Patiently Learning My Lesson

I started a new job this week. After several years of working temp jobs, I have finally broken out of that temp-job cycle and have landed a permanent one. Halle-fricking-lujah! Finally. I am not a patient person. Oh sure, I can wait patiently in line at Costco behind 50 people with carts overflowing with 100-pound bags of pretzels and other necessities of life, because, well, it's Costco! But when it comes to some of the major categories of my life (job, career, love), I have the patience of a spoiled four-year-old at her own birthday party being forced to wait until the very end to open her presents.

Since my divorce, life's biggest lesson for me has been patience. Even though I really wanted a permanent job, I had to wait a long time for one. My temp jobs helped me brush up my job skills, and I slowly gained enough experience to become marketable again as an employee in the full-time permanent pool. Eventually I got what I wanted, but ding-dang, it took much, much longer than I was prepared to wait.

And life continues its lesson, since I've been learning patience in my love life too. For the past two months, I've been dating a great guy I met online. We see each other about once a week. Even though I would like to see him more often, one date a week is really all our busy schedules will allow.

I like to think of myself as a quick study. (Who doesn't?) But even if that were true, there is no shortcut for learning patience. Cultivating patience is like listening to a long story told by a beloved aunt with a terrible stutter. It takes as excruciatingly long as it takes.

Happy For the Reminder

I am sitting on a bench facing the marina on a beautiful day in Los Angeles. I am struggling to write something witty or insightful about love for this blog, killing time before I pick up my daughter from a nearby birthday party. Less than ten feet from me is a married couple bickering about everything in front of friends into whom they accidentally bumped. He says the fish he caught on their recent trip was 30 inches long. She objects and claims it was only 25 inches. It continues on unabated by the presence of their friends, who seem trapped by an unfortunate circumstance forced upon them by Fate, the black-humored prankster of the Universe. He says something, she disagrees on the nobody-gives-a-f*ck details. They choose to pollute an otherwise serene place with their annoying, slightly hostile vibes rather than breathe in the glorious scene, grateful to be alive. I am once again happy for the reminder of how hard it can be to be married.

A big boat drifts by with a man in a formal tux and a woman in a white wedding dress, presumably sailing off to fulfill their marital destiny. "DON'T DO IT!" yells Mr. Bicker in a half-hearted way, as if he knows he's powerless to warn a man off tying the knot when that man is in the grip of love's sweet pull. The friends react with nervous laughter, embarrassed by the wider implication of Mr. Bicker's half-joking last-minute advice to the groom. Mrs. Bicker half-heartedly hits her loud-mouth galoot of a husband on the shoulder and commands him to "STOP IT! HE CAN'T HEAR YOU!" Then he reaches over and kisses her and they get on their bikes and ride away. I wonder to myself if I'll ever meet someone who will put up with me enough to kiss me even when I'm *that* annoying. Then I'm happy for the reminder that marriage works in mysterious ways.

A Love Letter to First Dates

When you're a woman using an online dating website, you get *a lot* of messages from guys. All of my single female friends confirm that's been their experience. For a single woman, it seems like having interest from a lot of guys would be a dating panacea, but that's not the case at all. Most of the men are too something: too old, too young, too married, too uninteresting, too encumbered by life's messy circumstances, too geographically undesirable, etc. It's an embarrassment of faux riches -- emphasis on embarrassment -- all that male interest. Think of it like this: Online dating is like having cable tv. You get 500 channels, but only three are interesting enough to actually watch.

July was the month of the long-distance suitor. And when I say 'long-distance,' I don't mean guys who live 30 miles away in another part of LA. I mean long-ass-distance, like Arizona, Italy, and Denmark. I don't understand why a man would waste his time writing me a long thoughtfully composed message expressing his interest in me when there's almost no chance it could evolve into something local and real. Winning the lottery seems more likely. Of course, they may be looking for *only* an epistolary romance that plays out over the course of many emails. That may be all their messy life circumstances will allow. 

An epistolary romance might work for some people, but I'm not one of them. Although I adore highly verbal men and appreciate a well written letter, I want the angsty, butterflies-in-the-stomach experience of a real first date. I want the smile and the direct eye contact. I want the awkward pauses in the conversation because you're too gobsmacked by each other to be able to think in words. I want the spontaneous jokes that erupt organically during the evening. I want the not-knowing whether he's going to kiss me at the end of the date. I want the unexpected euphoria that comes when you realize you feel a real connection. Even with all of my many awful first dates, I'd gamble on a first date over a love letter any day.

Fighting with Slightly Dim Strangers

There is a joke in my dating profile that many men don't seem to understand. I have included one of the biggest online dating cliches ever written -- Living life to the fullest!!!!!!! -- which is funny by itself because of its insistent, obvious exaggeration. (Really? The fullest?! How can you be living life to the fullest if you're single, yet you want to be part of a couple? And so much so, that you're willing to subject yourself to the freak show of online dating?!) But the real punchline follows that cliche as a parenthetical, illuminating statement:

I am LIVING LIFE TO THE FULLEST!!!!!!!

(That'll show my jackass ex-husband what an amazing woman I am!!!!!). 

The joke isn't me calling my ex-husband a jackass. The joke is iterating the subtext that I think prompts such overly emphatic statements of living the fullest life. The second line mocks the first one. But it only really works if one recognizes that 'Living life to the fullest!!!!' is the stalest of cliches. And most guys who contact me don't. I usually won't waste my time with the guys who include a comment about what a jackass my ex-husband must be (or what a jackass their ex is), so the joke serves as a filter for my kind of sense of humor. But sometimes I'm trying to figure out if the guy is in on the joke, as I did recently with a local 47-year-old British ex-pat photographer who claims to be transitioning into writing.

British Guy: your husband was a douche...  

Me: Quit flirting.

British Guy: he was an a hole!

Me: Now it's not just flirting -- you're taking off your shirt. Stop it.

British Guy: What do i have to say to get YOUR shirt off?

Me: Well, not *that*.

British Guy: I'm getting that you don't speak English very well. Or that you can't string more than a couple of words together at a time. Maybe you didn't do so well at school. Not sure what's going on, but it's a little weird. Are you a man?

Me: Yes, me is dumb. Me flunky-flunks village skool in old country of youthtimes of mine personage. The face cheeks of me are fired color red, sting like bulgaria village dunce shame.

I should have just walked away without comment. I know. I shouldn't have engaged in what is the online dating equivalent of that chest-poking right before an incomprehensibly stupid bar fight breaks out. But sometimes slightly dim online jackasses need to be chest-poked with their own idiocy. And I'm, more often than not, happy to do it.

Mr. Hard-Sell

I didn't mean to incite his interest every time I checked for new messages on the dating website. I was merely being lazy, always using the link that opened to *his* profile page, instead of creating a new link to the general home page or my own profile. He initially contacted me a few months ago, not long after I lost my good sense and went back to online dating. His first message to me was kind of over the top with a paragraph of generic compliments in Italian, as well as marveling at our 99% match compatibility. I checked out his page and decided I wasn't interested. He spent much of his lengthy profile talking about his vocation as a lecturer and his many new media projects, which I found exhausting. I could only assume meeting him in person would be even more so. And I didn't like his profile picture either, which featured him at a podium mid-lecture poking the air with all the authority and conviction of a cult leader.

Almost every time I got online to check my messages, he would visit my profile or send me a message cajoling me to agree to a date or at least a phone call. I was turned off by his hard-sell used-car-salesman approach. Instead of 'What do I have to do to get you into this car today?', Mr. Hard-Sell sent me messages like this:

Hard-Sell:  Noticed you stopped by my profile. Wondering what I need to do... to get you to respond to my note. Any suggestions? (Be careful... this is a trick question).

I only responded once with a brief message saying that what I needed was time, since I was very busy at the moment. But because I kept using the link to his profile to open up the dating website in my phone, he must have thought I kept obsessively checking out his profile, as if I found the question of whether I should go out with him or not as complex a question as "What is the human condition?"

Hard-Sell: Maybe we can touch base this weekend. If you want, leave me your number and a good time to chat. And I'll give you a call. 

I did not reply, assuming that he'd just get weary of continuing this one-sided email convo with a no-name mute.

Hard-Sell: Hey... it's a holiday weekend. Good time to go to the beach. Why don't we rendezvous in Santa Monica? Sometime this afternoon or tomorrow. Tell me what you think. Ciao bella.

No reply from me, yet I still continued to use the link to his profile page as a sort of default home page for the dating website.

Hard-Sell: Hey... you're still here. I'm still here. Don't you think we should get on the phone... and see if there's a spark? Pretty easy to do. <his phone number> Or send me your number and a good time to chat. 

Now he was just annoying me. I continued to give him the silent treatment.

Hard-Sell: I see you poking around. I know you're interested. I don't know what's holding you back. Quell your curiosity. Send me a note. I promise not to bite (well, maybe just a little). Sogni d'oro bella.

Nope, still not interested. I'm just lazy. When I finally pushed his patience to the limit, I received a very terse note with not even one word of Italian in it.

Hard-Sell: Talk to me. <Plus his name and phone number>.

I suspect his final email to me will consist of just one glorious, fitting word: Bitch.

Must You Persist With That Annoying Hopefulness? (Part 3)

In my last two blog posts, I explored the first six circles of online-dating Hell. This time I will examine the last three circles of internet-dating Hell. As in Dante's Inferno, the last three circles contain the worst of Hell's bounty. Naturally--because I'm lucky that way--I've had a lot of interaction with bottom-circle-dwellers. In fact, I'm sort of a magnet for these three types, who seek out gullible dupes like me willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

The Seventh Circle of internet-dating Hell is comprised of those who are going through the motions of online dating for purely ego-driven reasons. These are the guys who will ply you with a persistent charm offensive until you agree to meet for that first date, then bail on you with a cryptic "I'm sorry" the day of. The ego-driven guy is just looking for the validation that he can get any woman of his choosing to agree to go out with him. I suspect Aging Hipster was the first ego-driven guy who did this to me, but sadly not the last. Only last month, I got spanked again by another guy who behaved as though an ego boost is the only thing he really wants from online dating.

The most recent ego-driven guy had been online chatting with me on and off over the course of five weeks. He asked lots of questions about me, while revealing very little about himself. He asked me out a couple of times, but I was always busy. He claimed he was a comedy writer, but he didn't squander a lot of his comedy-writing skills on me. I was on the fence about meeting him, because he's nine years older and his alleged career success is frankly intimidating to me. If it happened, fine. But I wasn't agonizing over any lost opportunities to meet him. Eventually, we settled on an evening that worked for both of us. On the morning of our date, "Ego Boost" bowed out with a brief "I'm really, really sorry, but I have to cancel tonight." Could something legitimate have come up to interfere with our planned first date? Of course. Maybe his basement flooded or he got gout or things worked out with someone else he'd been pursuing online. But it just didn't feel as if his cancellation was due to an outside circumstance. It's the no-attempt-at-an-explanation cancellation and no follow-up that makes me think it was just another older guy trying to jump start his ego.

The Eighth Circle of internet-dating Hell is reserved for the Fraudulent, which includes an overflowing subset just for liars, who are legion on dating websites. Among the worst of the fraudulent are the married men who pretend to be single and lead double lives. Think Scott Peterson, who was convicted of killing his pregnant young wife when he decided he enjoyed dating more than being married. But many of the fraudulent are just small-time liars, with no agenda other than making themselves more attractive as a potential first date. The small-time liar prevaricates about his age, his occupation, or his height, just to be less likely to be dismissed before a first date happens.

One of the more benign encounters I've had with a liar involved a guy who responded to my sarcastic dating profile with a hilarious email that ended by asking me to call him "Nutsey." I eagerly obliged, and we started a dueling-banjos sort of back-and-forth with funny emails. Even though Nutsey is 58, three years older than my preferred age range of 45 to 55, I was intrigued by his comedy-writing background and that he's currently writing a book about economics. He asked me out, and I agreed to meet him for a drink and karaoke at a restaurant located about halfway between our places. A few hours before our date, Nutsey texted me to check in and see if we were still on.

Nutsey: I need to come clean about something. 

Me: Oh, I don't like the sound of that.

Nutsey: I'm not really 58. I just celebrated my 64th birthday a few weeks ago. You are free to cancel with no hard feelings of course.

Me: Nutsey!!!!!!! Are you *trying* to get into my blog?!

Nutsey: No, just your pants. ;)

Me: Ha! Don't you get into trouble when you claim to be younger than you really are?

Nutsey: Not really. Women usually say they're younger than their real age, and it turns out to be a wash.

I reluctantly bowed out, telling him I wasn't comfortable dating someone who's at a different stage of life than me. Sometimes I regret not meeting Nutsey in person. He was very funny. But I think I saved myself the likely anguish of dating someone who fundamentally isn't right for me.

The Ninth Circle of internet-dating Hell contains the very worst kind of online dater. In Inferno, Dante designated the Treacherous as the sinners of the Ninth Circle of Hell, condemned to live out eternity frozen in a lake as cold as their hearts. The Treacherous dater at his core lacks empathy. Because he has no real intuitive ability to empathize with you, his needs *always* supersede yours. In fact, the most hardcore Treacherous dater lacks the ability to even recognize that you have needs that are different than his. These are the sociopaths who will use you as a tool to get what they want. You are merely a means to their end. A classic example is the charming sociopath who sweeps a woman off her feet, marries her, and wipes out her bank account before skipping town. That hasn't happened to me (yet), but I don't rule it out as a possibility in the same way that I don't rule out death by killer bees or quicksand. I can't blithely assume it would never happen to me.

A more common sociopath is the narcissist who needs constant praise and adoration from you. He is an emotional vampire who will suck the life out of you and discard you when you no longer adequately serve that purpose. The narcissist is especially treacherous because he's charming and charismatic in the beginning while he's luring you into his heartless lair. Nothing will cure a narcissist, so get out as soon as you recognize your honey bunny is one. Being romantically involved with a guy who lacks empathy or is merely empathy-challenged is the dating equivalent of being the frog in the pot of water on the stove. You will not realize the damage to your psyche until you're suffering from third-degree burns.

Seriously, Abandon All Hope (Part 2)

If you've never had the first-hand experience of using online dating to search for love, you might be rolling your eyes, thinking 'Here she goes again with much ado about nothing -- going on about a few bad first dates. Suck it up, Frosty.' Anyone who's a veteran of internet dating knows I'm not exaggerating the emotional whiplash of this wild ride. Looking for a romantic partner who will be much more than a booty call is an exhausting process when you do it online. Part of the exhaustion comes from trying to recognize the inhabitants of the Nine Circles of internet dating Hell before you make the mistake of going out with them.

In last week's blog, I looked at the first three circles: Limbo, Lust, and Gluttony. This week I examine the middle three circles. We left off at the Fourth Circle of Hell, which, in Dante's Inferno, is filled with the Greedy, including both the avaricious and the wastefully prodigal. But I would use a different word to describe those who dwell in the Fourth Circle of internet dating Hell: the Entitled -- those who believe they are deserving of, or entitled to, certain special privileges because of who they are. You can see it in the highly successful guy who has the attitude that any woman should feel grateful to date him because of his success. Or the entitled hot woman who believes anyone she dates should feel lucky because of her "rare" stunning physical beauty. (Hey, I live in LA, where stunning physical beauty is as common as Starbucks locations.) They're often high maintenance and have an attitude that their needs always come first -- or worse, that their needs are the only ones that matter. 

The Fifth Circle of internet dating Hell is reserved for those consumed by anger. This ring is typified by the Angry Guy, who is disillusioned by intimate romantic relationships in general because he's never adequately processed his angry feelings about previous relationships that went wrong. (His female counterpart is Angry Girl, who can't stop bashing her ex to everyone within earshot.) Angry Guy is resentful not only of his former wives and girlfriends, but of the *entire* female gender. He's the guy who writes disparagingly of women on his dating profile. "I'm just looking for some fun with an attractive, fit, SANE woman until she decides to go loco on me," wrote a guy I not-at-all-sarcastically call "He Seems Nice." Angry Guy often speaks in broad sweeping negative generalizations about women. Yeah, sign me up for some of that shit. 

Heretics -- the ones who go against commonly accepted doctrine -- comprise the Sixth Circle of internet dating Hell. Within the context of online dating, a commonly accepted doctrine is the idea that everyone is looking for that one special partner with whom to spend the rest of one's life. Ha! Tell that to the swingers and the polyamorous, who reject the conventional idea that everyone has one soulmate with whom we naturally, magically pair up. Reading one's online dating messages is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get.

Stay tuned...