Show, Don't Tell

Writers hear the adage "show, don't tell" all the time. Especially if you're a writer in LA. Men on dating websites would have better luck if they applied that to their own profiles. Many guys, it would seem, do not spend more than five minutes writing their online dating profile. I'm not sure why that is, but maybe it's that many men just look at photos and never read a woman's profile. This is a missed opportunity though, because most women look at a guy's photos AND read his profile. 

I *never* respond to a guy who claims to have a sense of humor, yet doesn't make any attempt to show me he's funny in his profile. In essence, this guy is telling me either, 'I have a sense of humor, but I'm not going to take the time right now to make you laugh, because it's more important that I bore you with the rest of my intentionally vague and/or cliche-riddled profile,' or 'I have a sense of humor, because I will laugh at your jokes. I won't be able to make you laugh, but I will guffaw indiscriminatingly at anything that comes out of your mouth.' Neither one is particularly appealing. If the dude is funny, the humor should reveal itself in his profile. 

When I see a guy wearing Ed Hardy clothes, I try to stealthily take a picture with my phone in the hopes of one day creating a coffee table book entitled, "Douchebags of America." 

This is the kind of creative, funny line in a dating profile that makes me instantly fall head over heels in love with a complete stranger who isn't even my type. Because I thought that one line was hilarious, I was prompted to send this guy this message:

Hi. I just had to tell you how much I love your nascent coffee table book, "Douchebags of America." I look forward to spilling food and coffee on it when it inhabits my coffee table someday. You have inspired me to pursue my own coffee table book. It will feature phone pics of some of the colorful people I encounter at the mall or other mall-like places, such as the woman--excessively burdened by fashion--who was pushing a stroller, not with a baby, but with her chihuahua in it. I will call the book, "This is the Ridiculous Place I Live."

I also love the contradiction of the guy who claims to lead a full exciting life of activity, yet *all* ten of his photos show him relaxing on his and other people's couches. I seem to be catnip to a certain type of doughy, sedentary guy in his 50s who spends all his free time surfing. Not the ocean--just his couch and tv. Lucky me. As I've become more astute in reading between the lines of a dating profile, I can avoid guys like that who *tell* me one thing, but *show* me another. Subtext, as it is in real life, is often the most revealing part of online dating communication. Ignore it at your dating peril.

Blindly Hunting for a Man Truffle

It's days like today when I can't help seeing the similarities between dating and writing a blog. Sometimes, like now, the writing doesn't come naturally, just as an easy personal connection doesn't always happen on the first date. This is when I have to commit myself to sitting down and doing the difficult work of slogging it out, sentence by sentence, without the benefit of inspiration or a funny anecdote. Or make myself go on a second date with a guy with whom I haven't established an instant rapport in order to get to know him better. Even though both take much more time, I am sometimes unexpectedly rewarded, like a blind pig rooting around the countryside and discovering a truffle.

Whenever I go on a mediocre first date, I am sometimes left with the depressing feeling that the odds are so against me meeting someone special now at this point in my life. And even if I do, our personal circumstances (distance, life obligations, careers, etc.) will not allow a relationship between us to flourish. This is when I try to remind myself of the summer romance that almost didn't happen because I was ready to throw in the towel way too soon.

The summer when I was 20 and working in Florida, I met a nice guy when I went to a movie with a group of friends. Three weeks later he called me up and asked me out. We went to Bachelor Party, a movie with Tom Hanks before he was *the* Tom Hanks. But I adored him. Not my perfectly nice, bland date, but the wild charismatic character played by Tom Hanks. I adored a made-up character in a ridiculous movie. And I couldn't help thinking how poorly "Florida" my date fared by my unfair comparison of the two.

When Florida dropped me off at my place, he politely asked me if I might be interested in going to the beach sometime. I said sure, but only because I just wanted to be done with this lackluster first date. I wasn't really sure if I wanted to go out with him again. He was good looking, but I didn't feel a special spark for him. When Florida called me a few days later to ask me to go to the beach with him for the day, I said yes, even though I wasn't very excited about it. I could have just as easily said no, but at that moment, when I was facing the prospect of yet another weekend with no scheduled fun, I was in the mood to say yes.

Since we spent the day together--first in the car on the 90-minute ride to the beach, then at the beach for the afternoon, then afterward at dinner, then in the car ride home--we spent a lot of time talking and laughing. He relaxed around me and was able to be himself. And that's how I got to know Florida and fell for him. Hard. And it was gratifyingly mutual. And exhilarating. And surprising. After that second date, we were inseparable for the rest of my time there before I went back to college. It was a perfect summer romance that might never have happened if I had given up searching for a man-truffle after a mediocre first date.

Raising the Bar

Right before my divorce became official last year, I met a guy while swing dancing who seemed to have the most uncanny timing. Just as my friend was telling me we needed to get our courage up and go ask guys to dance, this guy approached us, interrupted my pal mid-sentence and asked me to dance. Perfect! If only life could always deliver with such impeccable timing.

After saving me from the minor indignity of having to hustle to fill my own dance card, I was ebullient with "Perfect Timing." We bantered back and forth while we danced for a couple of songs, then he asked me for my phone number. It was the kind of "meet cute" scene you would see in a Jennifer Aniston movie. And there, dear readers, is your foreshadowing. Has Jennifer Aniston ever been in a movie that *doesn't* tease you with its promise, but then turns out to be the same craptastic, soul-sucking movie on which she has built her career?

Perfect Timing was the first guy I went out with after my marriage broke up. Intimidatingly smart, he was a 51-year-old former sitcom writer currently employed as a website consultant. At first things seemed fun and very promising. He was that combination of intelligent and funny that I find devastating, my romantic kryptonite. But after the first few dates, Perfect Timing either lost interest in romancing me or he got lazy. We didn't go out a lot. We stayed in at my place. We spent a lot of time talking and laughing. Usually in bed. Sometimes I would make him dinner. Sometimes we would go out for dinner, but only as an impromptu event prompted by *his* appetite. And we never went swing dancing.

While I liked having regular sex with a guy who could make me think and laugh, I didn't like the way he closed himself off from me emotionally. Sometimes it felt like he had decided from the beginning that there was no way he was going to let himself get emotionally involved with me because I didn't fit his criteria of qualities in a girlfriend. It reminded me of a professor I had in college who seemed to decide within the first week of your first class with him whether you were an A, B or C student. And no matter how much effort you put into your term papers or class participation, he still gave you the grade he had given you in his head during that first week in his first class.

I wondered if he was in love with his best friend -- a beautiful woman from India who had a Ph.D in physics. I don't have a Ph.D in anything, let alone physics. Maybe that's why it felt like he had pegged me as a "C"-- someone fun to hang out with in bed, but not someone worth romancing, not a girlfriend. I felt taken for granted. When I could no longer tolerate it and told him I didn't want to continue to see him because I wanted a boyfriend, not a regular hookup, he acted surprised by my characterization of our relationship. But because I am a Ph.D-less idiot who still goes to Jennifer Aniston movies even though they're always bad, I agreed to go out with him again a couple of weeks later. I guess I missed him in a perverse Stockholm syndrome way.

This time around though, I stopped looking for the flaws in myself that would explain why our relationship sucked and started noticing his. One night he told me about a problem he had observed in many of his previous relationships with women. He felt he had just stuck around "hoping for a few emotional crumbs" from them. Of course, he seemed oblivious to the fact that in order to get more than just "a few emotional crumbs," you have to give more than just crumbs.

On what turned out to be our last date, I noticed and was annoyed by how conversationally "stingy" he was while we were having dinner at a restaurant I had chosen, not one of his. Even though I tried hard to make him laugh and think, he wasn't in the mood to be entertained by me. When we ended up back at my place in bed (as always), I was shocked when he offhandedly asked me where I had grown up, and not the name of my small hometown, but the state. I was struck by the casual way he asked this very basic personal question, as if he were asking for a detail too small and insignificant to remember--something like where had my mother grown up or where had my brother gone to college. A guy I had been seeing almost every week for six months couldn't be bothered to remember the state where I had been born and raised. WTF?! And that's the humiliating straw that broke the camel's back and made me decide I would never go out with him again.

It was also the humiliating experience that made me significantly raise the bar of what I expect in a boyfriend. It made me decide that it's not nearly enough to ask for a guy who is funny, smart and superficially nice to me. I want to date the kind of smart, funny, nice guy who *also* thinks I am worth the effort and emotional risk of romance. And by the end of the first date, he'd better f*cking know the state where I grew up. I would rather hold out for a feast than settle for crumbs again. I hope I don't starve. 

Sublimation, Frosty Pink Style

It's the oddest thing. I find myself singing along to the corniest of Christmas songs on the radio. And when I say corny, I'm talking Burl Ives corny. Last year and the year before that, when I was in the dark throes of divorce, I would turn off the radio in eye-rolling disgust whenever Christmas music came on. The very public hoopla surrounding the holidays just annoyed the crap out of me, perhaps because I couldn't stand to be reminded of the Christmases during the unhappy years of my marriage, when I felt compelled to go through the motions as if I were a person content with her life. Now I leave the radio on, singing along at the top of my lungs to everything, except for Ke$ha. I will always turn off the radio in disgust when I hear Ke$ha.

Even odder is my desire to take my daughter to see a well known drive-thru holiday light show that is notorious for causing nightly hour-long traffic jams on a major freeway. To put this in the proper perspective, I am going against my very visceral instinct to avoid traffic by any means possible, to drive directly into a traffic jam just to see some f*cking Christmas lights. What the hell?!

I suspect having someone new and promising in my life is the major reason for this surprising turnaround in my holiday mood, for this antidote to my "allergy" to the public rituals of an American Christmas. Sublimating my energy from this budding romance into my own positive "Up With People" anticipation of the holidays is, frankly, frightening to me. But at the same time, I don't give a shit, because I like feeling optimistic about the holidays again, even in a corny "Up With People" sort of way.