I’ve been trying to find real love for a while now. 4 years of online and offline dating have shown me that I would have no trouble at all if I was willing to settle.
The pitfalls of after-divorce dating are that I trip over opportunities for the following. Literally, every few days I get some reach toward me for one of the following:
1. Relationships of convenience, where someone is with me simply to have a warm body beside them at night and a person to date. No particular warmth for me as a person, but just to be together.
2. Casual sex.
3. Relationships with men who make loud claims to care about me but that I feel only friendly toward at best.
4. Sugar daddies. Dear lord, the online universe is FULL of divorce 50-something men who want someone my age with a good body and a sweet disposition. They have so few requirements. And they offer the world of financial security and easy living in exchange for the ability to plunder a younger body at will, searching for their lost youth. Trust me, they won’t find it there.
I’m being WAY too picky, apparently. I want the REAL DEAL! I want mutual admiration and goals, I want compatibility on all goddamn 29 measurements of compatibility that e-fucking-harmony talks about.
Before you suggest eHarmony, let me tell you that no online service matched me up with WORSE matches than eHarmony. Holy crap. You’ve never seen such unqualified, uncommunicative louses as the men that eHarmony felt I was best for. Gee thanks, eHarmony. Way to crap on my parade.
Perhaps there simply is NO WAY to find the real deal online, especially if you come at it from the “once bitten, twice shy” attitude that I do.
I no longer believe proclamations of undying love. I have heard them too many times from the mouths of idle wanderers to be fooled. I believe only once in my life did the person who spoke them at me even possibly mean them enough to back them up with actions. And I’ve been promised the sun moon and stars more often than a summer-stock Juliet.
I decided years ago that if someone loves me, they will prove it with actions, not words. Kind of a “look, don’t listen” attitude.
And I have nothing worth looking upon in my life right now. As much as I have admirers and sweet men who would possibly take good care of me (but never really have tried to prove anything), I don’t have anyone I am willing to love in return. I am much more of a Guinevere than a Juliet. I am not a young, naive thing who will believe the words of my enemy simply spoken from the heart, no matter where they lead her. Guinevere required daring tributes and long crusades to prove love before she was willing to bed down her Arthur, and I suppose Lancelot as well. Lucky woman had two men willing to go to that length for her. (Come to think of it, in my youth I was very much a Guinevere.)
Back to the online dating thing. I have learned the hard way that online dating isn’t “real” to these men. And it doesn’t draw the kind of men looking for authentic bone-deep love, who think time and experience show whether a woman is right for him. It draw the kind of people who think that a brief email flirtation followed by a telephone call of three hours length is a binding connection worthy of proclamations of love, and then on the next call are certain you’re a fraud – send a new picture taken right now to prove you really look like that. And on the next call are certain you’re the love of their life. And on the next call they accuse you of pretending to be something you’re not. And on the next call they declare their love again. And try to conference in their mama. No. Really.
And that’s what this comes down to. I’m “too picky” – I don’t want casual sex, nor do I want a relationship of convenience. I can find either in the “real world” easily. I don’t want phone sex and dizzyingly beautiful statements that never turn into action, and polite chuckles that mask bone-deep distrust lurking below the oily skim of kindness in every call.
I can find incredibly superficial love like that in “virtual dating” and in real world dating with virtually no effort.
So when I bitch that I can’t find anyone, I’m not admitting to a life completely devoid of attractiveness to the opposite sex. Nor am I admitting that I’m not trying hard enough.
I don’t want anything but a real live honest to goodness man I’m attracted to who is willing to stretch a bit on my account and admirable enough to admire. It’s terribly simple. Out of 7 billion people, one man somewhere must fit my bill, maybe.
But I’m coming closer and closer to the conclusion that he doesn’t exist in the online dating world, nor are my friends really going to ship me any of the great men that they meet in the cities.
I think maybe I have to go where the fish bite. Or at least the kind of fish I want at my table. I have to leave my woodland haven, my perfect idyllic empty trap of a world.
It’s a bit sad, because I love the woods so much, but I’m gonna do it anyway. Just a heads up (in case you haven’t already realized that I say everything on facebook about 6 months before I say it here now).
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