Week four (or five, I’ve lost count) of my quest to find love in all the wrong places and already I am exhausted, bored and frustrated. Gone are the halcyon days of the Internet, when online dating was self-selective and exciting. Back in the very early 2000’s, when far fewer people owned a computer than they do now, you could almost be guaranteed that anyone you met on an online dating site had a degree, and almost certainly worked in IT, Law or the Media. I have friends that I met over 15 years ago on dating sites that I’m still friendly with today. There was the very sexy war correspondent, the hilarious computer game’s writer, various lawyers and much more. I didn’t actually have sex with all of them but that wasn’t the point. They were interesting, articulate people that I would never have met in real life.
Contrast that to now when every man and his dog are online and the sifting process alone is enough to make me want to crawl under the duvet and never come out. Never mind that text-speak has become so ubiquitous, no matter what the age of the correspondent. Everyone online seems to think that it’s OK to spell “I” as i or “you” as u. It drives me crazy. I can almost forgive my university-educated son when he does it on his CV. It’s much harder to forgive a 50-something man who really should know better.
On the positive side, it’s easy to get a date. Some things never change, no matter what one’s age. Sure, it would help if I shaved 10 years off but I’m not that desperate… yet. Since my last post, I managed to fit in another date with Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome before he flew off on holiday for a week. Since his return, he’s not been back in touch and the Internet being largely unpredictable, I suspect he has had second thoughts or found a new play pal. I can pretend not to care but I do. He was lovely, local and had potential. Not boyfriend material (too many issues) but in a would-you-like-to-come-over-and-chill-out kind of way. For a moment, I thought I’d found Mr. Right for Now. Now I’m waiting for some kind of closure while appreciating that is asking for the moon, especially from a person whom one has met on Craigslist. The goodbye chat, face to face, was pretty much de rigueur before the Internet came along; now everyone knows that if they don’t text you back, it’s over.
One of my new rules about online dating is to take myself off a new site within a week of going on. I post my profile; gather up all the responses from the men happy to see a newbie and then bugger off after securing a date or two. I don’t want to appear like the house that has been on the market for 3 months and clearly has rising damp or some structural issues. No way. I stayed on Craigslist just long enough to meet someone interesting and then I deleted my post and republished it on Plenty of Fish. Once there, I arranged and had one date with a fun guy working in the Arts and then deleted my profile once again. We spent a lovely, platonic evening together but after he confessed to sharing parenting responsibilities with his ex, I couldn’t see a future for us aside from as friends. I have no desire to spend my precious weekends with someone’s else’s child, having just seen my own off so recently. At 55, I have a pretty good idea of what I do and don’t want and being a stepmum to a toddler isn’t one of them.
Also, I have to ask myself, is blogging about my dating life again the right thing to do? I’m not 40 anymore. What if one of my potential paramours reads about my adventures and is not amused? Back in my swinging days, the boys I slept with used to get a real rise (!) out of reading about my adventures (especially when they were involved). But I’m no longer a swinger and I actually do want to meet a life partner… eventually. What I’m saying is that this may be my last column. Or not. You’ll just have to come back and find out. 😉
