry with me for asking questions and googling him as he said he didn’t want anyone in his business…I not sure where that might have placed me.

Several days later, I got virtually the same email under a different name with the same exhortation to write him at a private email address.  This time I got smart and reported it to the powers-that-be who promptly took both of them off of the web site.

In the midst of these struggles, I did date about two different guys from the Cupid Site and a couple from Match.  They were nice pleasant men, some young, some older, but sadly in all cases there was just no chemistry. 

That elusive element that I captured on my first try I simply haven’t repeated in the several months since.  I know it’s rare, and I know I was lucky and one of my girlfriends said that some people never feel that. I don’t feel lucky, though.  I feel that the fates were rather unkind to me to give me that taste and then snatch it away.  It is as Hugh Grant said in Notting Hill: I feel like I was given love heroin and I can never have it again.

IN WHICH I SILENTLY PRAY FOR A “RE-DO” OR CODA GRAVE E SERIOSO.

I made a capital error, as Mr. Rochester might say. In the short attention span of dating (or is it the short attention span of younger men?), I left town. I had the trip scheduled for months and we know that these days airlines will have you killed if you try to change or cancel a ticket.  So, I went out of the country for two and a half weeks.  How was I to know that would spell the death knell of the great affair I was preparing to have (IN MY HEAD!)?

I texted One Syllable when I came home and was immediately brushed aside with the news that he had guests for the weekend.  At the time ready to swallow any line, I was, nevertheless, chomping at the bit.  I had enough self-restraint to wait until the weekend was over, but eager to see the man, I texted and he texted and I flirted and he flirted.  

I wasn’t suspicious or aware of any slackening of emotion.  How could there be… what about all those fulsome compliments?  What about that mighty attraction? Surely if someone says things like that to you, they mean them?  Those thoughts and feelings don’t dissipate just because you’ve been absent without leave for a short time.

Well, you can all intuit the sorry end of this experiment in living happily in the fantasy world, called by my fellow blogger, Jane, ILANALAND.  I will spare you, gentle reader, the details since I resolved when writing this blog, to say only things my Grandma Gussie would be able to read (of course Grandma Gussie and I went to see Women in Love and a host of “R” rated films together, but nonetheless….). 

I did see him one more time, some wishes were fulfilled, but it was an odd encounter at best and we shall draw a discreet, gauzy veil on the episode.  I will say that younger men seem less clued in about the feminine psyche than older ones.  Of course that isn’t always true, but let us just say that it was true in these circumstances. 

He later emailed me that he had met someone from the Old Neighborhood, and though there were “red flags” (red flags you say?), he was going to be patient.  Do I hear all the collective groaning?  Yes, of course I do.  What happened to “dating, nothing serious”?  Obviously, a lame excuse to get rid of poor bewildered and thoroughly bamboozled me. A few more emails passed between us, I was puzzled and hurt (REALLY HURT).

Nevertheless, in the middle of that mystifying, wholly dissonant situation, another dating opportunity presented itself.  I don’t want all of you to get depressed, and so we’re moving on.

Yet another young buck presented himself and claiming interest in the mature woman, wanted to meet.  I now kinda liked the idea of a younger man.  I wasn’t feeling this in a cougar, predatory sort of way since predatory is about the last descriptor anyone would use for me. (In passing, why does “cougar” have a negative connotation while if a 60 year old man gets jiggy with a 25 year girl old it’s all “atta-boy”?) Editor’s note: for the record, I have nothing at all against cougars; it’s just not my style.

For me, it was that visual thing again.  Guys in their forties and early fifties just didn’t look as decrepit as the men my age were looking – this with the possible exception of Richard Dean Anderson or Harrison Ford.

This candidate was a year or so older than One Syllable. I had seen him around on the various dating sites in the past, we were going to meet up, we almost did, we talked and then nothing ever happened.  But this time, I wanted to get though my sincere disappointment and pushed it. 

Really, we’re MOVING ON.

Met again at my favorite coffee place (but a different branch) no reminders, my friends, and I got myself some green tea and a scone and just waited.  I admit that normally I try to be a little late so that the guy is there before me, but he was slightly tardy (sorry, that from my school teacher days).  But I was up for a new wind to blow…another shot across my bow, climbing that mountain top that would make me forget, and…jeez getting a little carried away here.

He walked in and UGH.  I’m sorry but major UGH.  Shirt out, jeans baggy, some kind of golfing or perhaps what they used to called a driving hat on head and a face broken out in some kind of indescribable yet not deadly rash.  I don’t blame him for the rash, that isn’t his fault (unless of course it was caused by some awful lack of hygiene, but I was sitting across from him, downwind I should think, so I don’t know).  I will say this: he was a complete slob, looked like he had just rolled out of bed and hadn’t taken the slightest trouble to doll up for date with “absolutely beautiful” his words.  At least now I didn’t believe that stuff.

REALLY WE’RE MOVING ON.

Nothing there, unsurprisingly; there was nada chemistry not a dash, not a soupcon, not a scintilla (this is all terribly multilingual).  We had a pleasant chat; we each waited for our turn to talk (oh, just so you know, One Syllable didn’t do much of that…I was waiting for him to say “just the facts ma’am”). Slob asked me a question about what we’d talked about at the end of the evening, and frankly, it had fascinated me so not at all I forgot and probably answered incorrectly.  So, once again, very unsurprisingly, there was nothing said about meeting again.

MOVING ON.

I admit to some intermittent backsliding, some blue days, some days when I wanted to email, text, call, send smoke signals, ANYTHING to One Syllable.  But, I was strong, and eventually, I really did stop hurting.  I still think about him, but I have, for the most part, MOVED ON.

Took myself very quickly off of POF, especially when I saw that he had also done so.  I was rooting around his profile in my backsliding days, still looking at his complimentary messages and texts, but forced myself to get back on the horse.

My cousin recommended that I get on another free site called www.okcupid.com.  He said that there was a somewhat better selection process, (read a selection process); that people were asked questions which they could choose to answer or not and suggested matches (known as Quiver Matches, sigh) were gleaned from those questions.  Since I was still determined not to pay for the non-follow through, I took a look. I thought it seemed like a classier site than POF (actually, anything, including porn, would be a classier site than POF) and got busy.

IN WHICH I FINALLY TAKE THE PLUNGE AND MEET SOMEONE or EARLY COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT

It felt really great.  I was getting lots of feedback from the talent on POF. There was much praise for my sexiness, beauty, intellect, etc., all of these sterling character traits obviously gleaned from the photos.  Hence, from such enthusiasm, came many pleas to meet up.   

I received a lovely message from a 27-year-old guy who informed me that he was well hung, clean, disease-free and ready for anything NSA.  No, all you policy wonks, that doesn’t stand for National Security Act, I later found out it’s another dating-internet acronym.  It means, “no strings attached”.  I wrote him back and said how charming I thought his letter was NOT…in actuality I wrote him back and said, perhaps it was a generational thing, but I thought he was just a tad crude.  I expected rudeness and acute defensiveness back and was pleasantly surprised when he wrote that he just wanted to be honest and straightforward.  I thanked him for his offer and said I’d keep him posted.

I was amazed and gratified at the amount of attention I was getting from younger guys… they were the most effusive in their praise and, you guessed it, my ego was massaged and my susceptibility to flattery was on high alert. 

May I just state here that you forget? 

If you haven’t dated in a while and you’ve watched too many chick flicks…the sincerity that Tom Hanks had for Meg Ryan or even Seth Rogen for Katherine Heigl, is really quite missing in real life.  You forget the games that people play in their quest to allure, and how you’re supposed to respond to those games, how much you’re supposed to believe and how much you’re supposed to laugh off.  I formally admit and confess that I believed, something like Natalie Wood at the end of Miracle on 34^th Street. I forgot it was just bait from the preying mantis, which in this case, and possibly in the interest of avenging all males in the insect world, was going to eat me when it was done having its way with me.

But I digress.  I lied.  The first guy wasn’t the 27 year-old with the sincere proposition; it was another – one sworn to protect and to serve with slightly more subtlety and in his early forties.  He put the hard sell on max and had all the visual attributes as well as an unusually sexy and deep chocolaty voice. 

Initially I was evasive, after all, he was young, and as stated, I wanted someone who remembered the 60’s, not born at the end of them. He was the outdoorsy type, and I am definitely a hothouse flower who thrives on indoor activities, such as watching my TiVo, using my laptop and eating marshmallows by the bag.  He was action man, and I, except for doing the exercise tapes in front of my TV, was somewhat less kinetic.

Ego won over and I agreed to that lowest key of all meetings:  The coffee date in a public place. After said agreement, I finally read to the end of his profile, I recommend reviewing profiles before your first encounter, then you can avoid such gaffes as: asking them about their ex-wives if they’re widowed, or seeing the BIG RED FLAG where he wrote that he didn’t want a relationship, just dating nothing serious.  In passing, why would you just want to date?  Is there anything fun about this?  Oops, yeah, I forgot, that’s man-speak for “I just wanna get laid”.

So, to get to the exciting part of the story – we met at a local coffee bean.  He was a manly man, not pretty but tall, built, sexy, and had a one-syllable name.  My heart beat faster, I became giddy, tongue-tied and experienced something I hadn’t experienced in years… major ATTRACTION. And…it was mutual. Ahhhhhh…. At least so he said with his “you’re absolutely beautiful” and “you don’t look your age at all.” In passing, can that be a turn-on for men looking for older women?  Isn’t the point TO look your age??

We texted back and forth, he said really nice things to me – in texts… everything I could possibly want to hear and then some.  I was totally and utterly euphoric, sucked in, swept away, walking a couple of feet off the ground and completely forgot the “dating nothing serious” angle.  When I asked him about this, he said that it was because of his schedule.  That was very easy to believe in his line of work.

I must also just say that feeling this was wonderful.  It was a blissfully heightened state of awareness as though one was really in one’s life – not, as John Lennon said, busy making other plans; more in the moment than usual.  I think this is what a lot of people mean by love at first sight, but of course it wasn’t, I knew at the time it wasn’t, it was acute infatuation, but, brothers and sisters, it felt beyond fantastic.

Contrary to his demanding schedule (and I googled him and so knew that he was who he said he was) we saw each other three times in one week, and I completely disregarded the “dating and nothing serious” angle.

(I now recite this like a mantra, that and READ THEIR PROFILE UNTIL THE END. Contrary to the awful communicators men are supposed to be, I’ve learned that they do say what they mean, especially if there’s any chance that some silly, utterly ignorant, susceptible female thought they might want a longer term relationship than say, as above, “I just wanna get laid.”)

I busied my very active imagination thinking of ways and means to let this completely different person in my life.  Would he like my mother?  Would he get along with my brother (would anyone get along with my brother?)? Would he be kind to my Golden Retriever, and could he stand meeting the odds and ends of my family and friends at a 4^th of July barbeque?  I didn’t have us married (as I used to do in my 20’s and 30’s) but I did have us having a long and satisfying affair.

In short, I did everything wrong.

In which we get started down the road to ruination (or coffee date, one or the other)

So, I came to a decision. It wasn’t an easy one, but this time I decided to do it. I wouldn’t joke about it, I wouldn’t shrug my shoulders even once, I wouldn’t lie about it, and I would just get off my ass and do it.  It was time.  I’m fifty-seven and it’s not the biological clock that is ticking but the clock that says you want to find someone before it’s too late period.

But how do you do it in LA?  Everyone complains about how hard it is to meet people here. People sit in their cars, they eat in their cars, they put on their makeup in their cars, they have sex in the their cars, well, to put it another way, they do everything in their cars.  However, cars are not viable social mediums – nor are movie theaters, nor are supermarkets (all rom-coms to the contrary), nor anywhere else in this city.  And if you’re my age, you don’t really go to clubs with twenty somethings hoping to even meet any guys even in their forties.

So, sadly, it was the other thing, online, the Internet, the World Wide Web, this was to be the only outlet, especially for someone who was intrinsically shy and always had problems breaking the ice.  Now, mind you, I’ve tried all of this before, I’ve been on Perfect Match, I’ve been on Jdate, I’ve been on Match, I’ve been on Eharmony, but I’m being very honest, I really didn’t want to change my life enough to take any of it seriously.  I’d let guys contact me, I’d hesitate, I’d evade, I’d not give out my number, I’d email them to death, and mostly nothing much would happen. So I had the illusion of doing something while doing nothing.

Well, that wasn’t my goal this time.  I wanted the support of a genuine male, I wanted to touch one, hear one, see one, smell one, jump all over one…in short, I desperately needed testosterone in my life.

So, at the recommendation of a close friend, I tried PlentyOfFish.com.  It is a free site, he told me, and his ex-girlfriend found her new boyfriend on this site.  Well, he’s serial monogamist with all his bases covered in the web realm and his advice was definitely solid gold. I figured why not just get on a free site with no follow-through then pay for a site with no follow-through.

With such optimism, I soldiered on.  I filled out the profile. Oh, and on POF (as the aficionados call it) there isn’t much to fill out.  Which was probably best, as I had somewhat recently spent at least 45 minutes filling out the 29 dimensions of compatibility with Eharmony, and none of those questions asked you about physical attributes.  The thing to know about me is that I’m shallow.  I’m not attracted to bald, short Nobel Prize winners, I’m just not.  There is probably an entire constellation of women in this world who are, but I’m not one of them. Also, I am interested in men who attract me on a physical level.  For me, if it’s not happening there, it probably won’t happen period. You’re all saying to yourselves, that’s why she’s not with someone or married at her age, and you may be right, but it’s not something I can seem to change.

Also, it was important to me that I find someone roughly in my age group.  I wanted someone who could relate somewhat to the same things I did.  I wanted someone who could remember the Kennedy Assassination or the advent of the Beatles, and remembered what the sexual revolution of the 60’s and the disco era of the 70’s was about.  At least, they could remember the shame -- not of the sexual revolution but disco….

So with these few requirements, I filled out the questionnaire.  I said yes to the fact that I had a car, though I wonder why…possibly for the sex that I mentioned before.  I said I was looking for a long-term relationship (LTR in internet lingo), they ask for your age, height, your body type, and for you to make some sort of short statement about yourself.  (May I say right here and now that the following I know to be true:  men lie about their age and height and women lie about their age and weight.) More important than even this brief rigmarole that no one was going to read were the photos. You have to think about the impression you are making, especially since POF doesn’t seem to really edit the photos unless someone complains about someone taking a shot of their own penis for their profile pic.

I chose my photos carefully. I was quite positive I wanted to create a certain impression.  I wanted everyone to see how young I looked. (Oh, again, everyone says how they don’t look their age.  It’s rather sad when you think about it in our youth-oriented world.  People seem to think there is something shameful about not having died before they got old, as the Who wanted us to do.  So, therefore, I have said in my profiles that I don’t look my age.  Who wants to swim upstream?) There is a full body shot, me in all my nicely worked out glory.  There is a close up with me in a low cut blouse so everyone can inspect my boobs.  There is an old author photo of me, since my friend Judy has told me that author photos are forever, and another one of me fully –clothed clutching a wrap-sweater, and looking seriously, might I add, even soulfully at the camera.  Ilana in all her moods.

So, I said to myself and the four winds, WTF (more internet lingo that I don’t feel like translating), and I posted that comprehensive and complicated look into my soul and sent it into the ether, the void or perhaps, just perhaps, to love.