I’ve never written on, for or about a blog before. My exposure to the blogging world has been limited to a few blog entries written by friends and family. So all that is to say, I really have no idea what I’m doing, or whether anyone is interested in what I have to say. But I guess the beautiful thing about the blog-o-sphere is that it doesn’t really matter whether anyone cares! Write it anyway – for you. Do it just because you want to do it. What a novel thought.
So here I am, 30 and single for practically the first time in my adult life. I am coming out of a ten year relationship, and I am waiting for the one-year separation deadline our state requires before I can file for divorce. So what’s a girl to do to pass the time? I hear this online dating thing is all the rage…
I am fighting some deep resentment over the fact that I am single at all, because I would have preferred to work on my marriage, to honor my wedding vows and be a partner to a man who won my heart when I was just a girl. But that was not to be my destiny. Life has a very interesting and complicated path for each of us to follow, and so I go… following the … what? Yellow brick road? Bread crumbs? Advice from my friends/family/therapist? My own instincts?
One great piece of advice: An important step in getting over heartbreak and moving on is first giving yourself the message that you are single, available. Cause if you don’t believe it, no one else will. So here I go!
I decided to go on OK Cupid, since it’s a free dating site that had been recommended to me. The first thing you have to do on this site is fill out a profile of yourself. The 60-second sound bite, that encapsulates what people should know about you. This is surprisingly hard to do. The method I took was to drink a lot of wine and just type the first things that occurred to me. I got some feedback from my girlfriends (I pity the woman who has to venture into the world of online dating alone) and actually didn’t end up editing much of anything on the profile. So my advice – go with your gut and spit it out, cause you’ll probably say the most truthful and organic information about yourself immediately, before you have time to obsess over it.
First lesson of online (or any) dating: believe what people tell you about themselves. To be clear - not what they are “saying” about themselves, but what they are “telling you” about themselves. For example, if a man says on his profile that he’s “one great catch” he probably actually thinks that! This means not that he actually is a great catch, but that he’s just self-absorbed enough to think that’s what the ladies want to hear (be still my heart…). I made the mistake of assuming that this guy, Papi, was just being funny. But after meeting him and “basking in his greatness” (his words) it became immediately clear to me that he was indeed stone cold sober when he wrote that. Papi was the first guy I talked to on OK Cupid, and the first man I met in person. I refer to my time with him as “lesson learned” (hopefully). I also alternatively refer to him as the foot fetishist and scary man-boob guy. I bet I have your attention now, huh? :-)
In his defense, he set out the big red flags, I just didn’t know how to interpret them. Any one of these things would probably get a more experienced dater’s attention: 1) telling me he loved feet, so I should make sure to wear open-toed shoes when I met him for coffee; 2) sharing with me within an hour of meeting me that he thinks his dead father visited him in the form of a black dog who stood outside his house; 3) referring to himself in the third person (“You can’t pull a fast one on Papi”); 4) telling me he his father had just died and he didn’t go to the funeral. The meet-up wasn’t bad, we had things to discuss, and I was mildly stimulated by his conversation. My radar was slightly peaked, but not overwhelmed. Now, by the time he was texting me and asking for pictures of my feet, my spidey senses were tingling. But I (wrongly) decided that I should try to be more laid back and just go with it, so I engaged in his foot fetish silliness, not going as far as sending him a photo of my feet, but letting him continue to make all kind of foot/sex innuendos and send me pics of his feet with captions like “to bring you a smile” (gross!). I met with him for brunch one more time, thinking I at least had to get an answer about how serious he was about the foot fetish-ness. He said he was very serious, and that one of the most important things he was looking for in a woman was someone who would be into his fetish. He continued to text me things like “keep your feet soft for me” , “when am I gonna get to massage and kiss your feet” and “make sure to wear slip on shoes so you can use your feet under the table, giving me what you think I deserve.” Ad nauseum. Blech! I never thought the day would come when I’d be wishing a man would be that obsessed with something as mundane as my boobs! After about three weeks of this, I finally summoned up the nerve to say, I think the foot thing is a deal breaker buddy. This wasn’t before I’d shared the story with many family and friends, trying to get some advice on how to handle it. The best suggestion I got was to tell him I’d come down with a case of athlete’s foot. I feel bad, in the sense that he was totally honest with me from the beginning about what he was looking for. I just didn’t read the signs correctly, and thought he couldn’t actually be that serious about FEET. It truly is a wide wide world out there folks… And here I go adventuring!
