And Then Henry Jaglom Showed Up

He asked me to accompany him to a play. More precisely, he asked me to attend the play with him *and* his octogenarian father. I didn't really know what to make of it -- this eyebrow-raising suggestion for a first date. On the one hand, I was tickled frosty pink by the idea, and giddier than a gaggle of suburban housewives at a Chippendales revue at the huge promise of this extravagant blogging gift from the Universe. On the other hand, I pondered the possible reasons why he would choose to have our first date in the midst of a de facto chaperone. Was he just a guy with so little game he didn't think twice about how awkward it might be having a first date with his father there? Or did he have *so* much game, he felt he could take his father along and still have enough charm to dazzle me, should he be so moved? Turns out neither. He's just French.

I met "Frenchy" and his father at the theater to see The Rainmaker. Twenty-five years ago, I had seen a production of this play that, well... let's just say, really didn't move me. As a young woman not yet jaded by the frustrating elusiveness of lasting love, I couldn't relate to the play's 20-something "spinster" Lizzie, who takes a leap of faith and lets go of her spinster mindset to transform into a beautiful, desirable woman. But now, after having recently undergone a similar transformation of sorts -- the one many women go through when they get divorced -- I really enjoyed the play and how much its themes resonated with me. Frenchy and his father did too.

Afterward the three of us talked to some of the actors with whom Frenchy had worked on a previous play, including the woman who played the lead character "Lizzie" and Henry Jaglom, a producer of the play. As a feminist who gave up on Henry Jaglom's movies 15 years ago due to his exasperatingly heavy-handed take on women, I pondered the metaphorical significance of this notorious womanizing gasbag. Is it a bad omen when Henry Jaglom makes a brief cameo appearance during one of *my* first dates? Or is it just the Universe punking me by crudely juxtaposing a notorious womanizing gasbag next to my date to really highlight his attributes?

I choose to believe it's the latter. After bidding Frenchy's father adieu, the two of us went out for a drink and got to know each other a little better. I ended up having a really nice first date with a warm, funny, creative guy who is close to my age and a parent like me. Despite what on paper sounded like an unpromising first date, it turned out to be one of the most promising first dates I've had. As a writer, I love the surprising twist in a story. As an online dater, I love that the joke's not always on me.

Hey Trouble

"Hey trouble" was the first thing he wrote to me. As far as lazy two-word private messages go, this is by far the most intriguing one I have ever received, a genius way to initiate contact with a stranger on a dating website. After all, who doesn't like to think of themselves as a little dangerous? A little bit of trouble?

I have to admit, the laconic author of "Hey trouble" reminds me of the palm reader who tells *every* customer 'you are a lucky person,' because everyone likes to think they're lucky. I assume this online-dating "Hemingway" is sending the same message to hundreds of women who capture his interest for even a passing moment, so I don't feel singled out in any special way.

Yes, Hemingway, I am trouble. I am one Prius-driving, farmers-market-going, Walmart-boycotting badass. You won't meet a slow-cooking, NPR-listening mofo with a bigger black-humored heart. You have no idea what kind of trouble I am, Hemingway, but my lovely blog readers do. Yep, all seven of them.

Come and Knock on Our Door, We've Been Waiting For You...

This week in the FPL online-dating chronicles, I was contacted by a 46-year-old chef who loves to cook and opens restaurants for a living. After the previous week's unsolicited underpants photo incident, that might sound good by comparison. After all, I adore food cooked with love and served to me in restaurants. Except the 46-year-old chef is a woman, and she and her boyfriend are looking for someone to join them in a three-way. O, the endless variety of people in life's rich pageant. Too bad I seem to attract all of them who make me feel *very* uncomfortable.

Can it get any more awkward than a hookup? Yes. Yes, it can; a hookup with not just one, but two strangers. Sex is not a team sport. At least not for me. Or maybe I'm just not a team player. And though it's quite easy for me to immediately dismiss out of hand the possibility of ever participating in a three-way, that doesn't mean I can't imagine in excruciating detail what such an uncomfortable scenario would be like for me if I did. You're welcome.

In an episode left on the cutting-room floor from that late 70s/early 80s slapstickcom Three's Company, I--the Jack Tripper of this scenario--would be frantically trying to find any excuse to get "She-Way" out of the bedroom, leaving me alone with "He-Way" for a little conventional one-on-one nookie. Since She-Way is a chef, I would feign peckishness and ask her to go whip up something in the kitchen--you know, like risotto, which takes 45 minutes of constant stirring to correctly prepare.  Or 1,000-ingredient turkey-kale chili that requires seven different varieties of peppers and 27 unexpected trips to the grocery store. An evening filled with my obvious lies and frantic obfuscation is how that would play out.

With no desire to send a polite, but awkward, "no thank you," I prefer to answer them with the elegant silence that a no-reply loudly sends. She-Way and He-Way will be disappointed to eventually learn that they've contacted "No-Way" for their proposed group tryst.  

WTF?, Regrettably Starring Me

I was both appalled and amused at the same time. There must be a word for that. Maybe not in English, but I bet the Germans have one. Appalled and amused -- just as I am when I watch some dumbass reality show like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. But on this occasion, I found myself watching my own personal reality show called WTF?, regrettably starring me.

This week's episode of WTF? features an athletic guy in his mid-40s who contacted me several times in December and January via the dating website. I ignored him the first couple of times, because after checking out his profile, I suspected he was just looking for a short-term romp in bed. But I admired his good humored, low-key persistence almost as much as I admired his hot body, so I responded to his most recent email a few days ago and we chatted a bit through messages over the course of two days.

Born and raised in Romania, he now lives in LA, where he's lived for the past 25 years. "Romania" seemed very focused on my looks, which immediately put me on my guard with the assumption that he's just looking for a quick roll in the hay, which I am not. I took great pains to ask him what kind of relationship he was looking for, and twice told him I was seeking a relationship that built slowly over time, not a hookup. He agreed with me and *insisted* he was not looking for casual sex either. Hmmm... maybe I misjudged him. A few hours later--BOOM--he emailed me crotch shots of himself in his gratuitously tight Calvin Klein underwear. WTF?! Did he not read a single word I wrote?!

This is when that whole appalled-and-amused thing kicked in. At first I was stumped about how to respond. I realize that most women not looking for a hookup would have responded by ignoring him and immediately blocking him from her profile. But most women aren't writing a blog about their dating misadventures and don't need an ending to an unbelievable story about a clueless guy who thinks it's entirely appropriate to surprise a near stranger with revealing photos of himself in his skin-tight underwear.

I decided to pretend I thought we were now married.  

Me:  So, what happens now? Do you move in with me? Or do I come to live with you? I'm not really sure how this works.

Romania: Oops! i did piss you off.... im sorry.....

Me:  In some countries (Romania perhaps?), if you send a woman pictures of yourself in your underwear, the two of you would be considered married. I was married once. Once is enough. Please don't force me to be married again.

Romania:  You got it all wrong! not into getting married... just forget about my pics...erase them please!

Sorry. The scantily clad genie is already out of that bottle.

Guys I don't know who are overtly sexual -- either in words or pictures -- are a turn-off for me because it's a telltale sign that I'm being sexually objectified, which does not make me feel special. In fact, it makes me feel like a commodity, something so common as to be interchangeable with many others. Being treated as a commodity is the exact opposite of being treated in a way that acknowledges me as a one-of-a-kind being.

Romania often ended his emails to me with the loaded phrase, "Kisses where you want them." Subtle. Kisses where you want them. Oh, I know *exactly* where I want them.
You can kiss my ass.

It Ain't Brain Surgery

Take it from me, it might not be a good sign if you feel the urge to study before a first date. But this guy, a 29-year-old surgical resident whose photos reminded me of a young Barack Obama, didn't really seem like the younger guys who typically contact me on the internet dating site. (Oddly, most of them are computer programmers.) After briefly dating a guy who reads Martin Heidegger for kicks, I -- a woman who regularly reads chick lit -- was somewhat sensitive to dating someone too smart for me. So, I fervently hoped "Young Barack" would turn out to be doing one of the "dumber" surgical residencies. 'Please o please, let him be an orthopedic surgeon,' I prayed. But no, it turns out he's not one of the "dumber surgeons." He is, in fact, a neurosurgeon... a f*cking brain surgeon.

We chatted back and forth by email before we started texting. At first Young Barack was very interested in finding out about the serious book I'm in the middle of writing, because it's tangentially related to an aspect of neurology. But that doesn't mean I know much at all about the brain, which is why I was anxious to fill my head with the Cliffs Notes version before I met him. But, as the inner professional surgeon got elbowed out of the way by the inner 29-year-old single guy, his texts became flirtier, less syllabic. Instead of texts asking me about my book, he started asking me about my swimsuit, then my underwear, but always in a clever, funny way that rode close to the line of indecency without ever crossing it. Even though he has a degree from one of the best medical schools in the country and a residency at one of the best hospitals in LA--a very bright guy indeed--he was still essentially a 20-something guy just trying to get some.

He asked me out for drinks a couple of times, but I was either busy or out of town. Finally, after a month of emailing and texting, we made plans to meet for a drink one Sunday afternoon in October. He told me he would call me Sunday morning after he woke up. When noon came with no call from Young Barack, I wasn't sure if I should call him, but I decided against it since he was on call the night before. I didn't want to wake him up too early, and deny him that crucial last hour of sleep he would need in case he was called in to perform emergency liposuction later that night. If you need lipo, that's considered an emergency here in LA.

Hours went by as my phone mocked me with its smug silence. By 3 pm, I had given up all hope that I would ever hear from him again. At 5 pm, Young Barack texted me to ask if I was still up for that drink, with no apology, no "so-sorry-I-overslept," no hint of an explanation even. I tersely declined in a polite way of course, because I had plans to have dinner with friends that night--plans about which he had previously known, which is why we hadn't originally scheduled that drink for that night.

And that was it--the disappointing third act to a month of fun flirtation and the denied gratification of finally meeting someone in person. It's these kinds of unsatisfying online dating experiences, with their emotional highs and lows, that occur with all-too-regular frequency and wear me down and make me want to hide in my apartment for an entire Hot in Cleveland marathon in my bathrobe, smelling of beer and despair.

Internet dating shouldn't be this difficult. It ain't brain surgery. 

Filling in the Blanks

"im an athiest lets meet for a drink," wrote the 64-year-old retired man who is interested in dating women between the ages of 55 and 67. Why he sent this cryptic one-line private message to 49-year-old me is a mystery. I don't know why he would think I'd be particularly interested in or turned on by his avowed disbelief in a higher being. Perhaps he was short-handing the idea that only in a *godless* world would we be forced to resort to something as awful as online dating as the way to meet the most special person in our life.

The more likely story I tell myself is that he's been doing the internet-dating thing for months now, and is as jaded and enervated by it as I am. When he started the process, I imagine he took the time to carefully read each woman's profile and wrote long compelling paragraphs that made logical sense as to why he and his special messaged one might make a good match. But now, after enduring an endless stream of no replies, along with a string of disappointing first dates, this poor man's e. e. cummings can barely be bothered to write anything, much less something that makes logical sense and uses proper spelling and punctuation.

Since I didn't want to leave him hanging with yet another no reply, I wrote back:

"i like beets lets be penpals."

Weird-ass random shit deserves even weirder-ass random shit.

Trying to Exit the Maze the Way Jackie Would

Forty-f*cking-nine years old and I still don't know where or how to meet a boyfriend. What is that elusive "magic" that turns a guy you've started dating into a boyfriend? Some women seem to have no trouble choosing a guy and then almost instantly turning him into their boyfriend. I don't know how to do that. I've never known how to do that.

Back when I was in high school lo these many years ago, I remember how apoplectic I was when I found out how a friend of a friend had turned her crush into her boyfriend in a single afternoon. Having recently broken up with a longtime boyfriend, "Jackie" had developed a crush on one of the cute guys on the football team. When he was injured during a game and had to go to the hospital, Jackie showed up at his hospital room the next day and by the time she left several hours later, he was her boyfriend. WTF?! The nerve. How did Jackie have the audacity to hopscotch over the self-imposed requirement of months of unrequited teenage yearning for her crush before he would even deign to think about being her boyfriend? How does an afternoon of stilted conversation between self-conscious teenagers in a hospital room become a big romantic boyfriend-making date? I have no idea, although I suppose it didn't hurt that, in addition to her chutzpah, Jackie also had quite a rack.

The online dating, which I've been doing only for the past five months, has become wearisome. Trying to meet a guy who is boyfriend material seems as frustrating as trying to find the way out of one of those formal garden mazes made of tall boxwood hedges. Except the joke seems to be that there *is* no exit, which means you spend all of your time encountering dead end after dead end, then painstakingly retracing your steps until you finally go out the way you came in, exhausted and still single. But not the Jackies of the world. Undoubtedly, Jackie would enter the maze newly single and come out only minutes later holding hands with her new gorgeous football-star boyfriend Aaron Rodgers.